Nevada County CIO: ‘My Goal Is to Build a Team’

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.

Landon Beard is chief information officer for Nevada County, a role he has had since April. A 20-year county staffer, Beard was elevated from information systems manager to head of IT following the transition of Steve Monaghan, longtime director of the county’s Information and General Services Agency and CIO, away from the latter role. Beard joined Nevada County in April 2003 as a computer service technician and was elevated to lead in that role and serve simultaneously as network analyst in September 2005. He served as information systems manager for more than eight years before becoming CIO.

Beard has a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of the Pacific and a master’s in information systems from the University of Phoenix.

Industry Insider — California: As CIO at your organization, 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?

Beard: I did start as the CIO in April, but I am an internal recruitment and promotion, so realistically, my full-time CIO hat is still becoming a reality for me. I’ve spent the last several months recruiting my replacement and maintaining my previous seat and responsibilities through that time, while focusing on developing the CIO role and that definition and what it does for the organization. A lot of my time still has been spent in other pursuits; making sure that everything stays running properly has been a big deal. Three weeks ago, we did hire and the new person started for my previous role. I’ve been training her and that’s been going really well, and I’m looking forward to completely divesting myself of those transactional day-to-day duties so I can focus full time on the CIO role for the organization. You asked what my perspective on the CIO role is and the changes there. I do believe it’s changed a lot in the last 15 or 20 years from a largely technical, maintaining technology role, to being more of a partner for the business, partner for the organization, and delivering its services to the community. I don’t know what to attribute that to, except that I think it’s a maturation of technology, and the ubiquitous nature of technology in everything that’s being delivered these days. It’s been a big change and now I think there’s more appreciation for technology, being an innovator and being able to be leveraged to deliver better services.

IICA: 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?

Beard: Yes, it is accessible on our website. This was written before I became the current CIO. Steve Monaghan is our agency director. Steve had a big hand in writing it. I helped write some of it, definitely added to it, but I can’t take all the credit for where it’s at now. I did help structure it with the top five objectives that we have there now. Changing it from a purely project-based objective to really refocusing it on the needs of our user community, focused first on the development of the relationships and focused on leveraging technology to be [a] better government, to serve our community better.

Editor’s note: Find Nevada County’s Information Systems Strategic Plan 2023-2025 here.

IICA: 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?

Beard: Our largest project we’re currently working on right now is our finance system replacement. We are pre-RFP. We have a steering committee in place. We expect to go to RFP here in the next couple of months, maybe three months. And we’re looking for an [enterprise resource planning] system. It’s really just a recognition of the old system we have, the current finance system is end-of-life and there’s a lot of shadow finance systems happening with spreadsheets and stand-alone data banks and (extract, transform, load) jobs, moving data around and realizing that we could be a lot more efficient if we had a better system in place. So, thankfully, Steve, our agency director, really championed this over the last couple of years and has the CEO’s and auditor-controller’s ears, along with all the [chief fiscal/administrative officers] throughout the county. It’s a pretty strong leadership team driving this project. There’s a lot of collaboration happening, which is great.

Second to that, we are doing some smaller projects around security camera upgrades and door controls and those more tactical needs of the organization, just as those are getting older, they need to be replaced. And then down the line, I actually just met with the sheriff. They are going to be looking at new systems for data management for many of their functions, but no timelines on those yet. On the cybersecurity front, we’re formalizing vision and strategy around zero trust, really looking at how do we stay ahead of ... the curve if you will, where we’re heading next. We’re constantly in an improvement cycle with cybersecurity, so our security program manager’s helping to paint that picture along with the leadership team within the team itself. So, it’s our network admin and CIS admin leads, and our application developers as well, collaborating on that. That’s probably going to drive a lot of changes and needs for upgrades over the next several years as well.

IICA: In replacing the old finance system, I imagine you’ll want to identify a solution that will work well with the shadow systems out there now.

Beard: Absolutely. And the big thing we’ve identified up front is, change management’s going to be so crucial — and not change management in a technical sense, but in the people sense, of helping people come to terms with the change in their process. People who’ve been here for five or 10 years and have always done it a certain way, [with] the current finance system, using the current data extracts and putting them into a spreadsheet to get the data to where they need to go. We’ve gone over [it in] the last year, done a lot of work and tried to expose those, doing needs analysis, engaging with each of the departments to find out how they do their jobs. I can’t credit myself for that work. The project team really led that. But the data that they’ve come out of that [with] will lead into a lot of that negotiation and discussion and education and training around change that each of our employees is going to have to go through as we pick the new system. And we help them kind of relearn their roles, relearn how they do their jobs. We are very well understood that that’s going to be a challenge. It’s going to be probably one of the largest parts of the project.

IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?

Beard: That’s a huge question. My top three would be process enhancements, so, business process, re-engineering, business process adjustments. Data sharing is a huge can of worms. And of course AI, the whole artificial intelligence or language modules or processes, all of those have a lot of practical application in government. Process enhancement, I think that’s probably most near and dear to my heart, even though I came out of an operations side. What we can do in process enhancements, whether it’s data flows or workflows, those have real impact on how quickly we can serve the community and how well we serve the community.

Data sharing is a big one. There’s been lots of discussions about how departments can share their data sets, where they have overlapping data. There’s a lot of privacy concerns, there’s a lot of ownership issues we’ve got to work through. There’s some great models in other counties we’ve been looking at where they’ve been able to tackle some of those challenges. I think that’s a big emerging area for us where we can have dissimilar service groups who serve similar clientele start to overlap and align and be more forthright with the services and capabilities of the government to help people.

And then of course, AI. There’s privacy issues, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use it. There’s certain areas where we can use it that don’t involve privacy or restricted data sets. So, we’re starting to do a little bit of work on that. Steve Monaghan just came up with an idea for a pilot project working with a corporation to data mine 30 years of board public documents, to streamline some of their research processes. We’re actually meeting to just kind of start mapping that out, what that looks like. It’s all digitized, but when they have to look at precedents and different board resolutions, they have to have the history of any other resolutions that may affect those. And that takes a lot of manual paper right now.

IICA: How do you define “digital transformation?” How far along is your organization in that process, and how will you know when it’s finished?

Beard: That absolutely ties back into the previous question, a hundred percent. And I think it goes back to utilizing technology to improve services. I don’t think there’s ever really a “done,” you know, even once you modernize something with technology. I look at the digital transformation, which I think based on the last question, I would define it as just using technology to be a better government organization, using technology to streamline services. But even when you’re done, the technology changes, the data changes, the systems change. So even when we think we’re done, I think we have to be critical of ourselves and look back and say, “Is it really still done? Or do we need to reinvent, reinvest on that?” I think artificial intelligence or language ... models are going to continue to [push] the envelope as we get better and better. But we’re also going to be driving new services delivery, so that’s going to create new opportunity. I don’t think we’re ever done.

IICA: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?

Beard: For the county of Nevada, we’re centralized IT. We serve all of the functions here, whether it’s sheriff or library, the jail system, public works. We’re right here helping everybody. The IT budget is about $8 million, which is about 2 percent of the overall county budget. And we have 29 employees, including myself. We don’t include any of the admin functions. We are part of our Information and General Services Agency. And so we have the CFAO and admin staff who help with our budgeting, procurement, HR functions. Those admin functions are outside of my core budget, although they do bill me for it.

IICA: 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?

Beard: That's a tough question. We're all so inundated with communications these days. Emails are probably the most robust way to communicate. It’s the one I pay the most attention to. I do get the occasional contact by LinkedIn, but almost invariably they're marketing, they’re automated. And I ignore them. Frankly, time is so precious that when a vendor contacts me or a potential partner contacts me, if it’s a form letter, I probably won’t read it. If it’s an automated marketing scheme, I probably won’t read it. They’re pretty easy to sniff out. I’m looking for people, vendors, partners who have identified an alignment in our vision, using our strategic plan, understanding who we are and the community we serve. Then looking to bring some synergy and alignment with what we’re doing together. Really, people can educate themselves pretty well by looking at our strategic plan, looking at last year’s strategic plan, seeing where we’ve come from and also just asking those kind of questions. “Hey, what are the top things that you guys are working on?” You know, I’m very receptive to having those kind of conversations, but I really value real communication, with real people. Around vendor engagement, one of the things that kind of drives me crazy is when you get those promotional, “Hey, participate in this call and we’ll give you tickets to a Kings game, or something like that.” And I think just the misunderstanding of [the] government code of ethics there is a big challenge. I wish our vendors just understood it better.

IICA: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?

Beard: I would say one of the most intriguing, innovative projects we’ve done had to do with body-worn cameras. It was within the last year. The sheriff decided they were moving to body-worn cameras, and they did so. But what came out of it was a pretty significant data-sharing challenge between them and our public defender and district attorney’s offices. I can’t take all the credit for this. This is over the last two years, but it really came to fruition last year, when we were able to get everybody, all the stakeholders, to the table and start talking about the challenges. We had support from the CEO’s office to champion this and encourage everybody. And ultimately letting the team come up with technology solutions that improve that scenario. I won’t get into the weeds of what they did, but essentially [they] solved some of these operational challenges where these partner agencies to the sheriff weren’t getting the data they needed in a timely fashion; their needs for retention and redaction weren’t being thought of. It was a really good collaborative discussion and a collaborative outcome. It took a while and it didn’t cost a lot of money, but just negotiating and talking through and finding that shared win did take a while. I was pretty proud of the team and doing that one. That was prior to my current role. But it seems like every day, there’s something small that’s just a great win. We give our team a lot of flexibility to think outside the box, to be innovative. We encourage them to be entrepreneurs, to take the products that they own with the services that they’re responsible for and maximize their usage to think about how else they can be used to find problems and solve them.

IICA: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?

Beard: Honestly, I think the biggest thing, and this really hit me last fall, so just under a year ago: We were updating our five-year strategic plan and looking at what has changed in the prior year as far as [operating expenses] and [capital expenditures], and really the move to SaaS and vendor-hosted solutions, both on the software side and infrastructure ... as well. And as we produced our five-year plan, looking at the significant changes and challenges it provided for us fiscally — the whole capital expenditure model is almost extinct. And we’re moving into this operational expenditure model; that’s definitely posing some challenges. We’re having to change how we budget, how we work with the CEO’s office, with the organization’s budget for planning. We used to have some larger fund-based balances that we were able to stockpile for these larger needs. But now, we’re having to drain that to deal with more transactional [expenses] year-over-year. That was, I think, probably my biggest "aha" in looking at the fundamental shift in how technology’s funded. It’s not a technology challenge specifically, or a new technology. It’s how technology is being planned for, funded and supported in an ongoing fashion. And I think that that dovetails into cybersecurity. Because now, the obsolescence of technology is a lot faster. Where you used to be able to buy a $1,000 network switch and it’d be good for 12 years, now you buy a $3,000 network switch, it’s good for five. And along with that, you have to pay for an operational license and management license every year. This whole model is shifting significantly for us.

IICA: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?

Beard: I read a lot. A lot of websites focused on government technology, cybersecurity and lots of examples in those areas. Vendor-specific for existing vendors. MS-ISAC newsletters are really helpful. I look at our just generic news outlets using my Google News or ABC News, CNN, looking at the technology sector as precursors or indicators of what technology trends are happening. A lot of it’s about smart watches and new gaming computers, but every once in a while, there's a nugget about corporate technology or maybe something new that’s on the horizon coming up. So, that’s always interesting and just allows me insight into some of those changes that might be coming in the next year or two, into the more corporate space. Beyond that, a variety of government and commercial conferences, including one that’s focused on counties of California, the [California County Information Services Directors Association] organization. That’s a great one we go to twice a year, a great networking opportunity to just refresh relationships and remind each other that we’re here to support each other and share insights and successes together.

IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?

Beard: I try to protect my spare time voraciously. I try not to overdo it. I’ve got a large family and we do enjoy backpacking. That’s probably my No. 1 outlet when I can find the weekends that are available between all the kids’ things they have going on. Lots of projects around here. We have a small farm, so lots of things there keeping me busy. And then various mechanical projects. I like to build motors and engines and remodel cars, things like that. Most things [are] not technology-related outside of work. I try to be diverse in that; I have quite the variety of things we like to do. We love to do road trips, so we try to do that a couple times a year, for a few days or a week. And I’m trying to learn the ukulele, so that’s taking me a little while. They’re small, so they take a lot of dexterity, and I grew up trained in woodwind instruments, so it’s a completely different style and structure, and I’m struggling with the strum pattern. That’s where I’m stuck right now. Reading the last couple years has been pretty much focused on personal development on a couple of levels. I had a back injury a couple years [ago], so a few books around like recovery and exercise routines and some things like that. Recently on the more personal development side, I've been rereading [Stephen] Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — just about done with that one. It's a great book. [I] read one of Brené Brown’s books before that, Dare to Lead. And next is a book called Atomic Habits. It’s heavily recommended to me, so looking forward to diving in with it. Our organization is the heartbeat of our success. That’s why I’m reading these books, because my goal is to build a team, or to continue to build and invest in our team so they can be the best possible.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.