But inside the living museum, it’s a completely different story.
In a small office space marked only as “260,” a small group of government guerrillas is taking apart the status quo one Post-it note and action item at a time.
What’s striking about the work is that they aren’t buying some new multimillion-dollar, mega system and praying that it fixes all of their operational problems; instead, they’re doing the hard work that no one likes to talk about and even fewer like to actually do: picking apart bureaucracy and duplicative processes — and all in just 90 days. They call it the Marin County Digital Accelerator.
Eyragon Eidam/Industry Insider — California
NOT SEXY; ESSENTIAL
The team is made up of experts from several different divisions and operates on a boiled-down, “get-shit-done” agile model led by former California.gov Alpha Team member Luke Fretwell and championed by Chief Digital and Innovation Officer and Deputy County Executive Crosby Burns.
This first 90-day sprint included the Community Development Agency (CDA) and Information Services and Technology (IST) and focused on the work being done within the county’s planning and permitting division.
The work is facilitated, iterative and heavily interactive. What would start as a discussion about one problem would often end in the solution for at least one other. A code-it-and-close-it approach, the pair explained.
“What really just worked was getting people in a room,” Burns told Industry Insider — California.
“I think one of the most important things that we’ve done is we flattened the organization and created a permission structure,” Burns said of cutting out overly bureaucratic approvals.
A large portion of this work centered on tailoring the county’s Infor system to serve as a “single source of truth” for the planners and other stakeholders who use it daily. Many of the existing processes were redundant, the team told Insider during a recent tour, and required senior-level planners to repeat steps that could be automated.
“It’s not like, what is it, build fast and break things? It’s much more trust and empowerment, and just to do it, push it out and iterate,” Fretwell said. “You know, we can fix it, or we can build on it, we can pull it back, or whatever.”
The other products that have come out of the effort are undeniable improvements to the way things were. Take, for example, the PDF Buster GPT, which can spin up easily understandable webpage content based on a PDF (tables and all), or the Action Pages GPT, which takes existing webpages and reformats the content to be more accessible and clearer to constituents.
Media Technician Julie Chew explained that the Action Pages GPT was created with several goals in mind, including plain language headings, content that doesn’t exceed an eighth grade reading level and character count limits.
For Senior Planner Sabrina Cardoza, the GPT has been helpful in getting technical and legally complex language into a more digestible format, though she said it still needs subject matter experts to double-check the work.
“It’s really great that it gets me 80 percent of the way there, but I still, as a planner, have to make sure that how it’s been summarized or rewritten is actually how it’s applied,” Cardoza clarified.
PUSHING THROUGH RELUCTANCE
In government, “but we’ve always done it that way” becomes the mantra any change agent must contend with, and Marin County was no exception.
In meeting with the team, it was immediately clear that they were proud of the work they had done, but they admitted that they didn’t initially show up wearing their rose-colored glasses.
“I’m comfortable in saying 100 percent reluctance. There was lots of skepticism,” Cardoza said.
Even IST was somewhat reluctant to dive into this work. County CIO Liza Massey and IST Assistant Director Supriya Menon said that while the work needed to be done, diving in was somewhat daunting. This process came with unanswered questions and needed a considerable amount of staff time, all for an unknown outcome.
“I was super protective about my team, and I have to be honest,” Menon said. “I was doing check-ins … after a week and a half and two weeks, that they were selling it back to me and I was completely bought in.”
But not everyone saw this process as a potential nightmare. CDA Director Sarah Jones saw the exercise as an opportunity to streamline a critical service area. Between mandated timelines and processing permits, having the ability to step back with a critical eye for how the work got done wasn’t always possible, she said.
“It’s just very difficult to stay abreast of all those things that are out there that can affect how we could do our work better, which is part of what made this a huge opportunity to just kind of have this collective decision,” Jones said.
“Really, right from the start … it was a little bit of a leap of faith, but it really felt worth it to step in and do this,” Jones added.
The ever-increasing demands on government — whether from constituents or leadership — require a hard look at the way divisions operate. From Jones’ perspective, fundamentals come first.
“We can’t get to all these outcomes that the board asks us for, or even some of the steps that have been identified for us for process improvements, if we don’t do this fundamental stuff,” Jones said. “So, I think that that’s been a real advantage of this model with the project of 'Let’s just buckle down and do this.'”
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP
For County Executive Derek Johnson, the work has highlighted the value of honing available technology and processes. While he acknowledged that there is a time and a place for large technology projects, he said government needs to learn to spot other opportunities as well.
“The innovation cycles and technology for government have been pretty torpid, and we’re trying to do things — learn quickly, fail forward, learn, adapt, move again, try it again — rather than the old, ‘OK, we’re going to do this massive enterprise system, it’s going to take three years, and we’re going to lose momentum, and we’re going to be stifled by the rigidity of the vendor,” Johnson said.
Part of finding those opportunities is listening to the staff experts and pulling out the solutions to their own problems with the help of someone like Fretwell.
“They’re planners, they’re engineers, they’re the Sheriff’s Department, they’re Health and Human Services. They’re experts in their own field,” Johnson said. “To expect them to be 21st-century digital transformers and innovators, I think, is just misplaced.”
What lies ahead? More accelerators. Up next is a project with the Health and Human Services team.
Burns joked that the success of this first sprint has caught the attention of other departments: “It’s caught on here because people are seeing shit get done at a pace that they are not accustomed to.”
