As part of Industry Insider — California’s ongoing efforts to inform readers about state and local agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with IT leaders. Responses have been lightly edited.
Dan Fruchey was tapped to lead Sonoma County IT in August 2022, bringing 26 years of county-level IT experience to the role. He oversees the Department of Information Systems’ 120 employees and a budget of more than $61 million. He started with Sonoma County as an IT analyst in 1997, rising through the ranks in various roles like senior program analyst and division director.
Industry Insider — California: Tell us about your background and how it prepared you for your current role? As the county’s IT director/CIO, how do you describe your role?
Fruchey: I started out in the industry as a computer hobbyist while working full time as a licensed paramedic. Eventually, technology won out over pre-hospital medicine, and I went back to school to become a computer programmer, transforming a hobby into a wonderful career. During over a decade in emergency services, I learned to triage life-threatening issues and take the lead with a team of first responders in moments of crisis. That experience really helped me prepare for instilling calm among our staff and keeping perspective when dealing with a technology crisis.
I’ve been working full time for the Information Systems Department at the county of Sonoma for over 26 years. I started out as a help desk analyst during the Y2K era and progressed through a series of technical and managerial roles to become the department head. I’m a lifelong learner and I constantly work on improving myself through technical and management skills training while also experimenting with emerging technologies like generative AI. I love technology and helping people understand how to use it.
As people in our organization retired, I was repeatedly asked to “temporarily” take on additional responsibilities at a higher level. Those experiences prepared me to progress from technical to managerial roles and I eventually wound up leading every division in our department for at least a year or two. That experience was instrumental in preparing me with a practiced skill set when our department head retired. I was given the chance to lead our organization as the interim director until an open recruitment occurred and about 18 months ago I became the permanent IT director.
I am responsible for leading the work of the county’s central information technology organization. I work with local government leaders to create a technical environment that anticipates and supports their business needs, a critical role in ensuring our shared success for serving our community.
A significant part of my time is spent working with internal managers addressing the daily flow of administrative, personnel and budget challenges encountered like in any other organization. Technical work is directed by several senior directors who report to me and much of my job revolves around supporting them to achieve their goals in leading the various teams within our department. Succession planning across technical and administrative roles is critical to our current and future success. While I’m focusing on skills growth within our management team, I also create and encourage opportunities for professional growth within our technical ranks.
Another important aspect of my job is creating a culture where people know they are respected and valued for their contributions to our success. Our management team works very hard to empower people in the performance of their work, to allow for learning and growth knowing that mistakes are sometimes made, and to use the occasional misstep to improve together. Like many other government organizations, we work in a hybrid environment where employees often telework for a portion of their time. Building and sustaining a positive culture can sometimes require different skill sets than before, but we believe we have seen improved productivity and a positive work/life balance with this approach.
IICA: To the extent you can discuss this, and at a high level, what big initiatives or projects are coming up? What sorts of developing opportunities or RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Fruchey: We are working to improve access to government records, systems and services regardless of location or computing device. This includes about a dozen initiatives for improving information transparency, expanding hybrid work options and reducing technical debt for legacy technologies that can’t conform to this model.
In the six- to 12-month timeframe, we will be looking for partners who can help us improve our Public Records Act program, hybrid work environment and cybersecurity ecosystem.
IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
Fruchey: Government agencies are struggling to find enough qualified candidates who want to commit to a public service career. Investing in technologies and training that are a force multiplier for current staff is essential to ongoing success. Tightly integrated application suites are really beneficial. Whether that’s office products, graphic design tools, or programming suites, they really increase productivity and opportunities for collaborative work. More of these applications are including automation and artificial intelligence tools to reduce routine, repetitive work to allow users more time to focus on the work that matters most.
IICA: What is your estimated budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget and is there a strategic plan we may hyperlink to?
Fruchey: Our department has a budget of $61.3 million and a staff of about 120 employees for supporting the needs of roughly 4,400 clients. Sonoma County’s adopted budget for the current fiscal year is $2.3 billion and our countywide strategic plan is available here.
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?
Fruchey: Email really works best, as it makes it easier for me to pass along information to managers and staff working within the various areas we support. I can be reached at dan.fruchey@sonoma-county.org. I think it works best if vendors educate themselves on the departments that might be interested in their services by visiting our website. Additionally, I would suggest that vendors perform a search on the site for “Supplier Portal” and then visit the link for an explanation of how they can register to be notified when departments are seeking products or services.
IICA: Which project or implementation do you consider the most influential, in this role or in a previous position?
Fruchey: In October of 2017 Sonoma County experienced the Tubbs Fire, a series of wildfires that locally resulted in 22 lives lost, 4,600 homes destroyed, and over 36,000 acres of burned land. It’s a tragedy that none of us will ever forget.
On the first night, firefighters were able to divert the flames just a few short blocks from our county government campus, but it was a near thing. Many employees were displaced through loss of their homes or evacuations and couldn’t return to work at a county facility for an extended period. Government services were overwhelmed and at times our communications systems and infrastructure failed to keep up with demand. In the aftermath of the fire, we evaluated our risk for delivering government technology services should a similar situation occur again and came up with a plan to improve our resiliency and redundancy.
We moved many of our services to the cloud and improved failover capabilities both in the cloud and with our backup data center hosted by another county. Some services, such as our website, office productivity tools, videoconferencing and email were moved to vendors who host our services externally. Overall, we started shifting to an “anytime, anywhere, any device” strategy.
While this has taken a great deal of time and effort, it has demonstrated huge benefits as we experienced subsequent wildfires that resulted in mass evacuations with employees working from temporary locations throughout the region. By the beginning of the pandemic, we had already put many systems in place to improve the county’s ability to work from home. Like many other government agencies, a significant number of our staff continue to work in a hybrid format post-pandemic.
IICA: What has surprised you most in government technology during the past 12 months?
Fruchey: I don’t think most agencies were prepared to rapidly adopt generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini. Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools have been around for a long time but GenAI has huge benefits and risks we haven’t had sufficient time to fully understand yet. The National Association of Counties (NACo) will be releasing its final report on AI adoption for government later this year and I look forward to seeing the results. You can check out information on their work here, including their AI adoption primer.
IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Fruchey: I’m a geek at heart and so I’m always experimenting with different technologies. Right now I’m having fun playing with smart home technologies and learning photo restoration. Both of these require a lot of patience, but the results are well worth it.
I love reading and I’m always working on at least three to four books. For work, I read a lot about IT leadership, people skills and building client relationships. Favorite authors include Mark Settle, Peter A. High, Liz Wiseman, Simon Sinek, and Kim Scott. For fun, it’s military sci-fi and fantasy, almost any book by Nathan Lowell or L.E. Modesitt Jr. keeps me pretty happy.
IICA: From a high level, what is most important for readers and vendors to know about the county’s information technology priorities?
Fruchey: As a result of local and national tragedies, we’ve accelerated our path towards digital transformation in government services, embracing technologies for remote working much more quickly than we would have otherwise. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a lot of great benefits for our clients and community. We will continue looking for ways we can work with our community remotely. That means converting additional work processes to electronic equivalents and helping our workforce adapt to those changes. We also recognize a need to gauge our ability to continue at the current pace, and some clients have expressed a level of fatigue in always learning new technology to perform their work.
Sonoma County IT Director: Innovation, Resilience Are Our Core Values
