Chaeny Emanavin is director of the Office of Innovation at the California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS), a position he has held since February 2018. Before joining the agency, he was director of product at the California Department of Technology (CDT) from May 2017 to January 2018, where he built and taught modern software product development. And before joining the state, Emanavin logged more than a decade in federal service, working more than a year as director of product for the United States Digital Service; nearly two years as digital program manager at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and more than nine years as IT specialist at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Emanavin has a Bachelor of Science degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University; a Master of Arts degree in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University; and a CIO Certificate in Information Technology Management and Leadership from the National Defense University.
Techwire: As Director of the Office of Innovation, how do you describe your role; and how have your role and responsibilities changed in recent years?
Emanavin: The role originally … when Mike Wilkening (special adviser on Innovation and Digital Services in the Office of the Governor) was creating the position and the office, when he was undersecretary and then again as secretary, was to create culture change, speaking really in broad, general strokes. More specifically, it was to introduce Health & Human Services to the digital service delivery models and frameworks and techniques that had worked so well in the federal space, specifically U.S. Digital Service and 18F; and then in civic tech, like Code for America and other civic tech companies that have since spun up. But it was to take things that we know worked well for the Googles and the Facebooks and the human centered design-driven things that make these great, highly intuitive, dare I say addictive products. And applying that mindset to making government services easier to understand and deliver and the nuance I wanted to bring to it after 14 years of federal service was, how can we have state staff – and, when I was in the federal space, federal staff -- use some of these skills and techniques and add them to the foundational skills to make government itself more effective.
These techniques are -- it’s not an intelligence gap, it’s not an ability gap, it’s a skills gap. So, if you teach folks these skills, then they will be able to work more effectively with partners and deliver better things – specifically, product management and iterative techniques -- if a good project manager understands the business goals, understands rules, regulations, understands the technology and then understands the voice of the user. So, as I’m looking at state and federal staff, I’m like, ‘Well, business goals and laws, we get that.’ So, you just have to teach voice of the user and enough of the technology to understand, ‘Oh, here’s a trade-off between options. Let me make my choice based on that.’ You have a pretty great product manager in that sense. So, the office was focused on teaching these skills. So, that … was the purpose, was to bring in these skills and to not only teach them, but we also wanted to give folks a place to practice them while also building stuff.
We created a cohort model, which is, folks after they go through a six-week boot camp, they’re with the office for a year or two to just practice and build these things. The role is to set up the skills, the training, the curriculum, the strategy for that. And then also to choose and manage and deliver – we call them ‘engagements,’ but project efforts to find a problem, define it crisply and prototype a solution for it up to MVP (minimum viable product). We didn’t have the ability to deliver beyond that.
It has changed recently. With the new secretary of the new administration, it’s a lot of the same faces, and the strategies and the goals are tightly aligned. This organization, there’s a little more emphasis on whole person care than before. Not that it wasn’t an emphasis before, but they explicitly mention whole person care and using data to drive more effective business decisions.
So, my office is being combined with two others. OHII, (CHHS’) Office of Health Information Integrity … . It’s our group that’s focused on (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) HIPAA and making sure that there’s compliance and making sure all those things are going well across the departments. And also, our Office of the Patient Advocate. So, the three offices are combining … and it’s being called the (CHHS) Center for Data Insights and Innovation. It’s still human-centered design; it’s still applying the tight problem definition. But it has more emphasis on using data and using it effectively to drive the decisions and the insight to what things can we do as an agency and as a department to better deliver services, to better react to emergencies, to be more responsive and to be more future planning-specific -- use data better. It’s folding in what we were doing before with the tight problem definition, human centered design, prototyping … and then also understanding the data, gathering data more effectively and then creating those insights that you need to drive better business decisions.
Techwire: What is the timeline on the combination of these three offices, and do you think it will change what you do at all?
Emanavin: It does change a little bit. The timeline is, we are establishing the office in the next few months and we’re working through a couple of projects to sort of create our signature -- what’s the platform with which we build products? We’re doing that now and we’re very much in the beginning stages. But a lot of what my personal role is, it’s helping in the strategic planning. It’s a little more hands-on in the product management work to make sure that we’re building the right thing. And figuring out, then, in this new environment, how do we teach the next set of folks who are going to be doing this how do we get the new generation ready for this kind of work?
Techwire: How big a role do you personally play in writing the Office’s strategic plan?
Emanavin: The original of the strategic plan, I came in with a presupposition, like I said before, I want to be able to teach and apply these techniques that I saw work so well at U.S. Digital Service and the state. Then, working with people who were already here who just weren’t folks who understand how the state works. Tamara Srzentic (deputy director at CCHS’ Office of Innovation) … was incredibly instrumental in helping me figure out how to make this work in the state context. And she was also really instrumental in pushing some of the soft skills, the communication skills, the self-awareness. Things like strength finders, another program … called humanware, it’s basically communications in crisis situations. Those were really key pieces to add to the strategic plan to make it actually realistic. A lot of strategic plans are really pretty and aspirational but when it comes to the rubber meeting the road, we need folks who understand context in the state to go like, ‘Oh, if we teach this, it will help people get over that type of a blocker,’ or ‘Oh, if we teach that, it will help them get over this kind of a problem.’ And with the new office, helping my new boss figure out how to take these existing things and weave them into the expanded vision. It’s a lot of weekly strategic meetings, figuring out how to adjust some of the things that worked well into new constraints and new opportunities.
Editor’s note: John Ohanian, CHHS’ chief data officer and senior adviser on innovation -- and the former president and CEO of Community Information Exchange (CIE San Diego), a subsidiary of 2-1-1 San Diego -- is director of CDII.
Techwire: What big initiatives or projects are coming in 2020? What sorts of RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months? Will they generally follow the RFI2 model?
Emanavin: I’m unfortunately not the best person to ask about procurement. But I can tell you in broad strokes … one of the great accomplishments in the last few years is our open data hub. Taking that wonderful thing, we have another flavor of it which is called the Research Data Hub, which … last year the pilot, or a couple years ago, we worked with the Children’s Data Network, and Emily Putnam-Hornstein and Regan Foust, those wonderful, wonderful researchers there, helped us use the Research Data Hub to set up a pilot for researchers to ask for data from all the different state departments underneath Health and Human Services. And one of the things that my staff did last year was, we helped create a single form for all those requests. So, instead of requesting data from each department separately, it’s a single form that then, the things we’ve been building in the background on managed data those data stewards can say, ‘Here’s this one request; oh, and you need some data from here, some data from there.’ And the idea is to put them into this research data hub where the data can be secure and safe and exposed to only the people who are allowed to see it. But inside of this secure environment, the researchers can do all the analysis that they need to do and come up with all the insights, and then they write their papers, publish; and once it’s published, then the benefit to the state is that we can understand the data set and those insights can help drive some great business changes, or whatever other things that we can learn from it.
What we’re working on now as CDII is the expansion of that Research Data Hub concept to do the next step, which is expand it to more researchers but also to help our internal staff get data from across the different departments and to drive internal business decisions more effectively. And so, we’re looking at things like more effective emergency response, being able to predict where … resources are best utilized when disasters are coming so that we can be more prepared. Of course, you can’t be prepared for everything because that’s the whole nature of an emergency. But having the resources of something like a Research Data Hub, you can understand how the different departments and how the different things are converging; that situational awareness can help you react more effectively and plan more effectively.
And we have a couple things we’re going to figure out -- what’s staff, what’s contract. It’s a wonderfully ambitious thing so we’re going to need help from staff, help from partners, all that is to be figured out hopefully in the near future. But this first year is just figuring out what, at a small scale, we can do to deliver these things effectively and then scale up.
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?
Emanavin: I don’t think it’s ever finished because the nature of technology changes, the nature of people’s needs change. I think there will always be a role and a need for government services. I think the digital services transformation on a small scale, internally what it means is that staff understand how to better use data. Because we’re collecting a ton of stuff. Well, how do you pull insights out of that? So, learning how to better use the data. Some of it does involve learning tool sets. But a lot of it comes down to understanding processes, like the human-centered design process and understanding how to define that process crisply. And then how to build a thing to solve the problem. And I think that’s what it comes down to a lot of times. The nature of digital service delivery, it doesn’t always mean that the user or the constituents or Californians, however you want to define it, as the people who are getting those services, they don’t always have to use a digital means to get the benefit of the service. But what it means is that both from a human process and from those supporting processes and technologies, we’re doing things and continuing to improve them and do them as efficiently as possible.
Techwire: What is your estimated innovation budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Emanavin: That’s hard to define. I don’t know what it is because we’re combining. Right now, the staff is just me technically because the cohorts are all – they’re borrowed. It’s basically a professional development rotation. So, while they’re with the office, they’re still part of their department but they’re getting upskills with which to go back to their departments and use the benefits of what they’ve learned to make their departments better. There will be room for that. I just don’t know what – we’re still hammering out what that looks like.
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?
Emanavin: Right now the best way to understand what we’re doing is, we probably are going to put RFQs, RFPs out on the street. As far as communicating, unfortunately, the best way to do it is probably to just email me directly for now, because we don’t really have a more mature process. But we’re working on that.
Techwire: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Emanavin: My answers change over time. … Last year we did some really great work with CDT and with the cannabis programs from Bureau of Cannabis Control, CDPH has their cannabis licensing arm for manufacturers and with (California Department of Food and Agriculture) CDFA for the cannabis cultivators. We worked with the governor’s office and those programs and CDT to apply human-centered design to reimagine the licensing process. And I thought that that work went really well. We came up with some wonderful insights. … We built them, but we just haven’t been able to release some of the things just because it hasn’t been the focus. Some of the folks including myself got pulled onto COVID. Since COVID, part of my team has worked on helping build the software that supports CAhelp.org. … It’s related to that CalMS program where you send medical professionals to help where they’re needed. So, at first it was Sleep Train [Arena in Sacramento] and then it was with the skilled nursing facilities and now it’s the different correct facilities, skilled nursing facilities, etc. That showed how well this process works with the development process because we stood up the software to support Sleep Train in a week. And then after that, we started doing successive iterations to refine the tool.
Normally what happens is, you build a thing, you’re like, ‘Great, we’re done,’ and then you ignore it. We didn’t; we continued to go paper prototype and journey-map the process with the folks who were managing deployments and going, ‘Does this work? Would this work better?’ … So as we kept refining the thing, we were able to build software that really helped and reinforced the deployment managers. When we got new staff, then, they were able to get up to speed within a day because the software reflected their process so well. And when the process changed … we were able to change the software quickly. What’s cool about it is, we were able to for the first time … capture the difference between doing something quickly and then how much it costs to rework it when you make assumptions that aren’t right and then how much it costs when you do rapid prototyping on paper and then build what people have said on the paper prototype they would prefer. And to see the difference in cost. And it’s pretty amazing how expensive rework is versus how cheap it is to do it on paper and build something that’s closer to being correct the first time. I was really excited about that and I’m really proud of that because it gave us data for the first time where I could point and say, ‘Oh, this is significantly cheaper to make your mistakes on paper.’ Instead of code. Being able to work with a full-on development team and being able to bridge the gap between what business wants and what the team’s able to build is the whole point of human-centered design. And it worked beautifully when we had all the pieces together like we did for the cannabis project, like this is the way government programs should be built. I would love us to do more of that and we plan to, of course, over the next weeks, months, years.
Techwire: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Emanavin: I would love for our procurement process to make it easier for smaller companies to compete. And I know that there’s the small-business contract and everything else. But what I mean is there’s a lot of civic tech organizations that are small. … Who don’t even consider bidding on state projects because the paperwork process is daunting or because it just seems intimidating. I would really love for it to be a little less scary so that we get a really healthy ecosystem of all sorts of different size vendors, from all sorts of different perspectives, because I think it makes us as a state better and I think it makes the vendor pool better because we can all learn from each other. … I would just love for that to be more easily accessible to everyone. And those programs are out there, but they’re intimidating.
Techwire: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the govtech/SLED sector?
Emanavin: To understand kind of the pulse of what’s going on, I read a lot of Medium articles from just great thinkers in the field, from USDSers. Dana Chisnell (design lead at the California Office of Digital Innovation) is just a phenomenal person to follow from the (user experience) UX and design world. DJ Patel … again, we worked with him on some of the COVID data. I read [Government Technology*] and things like that. … To be honest, a lot of what I’ve been doing lately is looking on things like Udemy or LinkedIn Training and just seeing what courses in these fields like data analytics, human-centered design … are out there and … what’s trending, honestly, to be like, ‘What’s a popular training course.’ … It’s kind of a useful way to see what’s hot in the industry.
Techwire: What are your hobbies, and what do you enjoy reading?
Emanavin: I like doing different projects with my family. I’ve been -- I always enjoy barbecuing. That’s something I really enjoy doing. My son got straight As last semester, so he wanted a gaming computer. So, I said, ‘Yeah, but you know what, kid? You’re not just getting a computer, you’re going to build one and you’re going to learn how the different parts of a computer work. I’m going to give you a budget, you’re going to source the parts and we’re going to build it together.’ Ended up being a really great project because, again, it let me refresh my knowledge of how computers work. And he built a really great system. It’s kind of fun to go back into the beginner’s mind. Just little projects like that. I’ve been learning to play the ukulele with one of my kids – with two and the other plays the piano. Just things like that – music and home improvement projects.
*Government Technology magazine is a publication of e.Republic, which also produces Techwire.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
