Imre Kabai is chief information officer for Santa Clara County, a position he has held since November after having been acting CIO from February through November 2020. Previously, he served as the county’s chief technology officer from October 2017 through November 2020. Before joining the county, Kabai was chief enterprise architect and IT director at Granite Construction for nearly four years.
He has a Master of Science in geophysics, cum laude, and a Bachelor of Science in computational mathematics, both from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
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?
Kabai: My role as CIO can best be described by highlighting my top five responsibilities. The first is to build relationships with my business stakeholders and understand their challenges, opportunities and strategies. It’s important that the IT team is seen as a trusted partner that can help with enhancing business strategies. The second is to set priorities for the IT team by defining the strategy. The outcome is that we can turn complex, ambiguous, high-level business problems into actionable, simpler ones that the organization can solve. The third is to build a high-performing IT team that can execute the strategy. This includes encouraging and modeling the desired culture and establishing the necessary communication channels. The outcome is well-being and engagement. I love to see my IT colleagues enjoying their work and fulfilling their potential. The fourth is to learn every day from my mentors, peers, the IT leaders I work with and staff. I also seek to learn from thought leaders and disruptors outside the county. This enables me to grow along with my team and have fewer blind spots. And lastly, to appreciate every day the opportunity to have a meaningful job and a team to lead that I care about so much. This helps me to cope better with the inevitable daily difficulties of the job.
Over the years, we have experienced the emergence of such paradigms as systems thinking, lean, agile, business capabilities and, lately, design thinking. We are incorporating these paradigms into the Mode 2 paradox of operational excellence versus creative disruption. And we apply all this across the IT layers of people, processes, platforms and customer interaction. The CIO’s job became quite complex and the focus shifted from the means to the outcomes and from configuring technologies to empowering people.
Techwire: How big a role do you personally play in writing your organization’s strategic plan?
Kabai: I am accountable for delivering the IT strategic plan, which is often a key component in the greater organizational strategy, due to the remarkable impact of technological disruption. Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark in his book Life 3.0 did a calculation. If the production of goods would have grown the same way compute capacity for a fixed amount of cost grew over the past 150 years, 10 on the power of 19, then we could purchase of all the goods produced in a year by New York State for a few pennies. When we consider that compute translates to data transformation and exchange and better insights to make decisions — information technologies are the fundamental enablers of our present and future, and the end of growth is still not in sight.
Techwire: What big initiatives or projects are coming in 2021? What sorts of RFPs should we be watching for in the next six to 12 months?
Kabai: The county of Santa Clara operates one of the largest public health-care systems in the nation. COVID-19 demonstrated fundamental weaknesses in our institutions. The need for social services has significantly increased, too. While some people accumulated great wealth during 2020, a significant part of the population is struggling in Silicon Valley. Tent cities have mushroomed everywhere, and many of the people living in the tents and RVs have full-time jobs. Those people are the primary recipients of many of the county’s services. We must address these problems to be able to call ourselves a first-world country. I expect significant investments in the public health and social services areas, continued focus on public safety and justice, and legacy system modernization.
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?
Kabai: My definition today: shifting brick and mortar-type services to digital services to help our 2 million Silicon Valley residents to consume the county services quickly and conveniently. I see these services becoming more context aware, using natural user interfaces and becoming more equitable. I expect personal digital assistants and “things” becoming more and more of our customers, too.
We are not very far along with our digital transformation. We are busy establishing the fundamental governing processes and platforms and gaining the necessary knowledge. And I do not think we will ever finish, because by the time we utilize the newly emerged technologies and meet the shifting expectations of our residents, new possibilities and expectations will emerge. I asked my 900-plus IT team to play a game called Digitopia 2035, where they had to imagine the future in 15 years and the role the county will play in it. People really let their imaginations run loose. The submissions were fascinating, ranging from robotic autonomous firefighters, technology-enabled preventative health care, AI-based equitable judges and drone medication delivery for the elderly of the county.
Techwire: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Kabai: The IT budget is close to $400 million with 920 or so permanent positions. The overall county budget is in the $8 billion range.
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?
Kabai: The vendor pressure is always high. Our email spam filter removes over 50 vendor emails a day, but many still get through, vendor calls as well. I am not likely to respond when I get a direct call from a salesperson who wants me to stop what I am doing and dedicate time to a pitch. That does not work for me and will not work for the vendor, either. It feels like a solution is seeking a problem to solve.
The best way to get my attention is to teach me something. I always have five minutes to read something. Grab my imagination, give me the present of an “ah-ha moment.” Use an asynchronous communication channel, so I can choose the best time to consume your message. One of my intellectual heroes is American physicist Richard Feynman and the following quote is attributed to him: “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.” If you explain something to me in five minutes, I will be grateful, and my mind will be open to learn more.
We seek long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with our vendors. If you prefer to sell, rather than invest for the long run, we may not be the right customer for you.
Techwire: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Kabai: I am very proud of my team’s dedication and work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team worked so hard to shift thousands of users to remote work, built out telehealth, new digital services, information dashboards, testing sites, contact tracing and lately the vaccination infrastructure. While over 20 percent of the IT staff was assigned to COVID-19-related work, we went through significant budget reductions, kept our most important projects running, tended to one of the largest California fires, ran a smooth general election and kept executing our internal IT development initiatives. In 2020, five people from different IT divisions, representing the whole team, were recognized as the county’s Team of the Year. I feel honored and humbled to serve as the CIO of such an amazing IT team!
Techwire: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Kabai: I have a short answer — I would change its speed. Often, by the time we get through budgeting, procurement and implementation, the technology has lost a significant portion of its value. Information technologies decay fast. Fortunately, I have good partners in the procurement and legal departments, and we are working together to speed up the process while preserving its integrity.
Techwire: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Kabai: I do not specifically read government-related technology information. I believe what is unique and sometimes challenging in government is not the technology but the culture, organizational complexity, compliance, union contracts and board communication. It’s the human and process components. Usually, I start or end my days reading Y Combinator’s Hacker News, the Reddit technology news and Skimfeed. These news aggregators have a very broad scope. I browse through many articles and dive deep into some. When something is truly fascinating, I save the article and revisit it in a week, a month or a year. I also like to watch YouTube technology tutorials — some of those are really good.
Techwire: What are your hobbies, and what do you enjoy reading?
Kabai: I have been flying different types of aircraft since I was a teenager. I enjoy the real bird-like feeling of ultralights but also enjoy looping, rolling and spinning my small aerobatic Messerschmitt warbird. I also love tinkering with microcontrollers. I just built an ultrasonic levitation machine, finished a replica of the Enigma Machine and am working on a six degrees of freedom robotic arm that can play chess against me. I am also a steam engine enthusiast and amateur blacksmith.
When it comes to reading, I am a sort of bookworm. I predominantly read non-fiction covering history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, physics, biology, politics and more. What I learn from these books transfers over to my job well. Some of my favorite authors include David Deutsch, Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, Max Tegmark, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Malcolm Gladwell and Walter Isaacson. Right now, I am reading Bill Gates’ How to Avoid A Climate Disaster.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
