As part of Techwire’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 and cybersecurity leaders.
Carolyn Staats is the inaugural director of innovation for the county of Sonoma. She joined the county’s Information Systems Department more than eight years ago, working initially in records, then as a project manager before being elevated to director of innovation. Her previous private-sector work includes 14 years as chief information officer for Birkenstock.
Since joining the county in July 2013, Staats has led several IT projects, including the SoCo COVID-19 Check mobile app, which lets residents self-screen before entering public buildings, and the award-winning Accessing Coordinated Care and Empowering Self-Sufficiency Sonoma County initiative (ACCESS Sonoma). She was IT director for the initiative. The project was recognized with the 2019 Advantage Award from IBM Watson Health, in the Consumer/Patient Outreach and Communications category; two awards from the National Association of Counties including its 2019 Achievement Award in the area of health, for improving its service; and the Financial Times’ Business award for Public Sector. In 2019, Staats was named by the New York Times and IBM as one of the Top 40 women in the world working in artificial intelligence.
In July, the ACCESS initiative received earmarked funding for continued development from the U.S. House of Representatives. Work on the enterprise-level, cloud-based data hub was energized by the 2017 wildfires, four of which burned in the county. The need was for an integrated system to connect about a half-million residents to services across health care, criminal justice, benefits and housing — which had been siloed — while protecting their data. Ultimately, IBM approached the county about working together in late 2017, and SimpliGov joined as well. ACCESS is aimed at helping the county’s most at-risk residents. It uses the IBM Watson Care Manager and IBM Health and Human Services Connect360 tools as well as SimpliGov Process Automation systems, and it’s based on a San Diego County initiative that had created a tool enabling access by community partners. The system is mobile-friendly and uses forms created by SimpliGov that enable data to be captured and used in a cloud-based app that aggregates several IBM services. In a conversation with Techwire, Staats offered significant takeaways from the project and discussed upcoming initiatives:
Working together is essential. “We can be thought leaders. We don’t have to think small. We may have to take smaller steps to get there, but we don’t have to think small. And the key is collaboration,” Staats said. That, she added, is what fueled ACCESS — county agencies working together in a Safety Net Collaborative, including its Health Services, Human Services, Probation, and Child Support Services departments, and its Community Development Commission. Officials reached out to IBM with their ideas — not a budget — and “IBM said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea.’ They came to the table,” the director said, noting that thinking outside silos began with this group. It’s a balancing act between mandates and limited resources and lack of funding but staying current, and thinking even farther ahead can be brought within reach through “hybrid partnering with the private sector,” Staats said — and by convening people excited about the work who are willing to make time. Like the solutions they create, teams need to be “open-platform, vendor-agnostic,” she said. Collaboration, Staats said, can also stimulate legislation that can enable data sharing.
Institutional knowledge has to mesh with forward thinking. “Discounting institutional knowledge is a huge mistake ... if you want a quicker path to success,” Staats said. “But the institutional knowledge experts also need to understand that the attitude of ‘That won’t work because of...,’ that’s got a short shelf life in today’s world.”
Keep the client — or resident — experience in mind and have a client-centric approach. Sharing data on a client’s behalf can create a better experience for everyone, the director said. But, she cautioned, also remember that users’ experiences are based on their personal experiences — and that extends to technology. “I’m using technology, and that technology and its functionality creates my expectations of technology. I don’t compare my technology to government technology versus private-sector technology,” Staats said. “I don’t think like that. I think if I’m in this space, it should be working like this. Period. It doesn’t matter.”
Don’t use new technology to create a new version of an old process. Sonoma County was an early adopter in e-signature and electronic forms, moving into that space more than five years ago. The pandemic, of course, has since stimulated other governments to work in that space. Choosing low-hanging fruit as IT projects is fine, Staats said. But: “We looked at it from a true transformation standpoint, meaning we do not choose projects, believe it or not, because they’re low-hanging fruit. ... That, I don’t believe, is digital transformation.” Instead, the county chose a pain point that was impacting a majority of its users: staff development. Resolving that means employees now can be reimbursed for annual health and wellness allocations within a payroll period, resolving something the director said was previously difficult for payroll and employees alike.
Current, potential work: Sonoma County has done some work with “digital process automation bots,” its innovation director said — but the government wants to put some intelligence behind them to ensure they can “do more than just archiving documents.” One potential area where the technology could play a role is in resolving challenges between the county courts’ case management system and court minutes, which, Staats said, “are mission-critical for anyone on the justice side.” The county is also looking “from a future standpoint at some collaboration tools for working with the community partners around homelessness and assessments and things like that,” and may move forward on that near the end of 2021. And in 2022, it may look to do some work in IT resiliency and disaster recovery. The county already did an RFP in this area, and a vendor is doing an organizational assessment of department-level infrastructure at important entities — but additional needs are likely.
Techwire One-on-One: Sonoma County Innovation Chief on Data Hub Takeaways
