Brent Coe is the chief information officer at the California Tahoe Conservancy, a position he has held for nearly two years. He was previously manager of financial systems at San Diego State University for nearly four years; before that, he was a senior software engineer at SDSU for more than a decade.
Coe has a master’s of science in computer science and a bachelor’s of science in biology, both from SDSU. His volunteer work includes time as a Web developer at the Allied Climbers of San Diego. An avid skier and outdoorsman, Coe is also founder of San Diego Backcountry Skiers.
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?
Coe: I started in April 2019 so we’re getting to be two years now — that was fast. I started as more of a clear-cut manager of the IT Department and things related to that, and it’s expanded quite a bit as of last summer. I think as part of their general forward thinking, the executive team asked me if I would like to be more involved in working with the organization at a higher level, and seeing the whole organization as a series of systems and how they interconnect and those types of things. So, I still do manage the IT Department, of course, but now I also manage the Fiscal Department, which includes accounting and budgeting functions, and I’m a member of senior staff, which is what we call … the executive level plus the chiefs below them. So that’s been, I think, a good challenge for me and also quite beneficial because I get to be involved with more of the strategic level. I’ve very much appreciated that expansion of the role. That was one of the reasons I wanted to work here. I got the sense they saw IT, and just a systems approach in general, as an integral part of the organization, not so much an accessory.
Techwire: How big a role do you personally play in writing your organization’s strategic plan?
Coe: Our strategic plan predates me right now. When the next round happens, I do expect to be involved at the same level as other members of the senior staff at the chiefs’ level. And what exactly that will be, I think I’m going to be discovering. I believe it’s a five-year cycle, and we’re about three years out now.
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?
Coe: That’s a fun one because it brings to mind everything we just did in 2020, which was a very interesting time. But 2021, I think, for us is more of a return to more measured and more planned progress instead of an all-hands-on-deck scramble. One of the big projects that’s most likely to generate an RFP is, we’re going to move to accepting online payment processing, which is good. It’s a very healthy thing for us in general. That’s a mandate that came to us from our parent organization. I was thrilled that that happened because it was something that we wanted to do anyway. We have an acquisitions program that essentially purchases land. We currently own and manage roughly 4,800 parcels of land in the basin, and we are continuously adding and managing and sometimes parting with different parcels. And there are fees associated with all those transactions, so various real estate transactional fees. That’s probably where we’ll start with the online payments. The RFP … will be for a payment processor. We’ll be doing the Web development in-house; we just hired a very talented Web developer.
Beyond that, though, we’re fortunate to have that parent, which is the California Natural Resources Agency, because they do a lot of our … I don’t want to call it collective bargaining, but they have more of an opportunity to take advantage of economies of scale, being a much larger organization than we are alone. So they can negotiate better situations with larger vendors — that’s where we get our Microsoft licenses and other major contracts like that.
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?
Coe: I think somewhere implicit in that question is — I don’t think it is ever finished and will ever be. There may be another major evolution like the agricultural or industrial or informational ages, but I think in general, transformation is a forever process. That’s a part of my role to act as the counselor and try to help people accommodate change in their work lives. How do I define digital transformation? I think it’s a handy way to refer to what our transformation looks like these days, but transformation in general will always be occurring, so it’s really the only thing you can count on is things will change. With the major possible exception of the transformation we experienced last year; that had a defined endpoint.
Techwire: What is your estimated IT budget and how many employees do you have? What is the overall budget?
Coe: The IT operational budget is somewhere around $300,000 per year. It’s pretty modest, and the entire IT team including myself now is four people. We have a nice, small team, kind of like a little family, and the overall budget for IT … it’s going to be more than double the operational budget if we put in salaries.
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?
Coe: The best way to contact us is to email us at info@tahoe.ca.gov. But social media including Twitter and LinkedIn are fine. We have people monitoring those so we can give prompt responses. And the best way to educate themselves before meeting with me is probably just to read the material on our website, tahoe.ca.gov. That has a lot about us.
Techwire: In your tenure in this position, which project or achievement are you most proud of?
Coe: That is, I think, an easy one. I’m most proud of our response to the pandemic. Clearly, the pandemic was a monstrous, terrible thing that I would never wish on anybody. It provided an opportunity to accelerate things that we already had planned, transformations that we already had planned. To put it lightly, it created an appetite for change. We were able to get our entire staff working 100 percent remotely in about eight working days. We had some plans in place. They weren’t meant to be executed on that time scale. We were able to provide equipment and software packages to at least let people function, so that created a big safety buffer and eliminated lots of bad situations that could have potentially happened with sharing office space and those types of things. That question of staff safety is what really drove us. There wasn’t any way we were going to not do that. … If we didn’t have our strategy in place already, we would have been in a very different spot, and that’s a good place to give a quick shout-out to our parent organization for having those licenses in place. That saved us.
Editor’s note: Conservancy staff continue to work 100 percent remote; the entity has about 54 licensed users.
Techwire: If you could change one thing about IT procurement, what would it be?
Coe: I think I don’t have a lot of things I would change. I’ve actually been kind of the oddball who’s appreciated all of the state controls that are in place because they encourage us to be good stewards of the public trust. That is excellent. I would have said a year ago it would be nice to have more involvement between the IT side of the house and the fiscal side of the house. Now that I’m in charge of both, that’s a moot point.
Techwire: What do you read to stay abreast of developments in the gov tech/SLED sector?
Coe: I mostly read general news outlets that are very broad-spectrum. I would love to hear about some more specific resources. I am familiar with Techwire; I recently became familiar with them, so that’s quite interesting.
Techwire: What are your hobbies, and what do you enjoy reading?
Coe: Well, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise, being a Tahoe resident for quite a while, but I love to ski. I love to trail run, I love to combine those two things and to ski in the back country and climb up wild mountains and ski back where there are no people. And I really enjoy reading, both fiction and non-fiction pieces about people coming together and messing up. How organizations form and gel and fail and succeed and especially in the context of 20th century history. I’ll throw out one example: there’s a book called “An Army at Dawn,” about the American effort to wage a campaign in North Africa, not knowing what they were doing at the time. That has to do with the American invasion of North Africa in 1943. I find that to be quite applicable to managing change and organizations in general.
Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for style and brevity.
