GovOps, ODI Officials: Let's Get Modular

High-ranking state tech and innovation officials shared their priorities for the next year and a half during a fireside chat with industry at the Government Innovation Summit* in Sacramento Wednesday afternoon.

The industry-only briefing featured Government Operations Agency (GovOps) Undersecretary Sarah Soto-Taylor and Office of Data and Innovation (ODI) Director Jeffery Marino.

The duo acknowledged that while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s term is coming to a close, efforts to realign and streamline government operations are not taking a back seat. The state has been aggressive in its work to identify use cases for generative AI while also creating policy guardrails.

Soto-Taylor, whose umbrella agency oversees 13 different state departments, boards and programs, said the work to build out these use cases will continue, with a special focus on refining government services and citizen touchpoints.

“This year, we'll be very much focused on expanding our work and making sure that our state departments are not only thinking about the possible uses of Gen AI but are really looking at the fundamental work that they do and how we can be delivering services differently to Californians,” Soto-Taylor said.

One challenge facing the state is the varying technological maturity levels of the many departments and their specific missions. Soto-Taylor and Marino said the ultimate goal is to have a more holistic citizen-government relationship, eased by technology without the seams and silos.

“What we're doing at GovOps, and trying to lead the way forward, is really starting to think about how we serve Californians from a sense of their life events,” Marino said, “And a life event includes needs from across all of government, rather than … being able to meet one's need just through one department or one agency.”

For Marino, modularity and adaptability of new systems have to be considered for the state to realize its technological potential and avoid the never-ending cycle of system replacements seen to date.

“I often say that today's modernization project is tomorrow's legacy system replacement, and so we need to change that approach, where we're going to be more modular, and then also to make sure that state staff is equipped with the tools that they need so they can do their best work,“ Marino said.

Asked what a successful partnership looks like in the eyes of the state, both officials pointed to the RFI2 process as the way forward. RFI2 is the procurement vehicle created to allow for innovative ideas to find their way into the mainstream. The old ways of one-off contracts and transactional relationships seem to be on their way out, and Soto-Taylor and Marino both noted that iterative, co-creative partnerships offer the best value and solutions for all involved.

“I think that even though it will take some time to adjust the budget cycle and our procurement vehicles to the future that we want to see, we're still moving forward in the way that we know we should be operating, which is really to be as modular, iterative and collaborative as possible,” Marino said.

When it comes to getting solutions in front of a department, both officials urged against simply stating metrics about what a solution can do and instead urged vendors to understand the challenge statement and mission. Soto-Taylor advised industry representatives to talk with not only leadership about what a solution needs to accomplish, but also with the project managers for a better sense of operational requirements.

“It goes back to the mindset of we don't necessarily always know what it is that we want to purchase or what the solution is, but rather, we want to have that conversation up front about the challenge, and having the dialog on how we can get to a proof of concept before we launch into a full deployment,” she said.

*The Government Innovation Summit is hosted by Government Technology, Industry Insider — California's sister publication.