“I had very fun projects,” Glaholt told Industry Insider — California in an interview this week. “I loved the projects and the people working for this industry. I love the projects that we did, especially the CHRIS 2 PeopleSoft project. I would proudly stand that up against any licensing regulation software that’s out there right now. It was that good, PeopleSoft.”
Glaholt also reflected on how he serendipitously began preparing his team to work remotely — well before the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 sent the majority of state workers home.
“A lot of departments, of course, were scrambling to try and get the infrastructure for that,” he said. “About a year and a half before that, I decided, ‘There’s enough mobility that … we traded all of our desktops for laptops, and we set up our VPN so that it would be strong enough to hold any- and everybody logged in. So the end effect was when the order came down from Gov. [Gavin] Newsom, we were like, ‘We’ve already done that.’
“All we had to do was teach them how to do the VPN connection, and we never lost a single day of productivity. Wow! I think it was just foresight that me and my server admin, who now works at [California Conservation Corps], both kind of came up with [at the] same time: ‘Let’s just make this. Let’s be progressive. Let’s make it so that anybody can work anywhere.’”
He said that for about three years before COVID-19 exploded, he had been trying to prepare his department to use Microsoft Teams and other tools that allowed for remote communication and collaboration. That’s especially important given that the CHRB has responsibilities for racetracks in Northern and Southern California — and then the pandemic choked off travel.
“Suddenly there was a need for that — and we’d already done all the major work to put that into place,” Glaholt said. “A year before, we had kind of released it to our group and said, ‘Hey, here’s a way that our investigators from the south don’t have to drive or fly all the way up to have an in-person meeting. Now you can do it right here, online. Change was necessitated, and we were already prepared for it. We had a whole lot of foresight in that regard.”
Glaholt reflected on a third project that he’s especially proud of, which he and his team sardonically nicknamed “Les Mis,” a shorthand reference to “Les Miserables.”
“It [involved] configuration management, including all of our inventory management,” he said. “As our incident management, I built a web interface so that people in our group or our entire department can create tickets for requests.” Glaholt said he told a technologist friend about the project, “and he said, ‘Do you realize you just saved that department, like, millions of dollars?’ I needed it. I wasn’t going to spend a million dollars. Let’s just put this into place. And sure enough, it is now our document management system. So all of the reports that are on the website — basically they just submit a ticket within the attachment of that document and make sure it’s all good. We press a button and boom, it’s on the website. It’s automated.”
With his last work day scheduled for the end of October and his official retirement coming at the end of the year, Glaholt said, “I’m now doing everything in my power to make myself expendable.”
He said he wants his successor to be able to “step in and start learning, so they don’t have to do anything technical on day one. That is my goal. I am almost there. We’ve got a couple more big projects that we’re doing right now. We’re trying to codify our entire server farm. I don’t know if we can do that in two and a half months, but [the California Department of Technology] and we have been working very hard on making that happen.”
(The recruitment notice for the CIO position is here; the recruitment will continue until the position is filled.)
Glaholt, who’s 55, said he has no concrete plans to enter the private sector, as so many retiring CIOs do.
“I will certainly keep my options open. I have two very, very solid skill sets that are rare and desired in certain fields, like ITIL and PeopleSoft. I could easily go and do those things anywhere in process management, development, change management, all of that. So I’m not gonna say no, but I’m certainly gonna at least let six months expire before I make any decision on that.”
As for his successor, Glaholt’s advice is simple: “Find a mentor, if it’s in the same department or a different department. Get your ego completely out of the way and just absorb anything that they have — the things that they’ve thought, the things that they’ve done that didn’t work, the things they’ve done that did work. Just leave your ego at the door and accept mentorship from one or more people.”
Though Glaholt still has a thing for technology, he’s always had a passion for making music. He plays keyboards and does some vocals for his foremost band, The Used Cars, which is a tribute band to The Cars. They play in the Sacramento area and beyond. Given that it’s a tribute band, Glaholt and his bandmates dress the part — wigs, dark glasses, ’80s clothes.
He and his wife, Janet, love to travel and have seen the world — Africa, Norway and Iceland, and South America. He said they’d like to visit the Far East and cruise down the Nile. They also want to see more of the United States.
“We just went to New York for the first time five years ago. We’ve never been anywhere in the Midwest. … We’ve got lots, lots more that we want to do. Our idea of travel is get there, get lost, explore the place, absolutely suck the marrow out of a place, and then come back and talk about it,” he said.
Glaholt was featured in an Industry Insider One-on-One interview in June 2020.
