More recently, in the private sector, Jablonsky was vice president and executive IT strategist for Performance Technology Partners and then CIO advisory director for KPMG.
“I’m at that point in my career now where I can afford to do kind of what I want, as opposed to what maximizes my income,” Jablonsky told Industry Insider — California in an interview. “I believe there’s still high demand for my specialty. There should be. Putting out your own shingle, so to speak, is just the best way to approach things, because you don’t have to answer to anybody.”
In his practice, Jablonsky conducts “mostly executive-level discussions” that encompass the core of his specialty — IT asset management, financial management and enterprise architecture.
“Those are the three things that that I’ve historically done,“ he said. “As you know, when I was a CIO, I really embraced those things, and in the 12 years that I’ve been consulting since I left CalPERS, every project I’ve done has had those elements. Strategy and architecture kind of go together too, but you’ve got to know what you have. Ultimately these lead to IT transformation road maps, and you can’t do a good road map if you don’t know exactly what you own.”
Understanding a department’s assets and finances is a prerequisite to efficient management, he said.
“All of this financial management that I specialize in eventually leads to a better budget, since you know what your baseline is. … A lot of CIOs don’t understand that. Things don't just get approved automatically. Generally speaking, if you’re trying to transform the business, you’ve got to have an accurate representation of what you’ve got.”
He continued: “California is still on the hook for transformative government services. You know, certainly DMV is showing that it can be done, and they’re making great inroads. But the reality is that not only do services have to precede the transformation, but the transformation has to follow quickly or it won’t be sustainable. It's a two-step process, not a one-step, and that second step needs to be addressed by the industry.”
And with California’s state, county and municipal governments facing budgetary pressures and headwinds, Jablonsky noted, those large tech transformations can be especially challenging.
“The state and counties are in the same boat for the most part,” Jablonsky said. “When I was at KPMG, I did work for [Los Angeles], Santa Clara and Riverside counties, and I also did work in Oregon and Hawaii and a few other states. They’re all in the same boat: They have a large legacy environment. And ‘legacy’ doesn’t mean mainframe; it means anything that’s more than 10-15 years old and is typically characterized by not being enterprise, not being end-to-end.
“They all recognize that they’ve got to move their services directly to the constituency. It has to all be Internet, cloud — it has to be accessible.”
Another challenge for the public sector, he said, is that “a lot of vendors don't really understand government — the culture side of government. You can do all these big transformation technology projects, but you know, can it sustain itself? And a lot of that requires the middle and lower levels of IT leadership to be involved. … It's going to take some re-engineering and change management — change leadership — down in the halls of business, too. They all have to embrace that.”
Now that he’s calling his own shots, Jablonsky said, he and his wife are traveling more.
“We wanted to travel during the pandemic, but all of our airplane reservations and hotels were canceled on the other end,” he said. “So we finally started doing it again in 2023, and we did a nice trip last spring too, and have another one planned this spring. We like to golf and try to, you know, stay in somewhat decent shape.”
*Government Technology and Industry Insider — California are part of e.Republic.
