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.
Jeramy Gray is chief deputy at the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, a role he has had for about one year. During that time, he assisted in the implementation of an appointment system that enabled a fully appointment-based model to reduce the risk of COVID-19 exposure; assisted in the redesign of lavote.gov with vision and strategic direction; helped with the organizing of a proof of concept on Internet of Things ballot box trackers; and helped the organization refine its vote center placement methodology with data-driven approaches.
He is a longtime executive with the county, dating to June 2007, and his previous roles include serving as assistant executive officer of the Executive Office of the Board of Supervisors; as assistant executive officer of Technology and Planning; and in chief information roles from 2010-present, including time as CIO for the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk.
Gray’s education includes studies in business administration with a concentration in information technology at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Industry Insider — California: As chief of staff (chief deputy) for the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, how do you describe your role? How have your role and responsibilities changed in recent years in terms of their intersection with IT and innovation?
Gray: As the chief deputy here, I basically serve as the chief operating officer of the organization. So, all of the operational and execution aspects of the department are under my purview. I serve as the chief adviser to the registrar for all strategic and operational matters. And the scale of the organization is around 1,200 to 1,300 employees. We support not only over 5.6 million voters, which is the largest local electorate in the nation, we also provide other critical services such as vital records — birth, death, marriage certificates and other certified documents to millions of constituents in Los Angeles County. We have a stellar CIO here, Aman Bhullar. In my role, I get to oversee, of course, all aspects of the organization and that includes information technology. And I think that my new role, it’s more about really focusing on vision, strategy and policy. ... It allows me to take a step out of the way and allow Aman to manage the execution layer of things. And we have an amazing partnership. He allows me to alleviate a lot of what I’ve had to learn over the last 20 years. As IT approaches and methodologies evolve, he allows me to relinquish all those details to him and he does a good job at translating the strategy and the vision ... to make that a contemporary, strategic, innovative technology solution. So, it’s a very, very good partnership. Any time you have such a large public-facing operation that provides direct service to so many members of our constituency here in L.A. County, you have to be nimble and flexible. There’s no other way to survive and if you’re not nimble enough, you’re really not meeting the expectations of your constituents within your jurisdiction. We call them constituents. At the end of the day, they’re consumers and I think the expectation of government is that we will provide services akin to what they experience in their consumer lives. So, it puts the pressure on us when they order their groceries online, or they pay for a service using their digital wallets, etc. You have to be responsive and nimble because you don’t want the gap or the variance between government and a person’s consumer life to be so wide that individuals are burdened with dated, inefficient processes. So, it’s a constant battle or effort just to stay current.
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?
Gray: I’ve been back with the organization now for a year. I was here from 2015 to 2017. I left and went downtown to support our Board of Supervisors. One of the things that I am in fact focusing on now is developing a new strategic plan that will articulate the current state of the organization and give an outlook for the next five years. We’re currently working on that now; I think you could expect to see something published in Q1 of 2023. We’re going through a few exercises right now and we’re really excited about it. It will include feedback from multiple layers within the organization and really look at the future of government and how we stay viable so that we can meet those projected needs, at least for three to five years out.
Editor’s note: Find the current Los Angeles County Enterprise Technology Strategic Plan here.
Industry Insider — California: How often is your organization’s enterprise catalog updated?
Gray: We update that biannually and we are currently in the process of updating that as well. We have new systems that have recently been implemented and some on the near-term horizon. So, we definitely update that; we try and keep it as crisp as possible. In the age of microservices, it’s not as easy as it used to be with keeping that up to speed, but Aman does a good job in keeping that document current. And again, we will probably be updating that in the next couple of months if my time is right.
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?
Gray: There’s one project coming up. It relates to Assembly Bill 1466, which is an effort to redact discriminatory references in officially recorded documents. For example, there are some real estate documents decades ago that would ... have references to certain demographics that, in certain communities, you should not sell to. We actually have recorded documents within our organization that reference that. This effort would be to redact that discriminatory or racist language in all the incoming documents within the organization, it would happen in real time. We anticipate that we will probably touch around 450 million documents. That RFP will probably be on the street sometime in October. And that will obviously include a scanning component, a redaction component. We hope to introduce a bit of AI and machine learning in that as well. The other priority ... is just increasing our mobile presence. If COVID-19 taught us anything, it taught us that we must remain accessible to the public. And I’m a firm believer that mobility is the vehicle to do that. I think government services have to be accessible within this real estate. I think that designing public-facing solutions and digital services any other way is a waste of time and resources and has the ability to disenfranchise individuals. And I really believe that the key to things like accessibility and the digital divide is mobility. We will start really focusing harder on our data management and data science programs within the department. We are being challenged on a daily basis to look at our data and gain strategic insights from that data. I think we have lots of interesting insights to be discovered and that those insights obviously will assist us to improve our services and meet the needs of the public better. But to do so we need a more mature data science program within the department. We’re also utilizing and exploring IoT a lot more, especially as it relates to tracking assets. This organization manages literally millions of assets on a daily basis. The average election, from ballots to equipment that goes out to the community to assist people to cast their ballots, there are lots of moving pieces and we believe that IoT can greatly assist us in that. We recently did a proof of concept using IoT with our ballot boxes and it was very, very successful and gave us evidence that we should just push a little bit further. We recently completed an RFP for our election management system here within the organization. That was an approximately $38 million IT investment. The election management system, it’s almost the central nervous system to the elections process. It’s where all the voter demographic information is housed. It drives your ballot style, and all those things that just come to you nice and neat within your mailbox or otherwise. We are currently in the discovery process, and business requirements gathering. The RFP was completed and we are now in the implementation phase.
Industry Insider — California: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
Gray: I think we have to revisit the mobile-first design philosophy. I think in government, it’s a hard habit to break but when we design our responsive websites and our public-facing systems, we need to really focus on the real estate and experience from a smartphone perspective. And that goes beyond having a responsive skin or UI on a website. That is a total mobile end-to-end experience and I think a lot of our designers and developers have to get back to focusing on mobility. I think in that way, local governments often make the mistake in addressing the digital divide in believing that bringing Internet connectivity to homes will bridge that divide. It goes beyond that in my opinion. And it really gets down to us as government taking accountability to designing our systems so that it fits within the smartphone. Because here’s the thing: we’re never going to exceed the penetration of smartphones in the average home, whether that’s in our vulnerable underserved communities or other affluent communities. We’re never going to beat that penetration. The technology market is not moving in that direction. So, over the next few years we can get Wi-Fi to 200,000 homes and we will not exceed the adoption and penetration rate that your mobile phones are going to in those same communities. So, I think that we really have to begin focusing on how to leverage the smartphone as a vehicle to address that digital divide. That’s really the one area. The other thing is as we begin to design these mobile experiences, it has to be multilingual. In L.A. County, we have such a diverse constituency that when we design our systems, our websites, our content, our outreach, it has to be multilingual. We can no longer design these tools with monolingual content. It does not work anymore; it does not address who we are as a county and the individuals that need our services. We have to focus on accessibility at multiple levels.
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?
Gray: I think digital transformation is the change in evolution of a process and mindset, in believing that technology can actually improve the quality of life, streamline and make a process more efficient, excel. Digital transformation first requires an expectation from both business stakeholders and the public that things can just be done better using technology and meeting or exceeding that expectation with the necessary IT resources. I think we are on our journey for digital transformation. I struggle with this a little bit, because I think that you should never use the term digital transformation in something that you get to a finish line. It is a continuous process that you continually evolve and improve. I think it should be (termed) “digitally transforming” rather than digital transformation, because it’s almost like remodeling your home, right? It’s something that when you’re done with one part of your home, you realize you need to update another part and it never stops. I’ve been a homeowner for, you know, over two decades and it has literally taken me every part of that two decades to just update certain aspects, whether it’s landscape, whether it’s a bathroom this summer, a kitchen next summer. You never stop, so you’re always chasing that unicorn. And we’re built to want to achieve a certain level of finality, as we say, you know, “digital transformation,” but I think it’s really about the journey and the continuous evolution and improvement that really references that term best.
Industry Insider — California: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Gray: Our IT budget spans around $75 million annually. You understand public-sector budgeting and that some of that is earmarked for certain initiatives and projects and services. We always need more, but we are definitely an organization that prioritizes IT and, whether fortunately or unfortunately, has more than the average IT resources because of the scale of our organization and our purview within county government.
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?
Gray: I would say that it’s best to reach out via email; social media is fine. ... Definitely reaching out to Aman is something that they should do. There’s a great deal of empowerment and autonomy that this organization gives him and as a former CIO, I’m very passionate about empowering him and giving him a wide lane to operate in, flexibility in engaging individuals and determining what solutions are going to best address the needs of this organization.
Industry Insider — California: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Gray: I think in the body of my work within this organization, it was split up. In my former role, I was appointed by the (U.S.) Election Assistance Commission, as an adviser for the national voting technology standards. It was a committee called the Technical Guidelines Development Committee. That was an inspiring moment for me, to represent L.A. County at the national level and testify in front of this federal commission and talk about voting and technology standards; and now, having those standards in place so that other jurisdictions throughout the nation can look and decide how or if to implement some of these standards within their own jurisdictions. I think that, by far, is one of the highlights of my career.
Editor’s note: Gray was affiliated with the committee from late 2015 to early 2017.
Industry Insider — California: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?
Gray: I think it’s the rapid adoption of technology. COVID did a lot of bad things, that we all know. But the good thing that it did is, it upskilled the workforce significantly. Especially around IT literacy. And having the average employee understand how to use a virtual office and work from anywhere and use teleconferencing tools. And use cloud storage and all that. I think it’s done a lot to mature and upscale our workforce within the county. I’ve been with L.A. County for many, many years, and I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a time where the average employee was so skilled and acclimated with using various digital devices. And navigating business applications in order to do their job so, so efficiently.
Industry Insider — California: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Gray: I wish I had just one thing. It’s so many things. No. 1, I need the public to understand that when government tells them that the lowest bid saves taxpayer dollars, that’s not true. And I have to be candid when I say that, having managed many, many technology projects over the years, what typically happens in large complex projects is that that lowest bid may yield either change orders down the road or amendments to the contract. That adds more dollars behind the curtain anyway. I think the biggest mistake that we make in government is putting so much credence on the lowest bid when there are other variables that should be weighted higher to ensure that No. 1, we save taxpayer dollars and No. 2, we implement a solution that addresses the issue that we’re trying to solve by implementing whatever tool that we’re implementing. The other things are unlimited liability and indemnification provisions. They have to change. There is no such thing as a zero-risk project and unfortunately, government unintentionally, we tend to burden some industry partners with provisions that are not always conducive to partnership. Our board is pushing us hard to engage the boutique, mom-and-pop operations and those types of provisions make it tremendously difficult for small community-based organizations to gain penetration in the government because at the end of the day, they just cannot take on that level of risk and burden. So, we have to find a medium in order to meet them so that we share some of that risk and we succeed together.
Industry Insider — California: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Gray: I’m a big fan of GovTech*. I always have been. I think you guys have done an amazing job at giving the insights to not only the industry partner population, but other government agencies and jurisdictions throughout the nation to give us insights on some of what our partners out there are working on. But prior to GovTech coming along, it was all a secret. Unless you had a relationship in another county, city, state, you didn’t really know what the high-profile projects were. And oftentimes as we find, we’re dealing with the same issues. So, to have GovTech as a publication to give us insight and allow us to reach out to various jurisdictions and share notes and insights and successes, I think has been very valuable to me. And its partner (Industry Insider) as well. I read a lot of business publications at this stage in my career as well. Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review are two publications that I stay abreast with. It is amazing how many cross-sector issues have implications to the public sector and government and by staying abreast on economic issues, financial markets, etc., it really allows you to strategically plan some of the services that government needs to be ready for. And those publications are very, very valuable in giving you insight into that.
Industry Insider — California: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Gray: I’m definitely a sports fanatic, so ... at this age, I like to watch any sport. Baseball, basketball, football, you name it. I’m definitely very fond of going to sports venues and watching that live; that’s not always easy with COVID, things are getting a little bit better now. I plan to re-engage at those live sports venues, but that’s definitely been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I am reading a book called Servant Leadership. It basically talks about leaders being in a capacity that serves their clients and their employees, so it inverts the hierarchy and it really talks about empathetic leadership styles and really looking at giving your employees and the public more of yourself and serving them through mentorship, engagement, empathy and really looking through that lens as you make leadership decisions within whatever organization you’re in. And it’s a very interesting perspective on leadership because it is not a top-down type of philosophy. It’s really inverting that model and allowing you to prioritize them and build them up.
*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: L.A. County Exec on IT Modernization, Value of Mobile
