CIO Shares What It Was Like Adjusting to a COVID World

Industry Insider — Texas hosted a Member Briefing on Oct. 13, delving into the most up-to-date government technology issues and trends with a high-profile CIO based in Austin.

Ricardo Blanco, deputy executive commissioner for IT and chief information officer for Texas Health and Human Services, fielded questions from e.Republic* Chief Innovation Officer Dustin Haisler for about an hour Oct. 13 at the Archer Hotel at The Domain.

(We have broken the interview into two parts and edited for brevity. Part II features questions from members.)

Blanco began with an overview of HHS.

Blanco: We support 40,000 local, state customers, but we also have ... 7.5 million recipients of our services. So our application systems are far reaching. We have over 120 websites that we support, 220 different lines of business that we support within it. We have roughly 1,736 full-time employees, employee contractors. Our help desk calls, monthly average, between calls and emails, are 67,000 calls and emails, and that is increased, obviously, during the whole remote work environment. We provide core services, and the (Department of State Health Services) SHS is part of the Health and Human Services enterprise, but we also provide core services to (Department of Family and Protective Services) DFPS. The way IT is structured, I do report through a COO and to the commissioner, and I'm branched out with a deputy CIO that manages day-to-day operations. So that's 80 percent of the portfolio I take, and it's applications and infrastructure and operations. I have a deputy CIO to oversee strategy, which is the (chief technology officer) CTO governance. Governance in the (project management office) PMO office. I did hire Cisco six weeks ago. I'm out of, I had vacancies, three vacancies. And that supports the business operation side; IT deals what we call it. We support various programs so there's medication, which runs roughly 5.65 million recipients. … There's (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) TANF, which is temporary assistance, which is roughly 18,000 people that are eligible for that, and then of course we have (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) SNAP … a supplemental nutrition (program), which is about 3.35 million eligible recipients of that particular program. We are statewide; we have 13 state-supported living centers and 11 state hospitals, all in different counties within the state of Texas. And then we have support staff that are also distributed within the 254 counties in Texas. We operate in both a health-care-type setting. So we still provide great care services to individuals, but now we've kind of gone back to more of a contracting, managed care-type organization structure. We also operate and of course, the public health and COVID. I guess if you would call it a preparedness, emergency type of response function. So we cover lots of bases, if you will. We have a lot of data and organization. So if I can use an example, the data that we have in our organization, if you took all the data, it would reach the Milky Way and back twice. Just a little tidbit of information.

Haisler: There's a lot of data and a lot of users that you've got to support. So tell me ... the pandemic changed a lot of things. So we'll kind of dig into some of the things you did to transition your team, but first, are you remote-hybrid? Are you back in the office? Tell me a little bit about where your workers are.

Blanco: We’re operating in a hybrid manner. So here's specifically, and awesome, 44-45 percent of our workforce doesn't lease two days out of a week. So I guess if you want to call it timing, we just built the building, for that to get completed during COVID. And of course, sometimes I'm sure taxpayers want to see bodies in there. But it is a year-old building. It's great, though. It's our new headquarters. Very modern in the approach to technology. ... Now we do have people that work three days, and those are specifically in state hospitals where they're still providing direct care services, and we have to provide support.

Haisler: Let's talk a little bit about the pandemic, because I know that you had to rapidly transition and modernize and get everything up to the point where you could support where you're at today. Tell us a little bit about what you had to do.

Blanco: Someone received an order from the governor March of 2020 and basically said go home, send everybody home. We sent everybody home. All right. And at that point, we had to deploy technology rapidly to those that are now home-based. Within a week and a half we deployed close to 10,000 laptops statewide to our end-user community, and then we had to do a lot of work on our network infrastructure. So if you can imagine, the approach of protecting data has always been to put your data between a castle and moat-type structure. Now we're talking about individuals that we're having to support from home offices. We had to change a lot of our design and infrastructure to support more of a zero-trust model. We actually had to accelerate that, and we had to work with our partners to increase our bandwidth because now we're supporting people securely distributed throughout the state of Texas. A lot of that had to be done in relatively short time that we can have. And again, we wouldn't have been able to do that without our partners. … During the pandemic, the partnerships with our vendor community, helped us a lot in getting a lot of the supplies and continue to help us today during some of the supply chain shortages. We roughly had to take what would be reconstructing a pretty sizable, substantial network infrastructure and security infrastructure. We had to do something that would be equivalent to a project (that) would have been done in two years, we did it in six weeks. And we had to do it very rapidly. And so that's what we had to do to support our customers. The other part is we had to employ contactless-type services. We weren't familiar with what we were dealing with during the pandemic in COVID. We had to change the way we delivered customer service, our approach. We had to make changes on how we supported customers remotely. Historically, it was a shoulder tap and you were located within the same facility and someone would walk up and that's how they would engage support. This changed. Our help desk, within April and May, our calls went up about 250 percent. That also included the latency of responses. So we had to change more to a contactless-type help desk where we employed a lot of chatbot and virtual agents. We would not have been able to support the organization if we hadn't made that shift. And as you can imagine, the shift also required us to make changes on the cultural side. People were very concerned about whether they were going to lose their jobs. And the biggest positive out of this is that they learned that they were actually front and center learning a lot of the technology. We made a lot of investments in our team. You can deploy all kinds of technology, but if you do not invest in your team, if you do not take care of your people, a lot of that strategy culture will eat it every day.

Haisler: Let's talk about where you're going toward the future. Hybrid setup today, is hybrid the permanent reality for HHS? Are you looking at people coming back in person? Where do you see the future of your workforce?

Blanco: Our mission of support, it's a hybrid model, which is great to have executives that support that and twofold to actually want to increase it. We've gone and done our analysis on the functional titles and positions. And we know that not all positions require us to have people. A lot of our development that we did during COVID was done using collaborative tools. So we know that we can support an organization during COVID. Eighty percent of it was remote. And it didn't matter where you were located in Texas; we don't care. And that's our strategy on how we're recruiting today. … We give you the technology to be able to work remotely as long as we perform. That's really the main thing for us. And we're going to continue to work in a hybrid approach. Everybody's aware, specifically in Texas but also in the Austin market. We're competing with the private sector, and we're competing with everyone else. We're competing with other agencies. We will continue to push hybrid. That is our No. 1 goal and not only retaining talent but also how we recruit. That's our best way to sustain agency because we can't compete salary wise; we can make incentives. We have some other programs that we're trying to employ utilizing a hybrid employee-centric retention policy. We are looking at recruiting bonuses and so forth. We are getting very creative with an organization our size.

Haisler: Your department was recently recognized with two Best of Texas awards from Government Technology*, but I have got to dig into that a little bit for the group and talk about those projects. One was the Riata Migration Project, which won an ITS collaboration award. Tell us a little bit about what you and the team did.

Blanco: That was a good example of collaboration with (Department of Information Resources) DIR and our vendor community of moving a data center in less than, I think it was in 10 months, moving it from one data center to the state data center. Doing so we actually consolidated our server infrastructure out. I think at one point what we had was roughly over 800 servers and we minimized those 408 servers. We moved over 73 applications and tolls at the same time. And again, I'm talking about a big system, some Medicaid system. So that sucker goes down, you're impacting a lot of customers. And we did that in a matter of 10 months. Again, it was collaboration, a lot of good coordination with various, not only DIR but various vendors. And then the amount of firewall rules that had to be employed, over 700 firewall rules and over roughly seven or eight load balancer rules, just to get it over to the state data center. And then from there, we were able to really start minimizing our costs, believe it or not, because now we've consolidated and the next step from there would be to take that environment and make it cloud-based.

Haisler: You mentioned you have enough data to go to the Milky Way and back. So let's talk a little bit about the state health analytics reporting platform, that SHARP platform, which actually was recognized as the most innovative use of data analytics. Tell us a little bit about what was involved in that, and maybe if you know where that project is going.

Blanco: In COVID, as you can imagine, it was a very reactive approach. And the biggest thing that we're pursuing within our organization is making business decisions based on data analytics. IT was approached in August of 2020. We needed to provide some capabilities of all this data that we had public health vaccinations. There wasn't really a good metric of being able to provide that. You have 254 counties in the state of Texas; each one is governed by a county judge during an incident response. Each county has their own method of how they report data, believe it or not. We were receiving data from outside entities, not all of them headed by estimates and rep lab report systems; a lot of what we're seeing were facsimiles with handwritten data Excel spreadsheets. So there wasn't … a standard way of how this would come in electronically. As (in) 2020, we were approached, and we first started out with a project called IDDI. It was an Infectious Disease Data Integration project. Specifically, the goal was to report on COVID infectious diseases and make sure that information was going to get to the governor's office, but also reported to the CDC, saying we had to do within a certain percentage of accuracy. If you can imagine those dashboards that would come out on the news, or the governor report, there was a lot of pressure to make sure that that was accurate. And there were some failures, and there were some successes there. But as we're looking at infectious diseases and, as you mentioned, lots of data, public health had other objectives that they also need to report on. So that's when we developed SHARP. That was March of 2021. … Now we're talking about all the information that ties back to COVID. We're talking about vital statistics and reporting, death information and death records. All that is really vital to how you are reporting that's associated with COVID because there are impacts with insurance companies or with funeral homes. We created this other system, which is now federal like our flagship, we're taking that platform as part of digital transformation, and we're taking that and we're morphing it into Health and Human Services. So if you imagine we're now going to start reporting on eligibility, start reporting on Medicaid. And we have data systems that do that, but they're disparate systems. We're taking that model, and we're kind of morphing into the rest of the enterprise.

Haisler: So what are the major IT initiatives you currently have going on?

Blanco: So right now, obviously, cybersecurity, we're really focused on that. … We are required occasionally to go through a security framework that is done by a third party sponsored by DIR, knock on wood. HHS is leading that right now, all agencies, and that's a good thing because of the type of data we are responsible for. We have a lot of public health, protected health. A nation that we are responsible for. So we will take the security program very seriously. And that's something that we constantly will be asking for from the Legislature. It's something that we requested from the 48-team modernization fund, and we're hoping that we're successful in getting those dollars.

Haisler: When you think about all of those things you've got going on and the net new stuff that you're planning, how does that planning process work? What's your governance process or prioritization process?

Blanco: We do have a governance process, and we have what we call an intake process. And then we have what we call project portfolio manager. So the governance process is how we look at the different, not just the projects, but the different investments and the technology that we have within the organization. This is how we interface with our program areas. This is how we understand what their needs are. This is where we develop the road maps and the strategy. The hope is that we continue to mature that, and I'm not saying we're not going to go downtown and ask for money and stop doing that. But we're going to be a little more responsible about what we're asking for, or we're going to have a very strategic approach. So in October, I don't know if you had an opportunity today to look at that, there is an IP modernization plan that's published. It's a very transparent document to show the good, the bad and the ugly of it. … Some people said, “Hey, do you really want to do that?” Because I think it's important. I think it's important when we go out for money that everyone will look at it and say, “Okay, well this is the reason why we're asking. Right?” It seems like a very responsible approach, it is very transparent. I can now understand why they might be years behind or you have a 20-year-old application. It's really hard to convince people that they should embrace sim technology, and now's that opportunity to do so. The governance allows us to interface with our program areas to say, "OK, so your project, there's 107 projects within the organization. We just received marketing money totaling just shy of $1 million. That's not including all the other projects that we have. And then here is the success whether it's red, green and yellow." This is why … it requires management decision, and this is what you're investing in, and so you have the people at the chief executive level saying, “Oh, wait a minute. Who made that decision that we want that project?” It gets them to start thinking about and getting them involved in that decision-making. That way going forward, what we asked for, it's responsible. They understand what the investment is. We're making the right decisions. We're not building systems that are monolithic, huge, cost a lot of money. We're looking for something of a little more modular design when we build something. And then later on, if we have to add another module, we've already made the upfront capital investment, and now we're just adding functionality and services.

Haisler: Yeah, I think that's great. There's a number of challenges agencies like yours are dealing with. We talked about workforce already. What would you say are some of the other major challenges you're navigating, and what are you doing to try to overcome them?

Blanco: I think the biggest one, so you've got all this technology in place, it's great move into the cloud. Do you have the skill sets to support it? Who's going to support it? I think the big challenge is it's a culture thing; you don't want your staff to think that you're outsourcing everything. You want to include them as part of the journey, but now you're at the certain point where you know I've moved all these applications, made them cloud-based using low code, and so now it's a skill set. … The good thing about it is that staff has to get first dibs. We are investing in them, and we are investing probably more than what has been done historically because it's important. … Some people are just, they're not going to want to come along for the ride or journey, and they'll go in different directions. But that's part of the team and part of being a leader; so one way we look at it as the leader jumps into the frame first, creates a safety for the staff or even pulls them into the future, and that's kind of what we're doing. And once you create that safe place, guess what? You're going to have the followers, they're going to understand the mission, the value, writing the vision when they go like, “Hey, you know what? I bought into this. I'm going to support what that looks like for the organization. Count me in.” But our biggest thing has been a check to changing the culture itself.

Haisler: Yeah, I think it's a huge challenge, and there's no silver bullet for that, right? So you have got to kind of leverage partners and other things down if you navigate that. So as we think about the IT environment there's been a lot of changes to that. We've gone from on premise, you talked about your migration to the state data center. You've got multicloud, you've got your cloud smart, you've got managed service providers, you've got all these different things. How are you looking at your IT environment as you prepare for whatever comes next?

Blanco: I know today that 80 percent of my environment is either cloud capable, so I can either move into the cloud, or of course some aspects of the environment is leveraging cloud, or … 20 percent is not going to get there. It's an application that at some point is going to die, so we already assessed that one big thing that it's not a mystery. Sure people heard, but then we're asking for money, we're going to move our largest eligibility system to the cloud. We requested funding to do it. We did spend 18 months of planning and assessing, and right now we're just looking for that support downtown to be able to get the money to do it. It's the right thing to do. It's a 20-year-old system. I don't want to be in the data center business. I don't want to support Windows data center. We already have a $100 million data center. So why do I need to have something separate? And if you can imagine that's probably the best use of dollars to do that.

*Government Technology is a sister publication to Industry Insider — Texas. Both are part of e.Republic.