Jon Walton is chief information officer for San Mateo County, a position he has held since January 2013. He was previously CIO for the consolidated city-county of San Francisco, from June 2007 to January 2013. Walton, whose public service career has also included time as deputy CIO at the city of San Jose, was a senior manager with Unisys immediately before joining San Francisco.
He has a bachelor of science degree in land use planning and management/development from Humboldt State University. Since December 2018, has served as a school board trustee in the Pacific Grove Unified School District.
Techwire: As CIO of your organization, how do you describe your role; and how have the role and responsibilities of the CIO changed in recent years?
Walton: I’ve been CIO here for eight years now and before that I was in San Francisco. And San Mateo County is very different; it’s larger geographically, of course; we’re almost 600 square miles. But being a county CIO in a large county like this, the other thing I have found interesting, both from a challenge and a personal satisfaction standpoint, is the opportunity to build partnerships. We have 23 school districts, we have 16 cities within the county, we have a separate library system. And I think one of the things that for me has been different in the last eight years is how important communications and partnerships are to make things better for the community. Most people, when they live in a community, they don’t really think about exactly where all the invisible political boundaries are. And so, we really approach things in San Mateo County in a spirit of partnership with all of our municipal and school district partners.
Half of my responsibility is … the traditional things you would think about with a government CIO, the internal support needed for about 8,000 employees, so networks, radios and phones. Most of the application layer, we’ve pushed out either to the cloud — we’re heavily into the cloud for enterprise applications — but for what’s called department-specific applications, many of the larger departments have their own application and database staff. They’re embedded in their department with … a senior IT manager or CIO. We get along very well. We’re centralized when it comes to infrastructure and sort of a hybrid model when it comes to applications; I run the enterprise ones, and the departments run their own. But I would say the other 50 percent of my job, and sometimes more — especially during a pandemic, it’s been more like 80 percent of my job — is the external partnerships that put technology in place with our partner agencies to get through the pandemic and do things.
Techwire: How big a role do you personally play in writing your organization’s strategic plan?
Walton: I am (involved). I have two great deputies, though, and we’ve hired; we’ve gone through the typical RFP procurement process and hired some external experts. We did one about five years ago and then we’re refreshing it right now. It’s interesting to be trying to update a strategic plan during the middle of a pandemic. It’s a bit of a challenge because you get very tactical and very reactionary. But there’s definitely been some trends we’ve seen that I think are going to stick with us, that are going to affect our strategic plan as we go into this next two-year budget cycle which we’re just starting.
Which is, the traditional government model was the typical hub-and-spoke where you have one or two centralized data centers you really focus on, your (local area network) LAN and (wide area network) WAN in terms of how to secure things. And data transport and performance and support, assuming everybody was in one of the 90-odd facilities that were connected to our network. When the pandemic hit and we sent everyone home to work, over 80 percent of our workforce started working from home. That really caused us to shift not just technology but processes and staffing to be effective at supporting people working from home. And I think as I look at the strategic plan, a lot of the shifts in the technology we’ll be implementing, a lot of the shifts in the staffing focus, we’ll be really continuing to focus on that, I think, even when the pandemic’s over. I think a lot more of our staff will continue to telework, part of the time at least. So, we’re really going to adapt to that in our strategic approach to how we do things.
Editor’s note: The county’s goal is to complete the update of its strategic plan by June.
Techwire: What big initiatives or projects are coming in 2021? What sorts of RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Walton: I think one that we have already started … that will continue for several years is, it’s one of the back office things that aren’t probably as exciting as some people think when it comes to IT. But we support a very large public safety network both for our staff and a lot of our partner agencies. Being a large county, very diverse terrain, we have over 30 radio sites and a lot of the microwave system has to be replaced. … We’re looking for assistance implementing that in the coming year; right now, it’s projected to be a three-year project. We’re rethinking our whole telecommunications infrastructure. We had kind of the traditional Avaya desktop phone approach to telecommunications before the pandemic. We had been fortunate that right before the pandemic hit, we had rolled out Microsoft Teams at all the desktops, really thinking it would just be more of a casual collaboration and maybe chat function, internal to the county. But then, when everybody went home with laptops, it really became kind of a hub of communication. And so, I think we’re going to really rethink how that affects our telecommunications strategy and our RFP that we’re working on right now, to replace all of the telecommunications infrastructure. Because our old PBXs are very old and we need to either upgrade them or replace them with something new. That one should be out in the next few months.
Another big theme is going to be digital equity. We had been rolling out public Wi-Fi over the last seven years and had a really good system in place. But when the pandemic hit and everybody was trying to do telehealth appointments and online learning, we had to really double down on it. And I think it was a really good learning experience for us, just how critical free public Internet access is to people who are socially disadvantaged or in geographic areas that don’t have access. I think there will be some big RFPs coming out — with the board’s approval if they decide to allocate funds to that. But we’ve already estimated that we’ve probably spent $10 million on public Wi-Fi in the last seven years. And if we’re really to create an equitable environment for everyone in our county to have free public Internet access, we probably have to spend somewhere between $80 million and $100 million.
Techwire: How do you define “digital transformation,” and how far along is your organization in that process? How will you know when it’s finished?
Walton: Well, I’ll answer that in reverse. I don’t think transformation is ever finished, to be honest with you. I guess my view is, the pace of change in society in general is extremely high. ... I think we’re going to continue to see an evolution in society and in where we work and how we live. I think the pace of change is going to just increase if nothing else, or remain a constant. And I think from a transformational standpoint, the role of the CIO in probably any organization, but especially in government, is to find the right balance between maintaining the status quo and not chasing every new shiny object that comes along ... but at the same time, be very aware of how things are changing. The consumerization of IT, where everybody has a smartphone and a smartwatch and a tablet; this idea that the whole society was going to be built around hardwired connections to a home with a PC on a desk in a very traditional sense, I think, is almost a rarity now. Compared to everyone wanting to do things from iPhones or smartphones. I think that transformation is going to continue and I think the goal of the CIO is to try to work with their partners, whether it’s law enforcement or health care or public works and really say, ‘OK, based on where we see the technology going in society, how is that going to affect us in our business? And how can we continue this transformation process so that every time we refresh equipment or applications, which are usually on a three- or five-year cycle, we’re not just ripping and replacing something that already exists with the newest model but really rethinking, is now the time to change the process or the technology to adapt to new opportunities?’
Certainly, government tends to lag, a lot of times, and we just don’t have the luxury to … move as fast as some of the private-sector companies. But I think what I’ve seen in government is, we’ve done a much better job in the last five or 10 years looking ahead and looking around us and trying to stay up with change as much as possible. Where are we on that journey? Eight years ago, very few cellphones existed in the county for employees. The last time I counted, we have about 6,000 mobile devices in the county that we support. That transformation has happened. We had no applications in the cloud when I joined the county and now all of our big applications are in the cloud. Exchange: We were the first government to go live with Workday for ERP (enterprise resource planning) in California. I think of those types of transformations — every time we look at an app now, it’s just kind of an assumed cloud-first approach to it. When I joined the county, we had exactly one pair of fiber that ran from our Redwood City office to our hospital in San Mateo. Now we have 275 miles of dark fiber all over the county that we use to connect our facilities. Those types of transformations where you have to recognize what is required — if you’re going to put everything in the cloud, you need bigger pipes, you need better security, you need to rethink your security model. Is it endpoint protection or data protection? I think that transformation is going to continue for us for a long time.
Techwire: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Walton: We have about 8,000 employees in the county total. My staff is roughly 150 in the IT department. The county budget is between $3 billion and $3.5 billion a year, what the county spends on providing service to the public. And my budget is approximately $60 million that we spend every year operationally. There’s a capital side of it; sometimes that’s grant funded … (or) special project funds or something like that. That tends to fluctuate, but it’s usually somewhere between an additional $20 million or $30 million a year … .
Techwire: 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?
Walton: I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. I connect with a lot of people on LinkedIn; I find it’s easier than trying to keep a Rolodex or business cards. I’m just deluged with emails, so email is probably not … ideal; usually, I find LinkedIn is the best way to interact with the vendor community. If they say something or have something that’s of interest to me, then I usually ask them to follow up with me on my email and I have my assistant or one of my deputies set up a meeting. … I always recommend to vendors … that the Internet is a great thing in terms of searching, you can kind of see what people are talking about. I know not all government agencies or CIOs are very engaged with social media but ... in our county, we are. You can search all of our board meetings for anything related to technology. We have a good website; you can check out the website, there’s a lot of documents posted there. I always recommend to vendors, just take a few minutes, do some due diligence on the Internet and at least orient yourself a little bit to what our main themes are. One of my pet peeves is when somebody walks in cold to a meeting and says, ‘Tell me about your organization, tell me about what you’re interested in and focused on?’ I’m like ‘Why don’t you Google it and I’ll be back in 10 minutes.’
Techwire: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Walton: I would say it’s a tossup between two. One is, I just think that the operational excellence of what we’ve done going from — when I joined the county, we had GroupWise on a server on an AS/400 (later known as the IBM System i). I’m pretty sure we might have been the last GroupWise installation anywhere. So it was just, to me, the flexibility and the adaptability of the organization just to consume so much change so quickly. We literally, I think, have changed all but one application in the county in seven years. Staff have really been good about engaging about change management and process and adapting to new technology.
For me personally, I’m very passionate about the community. I’m a public school board trustee as well as a CIO, so I kind of wear two hats. And what we’re doing around the digital equity with the digital divide to me is critical. I always remind myself even though I’ve been doing a lot of digital divide stuff over the years that … we inadvertently leave portions of our population behind by putting things online without really thinking about it. And the hard work that the staff and the board has supported and the county manager and our partners in getting things out to the community — we get ‘Thank you’ notes from kids and their families now. You can imagine being an IT person, most of the things that you do are behind the scenes; people don’t really see the benefit all the time of a new laptop or a new cellphone. And there’s just sort of an expectation that technology will take care of itself and stay up to date. But to see the community really recognize the benefit of some of the work that has gone on related to digital equity to me has probably been the proudest thing I’ve done.
Techwire: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Walton: I would … like to see a procurement change not just in my county but in government procurement in general. I still feel like there’s an untapped opportunity for counties and cities to work together to do more joint procurement vehicles. … If I’m buying 1,000 Dell laptops at a certain price point, it would just be nice to see there was an easy way for smaller organizations, cities or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to take advantage of my buying power and process to leverage that to their benefit. Procurement in government is complex by design in the sense that you want it to be fair and you want to take enough time that everybody has an opportunity to provide a bid. But some of that complexity also creates inefficiencies when it comes to process and collaboration. I think if I could change anything, it would just be to create a more open collaborative system for other agencies to take advantage of.
Techwire: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Walton: I used to get all the magazines, the CIO magazines and things like that. It’s just funny, you talk about personal transformation — I pretty much canceled all my print subscriptions to everything just because I do find myself out of my office a lot more and I really find digital media is how I keep abreast of things. My Twitter account and my LinkedIn account — I get, I would say, probably 80 percent or 90 percent of my news directly from my Twitter feed or LinkedIn feed. I set aside probably 30 minutes every morning to scroll through all the journals I follow, all the writers — what are they writing about and what are the new emerging technologies? To me, that seems to be the quickest way to stay abreast of things.
Techwire: What are your hobbies, and what do you enjoy reading?
Walton: I’m not a CIO or IT person by training. I actually have a degree in science, so my love is science and I read a lot of science books and about physics and astrophysics and natural sciences. That’s still near and dear to my heart; I’m fascinated by scientists and the work that they do and the discoveries that they make, and space explorations and things like that. My dad was a scientist and so it reminds me of conversations with him whenever I read books about that and theoretical (questions like) ‘What does it take to do something,’ to get somebody on the moon or to Mars or one of the challenges around that. Personal hobbies? I like auto racing; I do race, not as much as I used to. I used to build cars, race cars, for friends and then I realized I liked driving them as much as I liked building them so I started racing some of the ones I built. … I like adrenaline rushes and so it’s very much an adrenaline-driven thing. At the same time, it’s a very focusing thing; when you’re on the track racing, you’re not texting or thinking about anything else. … So, for a person like me, who sometimes might be accused of having ADHD in terms of trying to do three or four things simultaneously, it’s a great opportunity to really focus myself on one thing and see if I can do better at it. … I’ve got a 16-year-old and an 11-year-old, and the 16-year-old … I gave him a Saab … for his birthday, and he decided he doesn’t like that; he wants a ’73 Nova, so I’m on the hunt for a Nova that we can restore together. And my 11-year-old, he’s determined to be a race car driver someday, so he’s in training on video games and things like that to be the next Lewis Hamilton someday.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
