Insider Takes: City Exec, CIO on Equity, Migration to Cloud

Leaders at San Jose, Silicon Valley’s most populous city and the 10th-largest city in the nation, discussed workforce challenges recently with Industry Insider — California as well as ongoing IT initiatives, and offered takeaways on migrating to the cloud.

Rob Lloyd is San Jose’s deputy city manager and before being elevated to that role in December, he was its chief information officer of six years. His portfolio as deputy city manager includes San Jose’s Transportation and Aviation Services areas along with the Airport, Transportation and IT departments. He has twice been named one of Government Technology magazine’s* Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers, in 2015 as CIO at Avondale, Ariz., and in 2020 as part of Team San Jose. Lloyd has a bachelor’s in sociology/public administration from Beloit College and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Information Systems from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Khaled Tawfik was appointed CIO at San Jose in April after being CIO at the city of Irvine since August 2016. At Irvine, he spearheaded the implementations of multiple enterprise business systems and enhancements to city services and business operations. Tawfik has about 25 years’ IT experience across the public and private sectors and was most recently chief of information technology in Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works for nearly 16 years. He holds an MBA from the University of California, Irvine.
In a video interview with Industry Insider on Aug. 25 at the Bay Area Digital Government Summit**, Lloyd said a key workforce challenge, seen by many governments, is “that the application pools are smaller and the quality isn’t as high as we’ve seen in the past ... .” Ways of responding, Lloyd said, implementing internship programs, helping managers be better mentors and coaches, and evaluating full-time roles for part-time or seasonal potentiality.

Asked what may be the biggest impediments toward adopting cloud services, Tawfik said many regulations haven’t been tested or verified yet, particularly around privacy and 911 data. Vendors have different platforms, so integrating the city’s private cloud with public and government clouds across multiple vendors has been a challenge “to understand, to develop a strategy and to make sure it works seamlessly between the different platforms.”

“Technology has really taken off most when we’ve been able to simplify things,” Lloyd said. “We need that cloud simplification to really make sure that we can staff up, skill well and then apply these things [so] that we can solve many problems with one solution set and one technology.”

Asked about IT projects or initiatives underway during the year’s second half, Tawfik said equity is one of the most challenging and rewarding. “It’s new, it’s exciting, we’re writing the book for this service and really understanding how we can extract intelligence out of the data which we have to make sure services are available, accessible, affordable to everybody in our community ...,” he said.

“The role of technology and the ability to partner well and solve things like equity and keep that empathy at the heart of the work, I think that’s the next generation of IT and technology leadership as a whole,” Lloyd added.

In April, Tawfik took part in Industry Insider’s One-on-One interview series; find that conversation here.

*Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Industry Insider — California.

**The Bay Area Digital Government Summit is hosted by Government Technology magazine.