As part of Techwire’s ongoing efforts to inform readers about state agencies, their IT plans and initiatives, here’s the latest in our periodic series of interviews with departmental IT and cybersecurity leaders.
Brian Sala is deputy director for research and evaluation and chief information officer for the California Mental Health Services Oversight and Accountability Commission, positions he has held since 2015. The commission is moving in February to new headquarters at 9th and R streets in Sacramento. In shepherding the transition and build-out of the new location, Sala is maintaining a focus on flexibility for collaborative work, so that when employees are in the office, they have easy access to plug in anywhere.
A veteran state employee, he was previously at the California Research Bureau of the California State Library, joining in 2007 as senior policy analyst and subsequently serving as assistant director from 2009 to 2011 and as acting director from 2011 to June 2015. Sala was an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, from 2000 to 2007; before that, he was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1993 to 2000. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Carleton College and a doctorate in political science from UC San Diego.
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?
Sala:We’re an independent commission created under the Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) passed in 2004. But for the first seven to eight years of the commission’s existence, it was housed inside the Department of Mental Health. It wasn’t really independent; it did not have much of its own staff. And then the Department of Mental Health was devolved in 2011-2012 and it was spun out as a fully independent entity. That was well before I got here; I’ve been with the organization since November of 2015. At that time, the statutory role of the commissions were changed; we had a regulatory role in overseeing county mental health plans in particular ways. ... And when that authority went away, we converted all (our) positions into an administrative shop. So, we have our own HR shop, budget shop, contract shop, etc. They’re very small, but basically all our program staff got turned into administrative staff, and we’ve tried building up programs since then. I have a formal IT staff of two and that is expanded by 100 percent from last year. ... There are two deputy directors – me and the other deputy director – and we swap portions of our portfolios. ... I’ve got research and evaluation plus the IT component. And the research and evaluation side, I have a chief who does the day-to-day supervision of staff and the front-end programs, and I directly supervise the IT staff. And I also supervise one other staff member, who’s ... a licensed mental health clinician, and she plays an advisory role. I’m part of the executive team. It’s our executive director, two deputy directors and our chief communications and our, I’ll call her our chief counsel – we only have one lawyer. But our real bosses are our commissioners. The commission is composed of 16 appointees. ... Our primary focus, again with the MHSA, is on oversight of the county mental health departments who implement the carve-out from Medi-Cal for severe mental illness programs. ... And then we have a policy advisory role in other stuff.
From the CIO perspective, we have a pretty thin technology footprint. I’ve been driving the transition from desktop to mobile over the last two years. More intensively over the last year for obvious reasons, because basically, all of our staff work from home probably 90 percent of the time. I’m in the office today; I’m in most days. So, we try to build that flexibility in for our staff. Most of our applications and data, we have a platform-as-a-service structure, we don’t really have our own app servers. ... Basically everything else, mass storage, we contract for, storage-as-a-service apps, platform as a service. And then we have a data warehouse – again, platform as a service ... . Right now, our data warehouse has on the order of 2.5 terabytes of data, and our role where we sit in the system, we’re not the mental health police, we’re oversight and accountability. Which, in the design of the system, we’re kind of in between all of the agencies that have direct program authority. So, we’re trying to combine data systems and data sets across the state, take advantage of administrative data. ... All of those pieces, to try to understand the whole person from an administrative data perspective, so then we can be more effective in asking real questions about what works and what doesn’t work ... .
Techwire: How big a role do you personally play in writing your organization’s strategic plan?
Sala: We actually just promulgated a new strategic plan last fall. It was probably an eight-month-or-more-long process; we worked with a contractor and with our commissioners. It was a very interactive process with our commissioners and the public. But I was part of that team and driving the composition of the strategic plan. It’s really more focused on program activities and vision, less than nuts and bolts, so we are continuing to work out the implementation side of it.
Techwire: What big initiatives or projects are coming? What sorts of RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Sala: We’re probably not going to be doing anything in terms of the RFP or RFA space for IT. So, again it’s platform-as-a-service activities, various apps or SaaS, Tableau licenses, a few other things and then that small handful of staff. The thing I’m most focused on is building out that data warehouse and our SaaS libraries so that we can do more of the things that we need to be doing, and then building the Tableaulibraries of dashboards that actually show what we’re doing. Other than realigning where we keep our mass storage, where we have our apps, etc., and trying to get that coordinated – which will be a big lift for us – I don’t anticipate that there will be anything major. It’s possible that we will go out for an RFP on replacement for our current data warehouse environment and the hosting for our SaaS, but probably not. That’s an annual contract; we’ve been working with a local contractor and vendor for a number of years.
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?
Sala: Digital transformation is an interesting concept with what exactly it means, and I’m sure it means different things to different people. When I came into this role, we were very much a paper-based organization, and the state was very much paper-based. It was seemingly difficult, for example, to get a contract that was approved without wet signatures. And then COVID-19 hit and boom, the world changed almost overnight and DGS (California Department of General Services) started putting out forms that allowed for electronic signatures. And I’ve been pushing on that. That’s one piece of it, is just workflow on contract approvals. Internally, it’s really a paper-based analog at this point; we don’t have a really solid workflow process for managing electronic documents through that workflow and getting them out the other side. It’s a real challenge to get that done. We do a lot of printing of documents that we don’t need to ... there’s a lot of waste there and a lot of that is just retraining. Part of that comes with remote work; it’s a lot more difficult for people to print stuff from home so they’re having to learn to manage their files a little more adroitly.
Techwire: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Sala: Our overall budget is a little over $250 million. The difference is local assistance, grant programs for the most part. ... We have some short-term needs to expand an existing grant program. We’ve had a rapid transition there in how do you manage a grant funding cycle when you’re not in the office? Again, it’s mostly paper analogs; it’s not truly a digital workflow ... . I don’t know when or ever we’ll be able to get there as an organization.
Editor’s note: The organization’s IT budget is “on the order of $800,000 a year.”
We have around 45 FTEs (full-time employees) at this point. We have grown quite a bit. When I got here in 2015, I think our FTEs were around 22, 23, and now we’re almost double that. We’re looking to go further. We also have, in addition to our state staff, we have a contract through UCSF (University of California, San Francisco), where we have embedded contract staff on the regular. We manage them almost as though they were state staff, but they’re not formally state of California staff, they’re UC staff. That adds additional management oversight, but it extends our capacity. We will be adding another half-dozen staff in that contract in the next six months as part of two ... fairly large program evaluation efforts.
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?
Sala: I would recommend they go to our website and pull down a copy of the strategic plan just to get some background on who we are. That will get vendors a long way. Certainly, through my LinkedIn account, that’s fine, or just by email, my work email. ... I get vendor calls, I wouldn’t say frequently but frequently enough, and for the most part, I’m not interested. I have a small handful of things that I really need to provide ¯ laptops for everybody, interconnectivity and then our platform-as-a-service activities, where we usually do those on an annual subscription basis and the costs of moving are pretty high. We’ve recently acquired a Tenable.sc license and we’ll be implementing them; we’ve worked with Okta ... . We’re actually exempt from DGS regulations when we spend Mental Health Services Act dollars. So we do not have to go to competitive bid for our contracts. We do sometimes do that, but we can do sole-source. And we try to husband that pretty carefully so we follow basically all of the DGS requirements with the exception of putting everything out to bid.
Techwire: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Sala: I would say we’re on the cusp, on the IT side, of things I will be proud of. Finding a unified platform-as-a-service environment where we can take full advantage of our Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions and better manage our data ¯ that will be something very important to me, and I think if we can get that unified with our data warehouse, I will be very excited about that. That’s aspirational; I think it’s very doable. We’ve identified some solutions that we think will work. On the more organizational grounds, I came here because I’m interested in good governance and in transparency and accountability, and I’ve been pushing really hard for us to build this data warehouse to link across state data systems because there’s a ton of value in state administrative data that goes underutilized. And because of where we sit in the system, there’s so many state administrative data sets that are used for ... fairly narrow purposes but have much broader value. I’m trying to free that up and take advantage of it. We have a very small footprint as an organization with the potential to leverage a lot of value at the state, and I’m very proud of what we’ve done so far. That’s also largely a coming attraction. We’ve published a little bit of that and some preliminary findings in our linkage with the rest of the data on our website. Moving into Tableau, it’s a turnkey solution for the most part and it’s not the most accessible, but it’s leaps and bounds forward for us as an organization being able to deliver value to the general public and accessibility to information about community mental health systems. I’m proud that started on that path. I think we’re on the cusp of really cooking with gas in terms of our ability to publish valuable dashboards on our website. We’re about to launch a complete refresh of our website. ...
Techwire: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Sala: As I noted before, we are exempt from the public contracts code, which makes it a lot easier for us to do procurement. ... That makes the process more simple. It limits our scope and so we ... do look for off-the-shelf solutions where we can. But where I really want to comment is on the distinction between waterfall projects and agile projects. When we developed our first transparency ... dashboard suite ... with (IFG) iFish, our contractor, we started off with a deliverables-based contract with them, which is pretty typical in state service. ... With an annual appropriation, you have to spend or encumber the funds within the budget year. And if it’s a service-based contract, basically the services have to be delivered within the budget year. With a deliverables-based contract, you get ‘budget year’ plus two so you write deliverables which historically have been waterfall design. You say ‘These are my requirements, go do.’ They come back with, maybe, an interim product and then you do change orders. That just multiplies the cost. We see IT projects and other projects fail all the time in state service because of that design issue, of one set of decision-makers writes ... one set of requirements that then changes over time. And then you have to pay for change orders. And the management process to go from beginning to end can be very challenging because of the structure. Whereas, with agile, you have the opportunity to say ‘I have some general ideas about what I want to produce.’ This is going to an interactive process. We had that with iFish; it was a very positive interactive process where I had a project manager meeting with the scrum leader and the developers almost every day and then we would have weekly or biweekly meetings ... .
Techwire: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the govtech/SLED sector?
Sala: To be very honest, I don’t have much bandwidth for reading any more. I used to have a subscription to GovTech* and a couple of the other publications.
Techwire: What are your hobbies, and what do you enjoy reading?
Sala: I do a lot less pleasure reading than I used to. I’ve been a The Economist subscriber since 1981. I have probably a two-month backlog and I’m a completionist. My daughter, who is 24, she’s newly home from two years teaching English in Russia – and she takes the new ones that I may never see ... because I’m so far behind. I’m a big science fiction fan, I’ve been one since I was a kid. And I love to cook, and I love to bake. I’m not a sweets baker – I bake bread. I’m one of those weirdos who had a sourdough starter before COVID-19.
*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.
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