As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to inform readers about state agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with departmental IT leaders.
Michael J. Sylvester II is chief deputy of administration and chief information officer at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services, his latest roles in a nearly 18-year career at the county. Prior to joining the county in March 2006, Sylvester was CIO at the Riverside County Department of Public Social Services for more than four years.
Sylvester has a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from California Lutheran University, where he graduated magna cum laude and minored in business, and he has a Master of Business Administration from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School.
Industry Insider — California: As bureau director and CIO at your organization, how do you describe your role? How have your role and responsibilities changed in recent years in terms of their intersection with IT and innovation?
Sylvester: It’s constantly evolving. My position has been a position of both a business leadership position as well as IT strategist for the department over the years. Early on, it was a lot of technical work in terms of trying to elevate the level of technology foundation for the department. And it’s really gravitated into more of strategy and picking up the latest and greatest in terms of what’s available and also, what are we doing from a business standpoint? In fact, the last year I’ve been serving as the acting chief deputy of administration, which has expanded my role beyond the CIO and bureau director for technology into our budget, contracting, program and policy areas as well. I’ve found that to be incredibly challenging and stimulating and really kind of exciting, just to be able to work on all sides of the business and IT. ... I’ve moved away from the IT a little bit, and [am] having some of our ... chief officers within the IT group really helping run the day-to-day, and even some of the strategy pieces. I’ve been still influencing that, but I’ve been focused more on what the department can do operationally to improve our services for the public and what behind that can be had by automation and innovation.
We’re really excited about the prospects of AI right now. I know that that’s sort of a panacea depending on how people define it. But we’re very pragmatic here, so anything that we pursue, we pursue to do something nearly immediately. We invest in tried-and-true and proven practices. And so, when we look at AI, we know governance is incredibly important. That’s something that we’re working with the county on and working with CalSAWS [the California Statewide Automated Welfare System] on. I’m really trying to have a good governance around that, but I do believe it’s the key to unlock many of the challenges we’ve had on the business side for many years in terms of onboarding staff, how long it takes to get the learning curve established through our training. Because our programs are incredibly complex. And to imagine somebody coming in off the street to learn them thoroughly front to back is quite a challenge. So, the technology should be there to really support that. And I believe AI really does help us build our applications to be more responsive to that and to assist and create pop-ups around areas that are proven to be troubling in the program area or they’re overly complex, and to be able to help new workers be able to pick that up more easily. We are seeing less tenure overall across the board in the amount of time people are staying in positions and staying with employers. So, we’re trying to still fight for that stickiness of how do you keep our retention high here in the department? And part of that is providing a lot of exciting opportunities to work on exciting projects and to really touch and help serve the public in a meaningful way. And also, to make sure that the tools and the applications and the things that we wrap around our staff are constantly innovating and constantly helping them be more effective.
Editor’s note: Sylvester, who is now chief deputy of administration, became acting chief in September.
IICA: Do you play a large role in writing your organization’s strategic plan?
Sylvester: There is a departmental strategic plan that is available. That’s a new strategic plan that we established for the department. About every five years or so, we put one together and it always has innovation built into it. This one has a tremendous center on community and engagement. And the IT aspects are woven through that. So, you’ll see that it’s more of an integrated approach as opposed to one that has an IT flavor to it. This is for our overall department, which is really large, it’s the third largest department in the county. The strategic plan was facilitated with, of course, a consultant. But each of our senior executives over the various bureaus led various areas, like the administrative aspect, reimagining administrative services. I helped lead that with a counterpart of mine, and really tried to put some juice into that one. And it’s still one that we’re going to continue to evolve. Our director has been probably the most influential one. And that’s Jackie Contreras. She really has a vision for how she wants to see human services delivered and what kinds of impacts we can have and how we can build better connections with the community and with our partners. And that’s been a wonderful vision for us all to sort of tap into. We’re always looking for something that can move the needle for us. Because the challenges that we have and the populations we serve are immense. They’re societal. They take tremendous momentum to make progress. And that’s why we look for big ticket-type opportunities from an innovation standpoint, not only in technology, but also in the innovation and, and business process. That’s something that I think we’re gaining strength in and that I’m real excited about.
Editor’s note: Find the department’s strategic plan here.
IICA: What big initiatives or projects are coming up? What sorts of developing opportunities and RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Sylvester: I can’t really say RFPs, but we do have projects and we do have initiatives that we’re really moving and advancing forward. One of which has been a tremendous success for the department ... the revamping of our external website. We changed our website completely from what it once was, which was more of an informational site, to really being something more interactive and also adaptive. We didn’t go with the glossy, lots of pictures type of website. We went for the more pragmatic, practical approach of, people come here to get information. The prominent components are very tiled items that actually go into our program areas and how to obtain services. Now what we’re doing also, and this is a venture into the abyss as well, is that we’re tackling our intranet; the internal portals don’t get a lot of acclaim. They’re extremely important to every staff member of the organization. We’re going to be using some of the same design concepts and creating community pages and things like that, that will allow us to communicate more effectively internally as well. It’s going to be a major departure from most internal websites and it’s going to have somewhat of an advanced touch and feel to it, more like an external site. Each operation, we’re also working on an administrative portal, so that we can have as much of our services delivered electronically as possible. Many of our services have been moved to electronic requests, but we still have some that are form-driven. But having them all in a one-stop shop where you can go and you know where the forms are, you know, where the electronic requests are, and as the forms are making that transition to electronic, it’s all going to be available in one area. We want to lower that veil and say, no, we’re going to be transparent, everything is readily accessible, and continue to evolve just like we’re doing to our external site.
IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
Sylvester: I know it’s been espoused quite a bit in the last many years, but I just don’t know if people really have grasped the user-centered design, user-driven concepts. I think that’s really something that we’ve got to continue to embrace. If you really want it to be successful, particularly in government, when you drive it from a user-centered perspective, then you have to connect the dots to the back end. Sometimes the user-centered design perspective stops at the requester or the “how can you make it convenient,” and everything on the front end, but you also need to make it highly effective, process-wise, on the back end. You can’t just leave those alone and just address the front end, or you might be just pouring into a bucket and not designing any ways to get the things out of the bucket in a real effective manner. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there to really take that user-centered design and then also pair it up with real, true business process re-engineering and work on the back end. And create an alternative flow. And then work to implement that, as opposed to just letting the traditional processes handle these new input designs.
IICA: How do you define “digital transformation?” How far along is your organization in that process, and how will you know when it’s finished?
Sylvester: There is no finish line. The goalposts continue to keep getting moved out, and that’s the way it should be. We really do buy into continuous improvement and that whole thought concept that you’re never, ever really there. But as long as you can keep visioning five steps ahead and saying, “This is where we’re going,” that’ll keep us directionally correct with our overall vision and also make sure that we’re making progress. I think that digital transformation is an overused term in our industry. People use it all the time and they apply it in many different ways. But really, I think what it is, is just effectively conducting business in an efficient manner, in a way that actually is inviting for a customer to engage. And it’s also efficient in terms of providing a service or product, that comes on the back end of that. And I really do think that seeing the full picture, creating the complete communication circle, is going to advance us to where we really need to be. We’ve learned some things out of that pandemic as everyone has, on really how to embrace remote work, and to figure out, what enablement do we really need to have? I don’t think people really realized how many things you needed to have in place to make it effective, to make it really work for the person who’s working in that capacity and also the people that they’re serving through that work. Before the pandemic, we had conference rooms, we had conference room software. I could count on my hand how many of those meetings we actually had. The pandemic has forced us to get comfortable with this. This is becoming a real game-changer in terms of allowing us to still have a higher degree of engagement and to do it efficiently. When we look at it societally, again, we’re addressing that for our customers as well as ourselves. We’re already starting to think about how to leverage it more, how to create better benefit around that.
IICA: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Sylvester: Our budget’s fluctuated throughout the years. It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of about $70 million for IT. And our overall budget for the department is $5 billion. We do a lot with not a lot, from a percentage basis of IT to overall budget. But yet it’s highly delivered and highly efficiently managed and leveraged. In terms of staffing, again, we have over 15,000 employees. We have roughly 450 IT staff to support that size department. I like to have our teams running as lean as we can, because we are funded by taxpayer dollars and we really do want to be as efficient and as effective as we can be. We’re always looking for ways to do more with less.
IICA: How do you prefer to be contacted by vendors, including via social media such as LinkedIn? How might vendors best educate themselves before meeting with you?
Sylvester: Vendors typically connect with us through conferences, through forums that our staff go to. And then email communication is a primary communication vehicle for us. Phone is less. It’s mostly email. We believe in a very competitive, friendly environment. What I encourage our vendors to do is to really work with our Internal Services Department, known as ISD, at the county. To get on these vendors lists, because they put out master agreement lists and they have to basically demonstrate that they can provide these certain services, and that makes it a lot easier because it becomes quick bids for those, as opposed to running full RFPs. Most of our work comes off as quick bids and runs through central purchasing, through an Internal Services Department bid list. I encourage vendors to get on those because tons and tons of work in the county is exercised through those. RFPs generally are much, much larger-scope projects, and they have obviously public solicitations and competitive selection processes. I would encourage any of the vendors out there to really work on trying to get on the vendor list for the different categories. Then, when RFPs or any bids go out, they will know, they will see them, and they will be able to actually respond.
IICA: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Sylvester: I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings because I have a lot of favorites. CalSAWS has been something of a favorite of mine, just because of the nature of how large [it was] and how many different entities have weighed in on that. There were so many times that that could have not went forward. It took everybody together really seeing that we could get there. I’m extremely proud of that. But I’m also proud of some of the predecessors that we did in L.A. that really helped set the groundwork. We implemented the first large-scale imaging system and call center in Human Services out here. And we did that almost 15 years ago. We kind of envisioned, even though we were at that time still running on a COBOL-based mainframe and a database-based mainframe for our case management system, we figured out how to connect in more modern kind of solutions like a contact call center and imaging to get to electronic records. Even before we got a modern case management system up. The fact that the department was able to do that eased the burden when we did make that case management system changeover, that we weren’t changing everything. We were changing the case management system, but the ancillary system’s actually still sort of plugged into the new one. I’m not going to underplay the fact that going through a case management system change in a county of our size is difficult. But we all did it together and I’m really, really proud of this department. And, a lot of those enablers that our technology leaders helped put together did minimize some of those distractible things that would pull people away from success. We had to land it. We had to be successful in L.A. if it was ever going to be at CalSAWS. I want to make sure that I emphasize that it was really a lot of effort that was put in here.
IICA: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?
Sylvester: I don’t often get too surprised. I was pleasantly surprised, I guess. It was something I saw in some AI because it got that possibility thing going with me on the ability to deal with language translation. We have a huge investment in equity and really trying to deliver our services to all those equally or in an equitable way. So that they all have access to our services; and we serve, I think it’s 13-plus different languages. The fact that AI is now starting to be able to really tackle language in a highly effective way, we’ve seen some demos on it, it opens the doors. And I do think that AI being able to translate this stuff in real time, in voice online and potentially also from written material, could really change the equity and how it’s dealt with in that area, and really help us deliver on that.
IICA: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Sylvester: I do read GovTech,* obviously. I read CIO Magazine. I also read Harvard Business Review, that’s one of the ones I look at all the time. There’s always crossovers there; innovation is always spread out through that. I’ve got some great ideas about telework and about different work environments, because that’s a big thing for us right now — we’re really revamping and looking at our workspaces and our buildings. And trying to change the narrative of what Social Services may be perceived as publicly, to getting more professional environments for people to come and engage us in, and for our workers to work in. We’re making advancements in those areas and I got a lot of ideas out of Harvard Business Review when they did a special on workspace design and how to create a happier work culture.
IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Sylvester: My hobbies are mostly outdoor stuff. I like to get outdoors and snow ski and wakeboard and do stuff with my young sons that keep me feeling like I can try to keep up with them. I’ve got adult sons in their mid-20s, and they keep me very active.
*Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Industry Insider — California.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
County Public Social Services CIO: ‘We Do a Lot With Not a Lot’
