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.
Maisha Dottery is chief information officer at the California Department of Community Services and Development (CSD), a role she has had since July 2021. Dottery is a veteran state executive whose career dates to 1999 when she joined the California Department of Water Resources as senior IT project manager and change manager, a role she held for nine years. After time at the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the Financial Information System for California, Dottery joined the State Treasurer’s Office, where she spent nearly nine years and was most recently chief of IT operations before being named CIO at CSD.
Dottery’s education includes a Master of Technology in Project Management from George Washington University, and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Her professional certifications include Communicate with Diplomacy and Tact from Dale Carnegie Training and Reasonable Cybersecurity for Business Leaders from LinkedIn.
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?
Dottery: As CIO of the Department of Community Services and Development’s (CSD) IT organization, I focus on collaborating with business and technology groups to ensure our technology investments align with the department’s current business needs and long-term operational goals. Our IT organization partners with internal and external leaders to identify and achieve the department’s big-picture goals. We also need to balance that with a focus on short-term program delivery beyond specific technology-driven initiatives, while fostering an IT culture that successfully develops future leaders. My responsibilities as CIO include maintaining and improving the organization’s technology processes to maximize productivity, ensure successful administration of state and federal grant programs, and guide the ongoing technological advancement of internal technology systems and processes. My team and I strive to reimagine technology’s role and evolve our thinking regarding structural norms and traditional operating models to meet the higher expectations of our customers, both the community-based organizations we partner with and our low-income customers. To advance the end-user experience, we use collaborative models as the catalyst to partner on business strategy and transformation. While our organizational priority is to strategically support the department’s long-term goals, we also need to be prepared to pivot to address new priorities quickly. In recent years, CSD has been given responsibility for significant new programs to help Californians economically impacted by the pandemic emergency. These new initiatives have provided our relatively small department with the opportunity — and challenge — to prioritize limited resources to balance the immediate need for new technology solutions with our long-term goals.
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?
Dottery: CSD’s strategic plan is being updated this year and I look forward to new opportunities for technology advancement, data utilization, and program service improvements that the strategic plan may inform or prioritize.
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?
Dottery: CSD is streamlining its aging systems and services, updating them to an integrated modernized platform. Our goals for modernizing the systems are threefold: to accelerate vertical offerings to increase administrative efficiency (at both the state and local level) and enhance service offerings to California’s constituents; scale our digital transformation to meet the department’s needs; and to optimize CSD’s systems and services for greater reliability. The design of this project will incorporate all the functionality in our existing systems onto the Salesforce platform using a centralized data warehouse and other supporting technologies. As we enter this unique opportunity over the next three years, we are planning incremental initiatives that will offer insights to help inform the platform’s structure to meet CSD’s current and future needs. For the project, we will be procuring services to assist with these incremental improvements to uncover business opportunities and identify technologies to allow our joint business-technology strategy and discover the best way to pursue these opportunities for CSD.
IICA: In your opinion, what should local government be doing more of in technology?
Dottery: CSD partners with a network of nonprofits and local governments to deliver services to low-income individuals, families and communities. During the pandemic emergency, we focused on supporting our local agencies’ efforts to develop new and creative ways of delivering services when the existing in-person models of service delivery were untenable. This support included providing additional programmatic flexibilities and enabling their efforts to move office operations and application processes online with additional federal funding and assistance from CSD. The lesson of the pandemic emergency has been that CSD and our local service providers, including local government, should always look for ways to leverage technology before the next crisis hits. A culture of continual improvement is required to strengthen our collective ability to adapt during times of crisis to ensure services continue to reach low-income Californians.
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?
Dottery: Digital transformation means using digital technologies to create or modify existing business processes, culture, and citizens’ experiences to meet changing business, organizational, and operational requirements. Simply stated, digital transformation is reimagining operations with a digital solution. CSD has established a foundational presence in cloud technologies for our new applications and we are now in the process of migrating older legacy systems to those same expandable platforms. Since digital transformation efforts reveal new capabilities and opportunities, there is no end to this process. Once we complete our initial effort, we continue to pursue ways to enable our business processes to become more efficient.
IICA: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Dottery: CSD is a small government organization of approximately 120 employees. In addition to supporting internal CSD staff, the IT organization is also responsible for the support of more than 200 external community-based organizations and managing the successful integration of three independent front-end technology systems into CSD’s IT framework. Approximately 10 percent of the employees are in the information technology division. Due to the agile nature of CSD’s work, we often augment CSD staff with contractors and vendors to support our large-scale technology work efforts.
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?
Dottery: Vendors interested in partnering with CSD should familiarize themselves with the department by reviewing the information and materials located on our website. Our supported and expanding platforms include Salesforce, Okta, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and the California Department of Technology. Those interested in a meeting with me may send an email of interest to CIOSupport@csd.ca.gov.
IICA: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Dottery: The achievement I am most proud of is our implementation of the California Arrearage Payment Program (CAPP). In 2021, when I had only been at CSD a matter of weeks, we began working on a new system to roll out this program that dedicated $1 billion from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to address Californians’ energy debts during the height of the pandemic emergency. My long history (20-plus years) of project and vendor management gave me a solid foundation to contribute to the success of the project. In 2022, CAPP was funded at $1.2 billion, and we were able to substantially improve the system by building off the previous year’s iteration.
IICA: What has surprised you most this year in government technology?
Dottery: What has surprised me the most during this year has been the rate of technological development, change and adoption. New technologies are being developed at a rate that will fundamentally reshape government workforces and how services are delivered to the public.
IICA: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Dottery: I use several mediums to stay abreast of technological developments and trends. One of my primary sources is Gartner. Other resources include the Public Sector Network (PSN), NASCIO, Forrester, International Data Corp. (IDC) and GovTech.*
IICA: What are your hobbies and what do you enjoy reading?
Dottery: I really enjoy teaching leadership and STEM courses to underserved communities. I equally enjoy using my creativity, specifically on paint projects, arts and crafts. Using my ability to create something from my imagination and watching it come to life is a gratifying experience. In the future I’d like to create a podcast to share leadership and STEM program implementation best practices.
*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.
State Community Services CIO: ‘Culture of Continual Improvement’ Needed to Bolster Service Provision
