State Tech Leaders Detail How IT Procurement Drives Innovation

It’s been five years since Gov. Gavin Newsom implemented the new procurement vehicle known as RFI2 (Request for Innovative Ideas), and several key state technology leaders spoke last week about its continuing role as a driver of innovation.

In a panel discussion during the California Government Innovation Summit*, a panel of state IT leaders briefed a roomful of government technologists and procurement officials on “Procurement Power: Driving Public Sector Innovation” and how that push for innovation has transformed their departments.

Scott Gregory, deputy director of technology for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), was among those who jumped on board the new technique immediately. Gregory, a veteran government technology leader, had moved from his role as state chief innovation officer to his current position with CAL FIRE in July 2020, when both the COVID-19 pandemic and the state’s wildfire season were in full swing.

“Our focus was not only to look at the suppression efforts, but how do we then predict where this is going to occur?” Gregory told attendees. “How can we model what the impacts will be? So that necessitated us to go out through a vehicle like RFI2 to be able to find technologies that can help support our mission. And what we found going through that was not the typical procurement process; it was very accelerated, and it helped us support our mission and our pledge to the citizens of California.”

Gregory said the RFI2 process strengthened the relationships among state departments and also enhanced “an understanding within our organization about how we can work together, oddly enough, through a new procurement vehicle, a new procurement path, to focus directly on the mission that was at hand.”

Gregory said: “We looked at different companies that were proposing solutions. And the difference was, it wasn’t just talk. We started this … and then this tool was put into the field and tested. This tool was tested on tailgates, on vehicles right at the fire line, predicting the two-hour, four-hour, six-hour, eight-hour progression of a fire. We found that it was very helpful tool for our incident commandments on the ground.”

Gregory said that when CAL FIRE committed to RFI2 as a procurement vehicle, “it actually changed us culturally, caused us to look at procurement differently, but also organizationally changed us and how we implemented technology, and how we changed as a culture and rallied around technology as that catalyst.”

“The RFI2 process kicked off a brand-new unit within CAL FIRE,” he said. “Our intel group is a part of the organization that does fire intelligence, everything from weather monitoring to law enforcement monitoring around arson to fuels mitigation, to be able to fuse that information together, to be able to paint what the fire threat picture is.” Legislation was created to establish the CAL FIRE Office of Wildfire Technology Research and Development, whose board he chairs.

“That board is specifically designed to investigate and look at new, cutting-edge, not-on-the-market-yet technologies that can help support fire suppression. There’s an interesting marriage between RFI2 and that office. Now we have a procurement vehicle to be able to leverage once we do these investigations — to be able to tie in to say: ‘We’ve looked at this. We’ve proven it. Now let’s really prove it out into the field.’”

That process, Gregory said, also led to the creation of CAL FIRE’s intelligence office, which employs 72 intel analysts up and down the state, using primarily the technology that was acquired through RFI2. “Which is kind of mind-blowing, right? It created new ways for us to look at how we manage, disseminate and predict the future as it relates to fire. It created new careers, it created new collaborations, and ultimately changed the face of how CAL FIRE addresses wildland fire.”

The role of the California Department of Technologyis different in that it has additional oversight responsibilities over multiple agencies and procurement practices, said panelist Tiffany Angulo, CDT’s deputy director of statewide technology procurement.

“One of the things I want to really hit home is that you have to collaborate with the procurement folks in your department because they are the middle piece for you,” Angulo told attendees. “You have a program that’s telling you they need something, and so they've got to come to you and say, ‘Hey, can we get this thing? Can we have this IT system in our department?’ Then it gets off to procurement and they go, ‘No, we're not going to do it, because we have all these requirements.’ And that shouldn't be happening.”

She agreed that one of the benefits RFI2 established was collaboration. But the process can also fill gaps, she said.

“If you’ve done procurements that have not been successful, that’s a good opportunity to look at RFI2,” she said. “Because maybe there’s something that we don’t know, but the innovator pool, the industry pool, can tell us in a different way than what we’re used to. So that’s kind of how we’re continuing to use RFI2.”

The Department of Motor Vehicles was another early adopter of RFI2, noted Ajay Gupta, the state’s chief digital officer, whose assignments include working on DMV’s transformation.

“We were looking to really transform and change the way we would do our business operations, and that required both a new way of thinking — looking outside the status quo, to different industries even — and one thing that was kind of like the anchor was the procurement process,” Gupta said. “And then, coincidentally, RFI2 had come out … so we really dove deep into it with the simple goal of inviting the industry to come in and give us ideas and those opportunities to really solve the problem.” The contrast between the old way and the new was significant, he said.

Like other departments that use RFI2, Gupta said, DMV remained open to ideas from other industries — the retail or financial sectors, for example. Gupta cited as an example the challenge laid out by DMV Director Steve Gordon: Reduce customer wait times for a Real ID in field offices from 35 minutes to three. Gupta said that meant breaking the problem down to its essence: What they needed wasn’t a specific solution for how to cut wait times for that specific product; it was how to reduce customer queuing in field offices and instead do as much as they could online.

“It created this ecosystem where more and more people from another industry sector were interested,” he said.

Angulo noted that with the rapid change of technology, procurement and government needs, one thing is key for vendors:

“Be ready for the unknown. Be able to adapt, be able to be agile through the process, because you are working with so many different solutions, potentially you will have pivots along the way, and that’s okay. I think that leads to a more successful process, but you do have to have more of an agile thinking.

“You might start to look at your project differently, instead of going for full-blown implementation. Now you just want to do MVP [minimum viable product], right? I mean, there’s so many different ways that this can result, that I think you have to be open — and so does your leadership, who’s driving your sponsorships.”

Panelist Angela Shell, the state’s chief procurement officer and deputy director of the Department of General Services’ Procurement Division, noted that the RFI2 process, though transformative in the right applications, still operates within guidelines.

Though RFI2 is based on negotiation, only DGS and CDT have the authority to negotiate. She said that if someone in state government thinks an RFI2 procurement might work for a particular problem, “you do have to come to DGS and CDT, and then as we work through the RFI2 process, we determine, is it something that DGS moves forward with or CDT? And it’s because of that negotiation piece.”

Shell noted that DGS is “layering the alignment of the RFI2 on top of the PAL [Project Approval Lifecycle]. We are currently working on that continuous improvement. We are currently working on the mindset of RFI2 and how it can fit into the Project Approval Lifecycle process. I think that there's going to be some huge successes in complementing the Project Approval Lifecycle.”

But DGS, DMV and CDT aren’t the only departments in state government that are seeing how procurement can drive innovation. A couple of attendees at the session volunteered how their departments are doing it.

The California Department of Public Health, for example, used RFI2 during COVID-19, extensively leveraging emergency contracts to drive urgently needed solutions.

And the Department of Health Care Services’ procurement division created one of the department’s first tracking dashboards. Now it’s modeling a lot of other project dashboards after that one.

*The California Government Innovation Summit was presented by Government Technology, sister publication of Industry Insider — California.