As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to educate readers on state agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with departmental IT leaders.
Phillip Ramón Leclair is chief information officer and, since March, acting assistant city manager at the city of Pasadena. He has been CIO since January 2012 and was previously deputy CIO from October 2008 to January 2012. His earlier work includes time as a senior consultant at the Civic Resource Group, providing IT strategy, marketing and project management consulting; and nearly four years as technology services manager for the city of New York.
Leclair has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Industry Insider — California: As CIO of your organization, how do you describe your role? How have the role and responsibilities of the CIO changed in recent years?
Leclair: Well, I consider the CIO here at Pasadena as an internal consultant, an innovator, a marketer, a champion, a cheerleader, a motivator. And actually, also a connector. Leading this organization is really about taking the strategies and investments for technology together, making some decisions and moving those initiatives forward. And building a high-performance team that’s customer service and solutions oriented. These last few years, I’ve had to change from being this internal consultant and champion of new technologies to actually being much more of a stabilizing force to help balance the realities of the resource constraints and high expectations that have been a result of COVID-19. And also, with COVID-19 and the "Great Resignation" – both have really contributed to this change. I hope it kind of goes back. I’m asked to do a lot of other things as well, but I find myself really trying to make sure that our initiatives are moving forward and helping the organization react to what’s been going on.
Industry Insider — California: Do you have the sense that the realities you mention may, to a certain extent, return to what they were pre-COVID-19?
Leclair: I think for the most part, it’s starting to shift. We’re talking about updating our strategic plan again, we’re working on our work plans for next year – so yes, I think the business that we normally do is moving back in that direction. The exciting part, though, and I didn’t have this answer before, but we have really moved like five years ahead within just a short period of time. So, I think we’re starting off at a different place.
Industry Insider — California: Does your organization have a strategic plan, and may we hyperlink to it? How big a role do you personally play in writing that strategic plan?
Leclair: Yes. We have a five-year strategic plan, which is a little bit longer than we should have in IT, but five years is kind of where a city does things. That is posted on our website, and we’re at the tail end of the five-year plan, so we’re starting to make arrangements this summer to begin refreshing that plan. And how we’ve gone about it is that ... we have been directly involved in the creation of the themes and the goals of the plan. Although we have used a consultant to help with facilitating discussions and to help complete and build out the actual document. But the projects and initiatives that we are encompassing in the five-year plan are the result of everything that is collected from all of our customer departments, their plans and objectives that they see immediately and into the next five years.
Industry Insider — California: How often do you update your organization's enterprise catalog?
Leclair: We do have an enterprise catalog posted online. It’s available to the public but we also have our own internal version. But honestly, the internal version of it is ... rarely used any more. Instead, we focus on smaller updates within our service desk catalog. And we also, I would say we use a lot more marketing materials to send out our message about what the IT department services are, through newsletters, service updates and internal presentation. I think if I dial back to five years ago, having an enterprise catalog was really important to catalog all your services, and you know, I’m not sure anyone really looks at it. If you have a good reputation, that says, ‘This is what we do,’ and because almost everything anyone does connects with technology now, it’s almost by default that somehow IT is drawn into anything.
Industry Insider — California: 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?
Leclair: The one that kind of connects with something I said earlier, how we’ve accelerated things maybe five years ahead of time – we have been working on a replacement of our legacy telephone system, which a lot of organizations really don’t want to deal with because if it works, leave it alone. But it’s a 30-year-old PDX. We’re moving to a unified communications platform over the next three years. We already have that RFP out there for this ... but what’s exciting about it is we’ve made the decision through other assessments that we’ve done previously to use Microsoft Teams as the platform for the system. As a result of COVID-19 as we all rushed into leveraging Teams or any of the other kinds of services, it’s like ‘Well, what more can we use out of an interface that we are already using for all of our meetings and chat and the other Teams functions?’ We’re taking a big stake into Microsoft Teams for the phone service. Another one that is coming up is that our city provides commercial fiber-optic service, for almost the last 20 years now. And we’re discussing right now how to expand that service further and possibly into residential neighborhoods. This is the result of ... the dollars coming from federal and state sources that become available the next couple of years. So, we’re going to be looking for partner companies to leverage our infrastructure or partner in some regard to help improve and expand services in general in the Pasadena community. Pasadena also runs its own water and power utility. And so, we’re developing plans for smart meters right now – AMI technologies to roll out to all our customers over the next few years. We’re also looking at machine learning and artificial intelligence. Those are making their way already into some of our technologies even if we’re not asking for it. But we are looking to engage with a vendor to support a robotic process automation pilot project, to support either an internal IT effort or maybe a customer-focused initiative in the next 12 months. We were recently awarded a grant for $1.5 million by the federal government to outfit an additional 18 public parks with Wi-Fi service. So, we’ll be looking for vendors to help us with that. We’re also always looking for security products and services; we have a plan to reinvest in our endpoint security solutions and preventative monitoring services also in the next 12 months. We are expanding our ServiceNow. We have ServiceNow and we’re working right now to incorporate asset management as a module. But once that’s completed, we have some goals to launch and change the problem management module, so we’ll be looking for consultant services to help us configure and deploy those.
Industry Insider — California: How do you define "digital transformation?" How far along is your organization in that process, and how will you know when it's finished?
Leclair: I’ll start at the end: I don’t think it will ever be finished; in long-term technology, there’s always a change. And as long as we’re dealing with systems and servers and data and so forth, that is a part of a digital transformation. How I define it is, digital transformation is the adoption of technology, data and practices that enable our citizens to seamlessly interact with the city virtually; our employees are using mobile solutions and we’re making data-driven decisions and exploring and deploying emerging technologies to experiment with changing business models and services. I would say Pasadena is similar to most cities on this digital transformation journey. We have some bright spots where investments are occurring right now that are changing how we do business. And then there’s other areas that are still far behind that curve. And I mentioned before, during COVID-19 we’ve really made some major expansions and investments into online services that have been not as further along. Including more online billing, online permitting, more mobile and remote tools for staff to work efficiently from anywhere. ... And we are looking for new opportunities to take advantage of new technologies to improve our capabilities and services to our constituents. So, we’re always looking for the next thing.
Industry Insider — California: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Leclair: Our annual operating budget for the IT department is $22 million. And our annual capital budget, I would say average is $10 million. We have different major initiatives that come and go that can spike that up by two or three times. And the city budget overall is just under $1 billion. Number of employees: about 80.
Industry Insider — California: 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?
Leclair: We encourage vendors to connect with us to showcase their products and services. And to help the vendors prioritize their efforts and their marketing, we publish our IT strategic plan online. That includes projects we’re contemplating over the next five years. But in addition, also on website, we post our annual work plan that contains the approved initiatives for the year. And so, I recommend vendors review our website first so they can see what we’re talking about, what we’re focused in on, that year. And then also register to do business with the city, where they’ll get notifications of RFPs and bids automatically. But vendors are encouraged, they can contact our department via email or LinkedIn is preferred. But we’re only likely going to respond if it’s one of those initiatives on our plan.
Industry Insider — California: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Leclair: I’m actually going to do two; the first is a little cheeky. I’m a survivor of an ERP implementation, of our Finance and HR system in 2015-2018. Do I need to say more? Another major highlight looking back, in 2019, Esri selected Pasadena as their model GIS city. A delegation from Pasadena presented at their annual user conference, at their general assembly session in front of 19,000 people. We were truly humbled to be asked to present and excited about the opportunity to showcase all the great things that Pasadena is doing with GIS to support the community. The presentation is available on YouTube.
Industry Insider — California: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Leclair: In addition to – there’s a lot of talk about overhauling the government procurement process, which needs to happen, I also wish or prefer vendors to provide ways to test drive products and services with minimal time and resource investment before engaging in a structured procurement process. I know that’s somewhat pie in the sky probably, for some technologies – it’s just, we never really truly get to touch and feel sometimes before we have to enter that procurement process, which makes it more difficult.
Industry Insider — California: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the govtech/SLED sector?
Leclair: GovTech* and Industry Insider — California, obviously. Is there anything else worth reading?
Industry Insider — California: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Leclair: I work to travel. And when not working, I’m likely reading a travel site, a blog or planning my next trip. COVID-19 didn’t slow down my travels at all. One highlight was a road trip to the Grand Canyon during COVID-19. We had the entire canyon to ourselves. The usual throngs of cars and buses and tourists were nonexistent. It was an unbelievable and unforgettable experience.
*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.
Industry Insider One-on-One: Pasadena CIO on Strategic Plan, IT Modernization
