#179: Richard McHattie, Chris Chirgwin, Mike Hojnicki, Don Ingle
Joe Toste
·
36 minute read
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Richard McHattie, CIO of Maricopa County, Chris Chirgwin, CIO of Santa Barbara County, Mike Hojnicki, CTO of New Castle County, and Don Ingle, Industry Executive Advisor from SAP, share valuable insights into how these technology leaders are reshaping the future of county resident experiences.
Discover how their groundbreaking strategies are setting new standards for innovation and transforming community services, promising a future where technology seamlessly enhances daily life.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How counties like Maricopa, Santa Barbara, and New Castle County are revolutionizing resident experiences with digital modernization.
- The transformative power of AI in enhancing public sector services and support.
- The importance of collaboration in driving innovation and overcoming IT challenges.
- Why balancing people, processes, and technology is crucial for successful digital transformation.
- Strategies for building a high-performance IT culture in hybrid and remote environments.
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Intro
(03:12) Communicating with Elected Officials
(05:48) Project Justification: Costs & Operations
(07:55) People, Processes, & Business Transformation
(10:32) Leveraging AI for Efficiency
(15:48) Analyzing Transcripts & Financials with AI
(20:44) Communicating Long-term Value to Leadership
(23:19) Building a Remote Workforce & Accountability
(28:32) Educational & Government Partnerships in Arizona
(33:12) Enhancing UX by Shifting Services Online
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Joe Toste [00:00:00]:
Hey, what's up everybody?
Joe Toste [00:00:00]:
This is Joe Toste from Techtables.com and you're listening to The Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIO's, cisos and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today and to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.
Joe Toste [00:00:34]:
Welcome to day three. Let's go. Thrilled to have Mike Hojnicki, chief information officer at Newcastle County, Delaware, Chris Chirgwin, chief information officer for Santa Barbara County, Richard McHattie, chief information officer from Maricopa county and Don Ingle, industry executive Advisor at SAP. Welcome to The Public Sector Show by TechTables Rich. We'll start with you. For those who don't know you, you've been on the podcast before, but short little background intro.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:01:01]:
Sure. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Rich McCatty, CIO from Maricopa county I've been in the county for almost 20 years now, which is a little hard for me to believe. I came from private sector in the energy industry business development for a few years and then our previous podcast was about my experience startup with RFID microchip technology for companion animals. So I'm currently managing an exceptional team. Some of them are in the room today, which is great, with about 200 plus IT professionals managing about 50 lines of business in the fourth largest county in the country. Very honored to have that responsibility and again, glad to be here.
Joe Toste [00:01:37]:
Okay, so it's the fourth largest county.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:01:39]:
I think there's some debates because I've.
Joe Toste [00:01:41]:
Been hyping you as a second largest.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:01:43]:
Yeah, you can go a second.
Joe Toste [00:01:44]:
Chris, good morning.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:01:46]:
Chris Churgwin, CIO for the county of Santa Barbara. I've been in my role just under two years and similar to you, I came from the private sector, been in IT services for about 25 years. During that period of time, started up three different companies and sold two of the three. Now in the public sector, the county of Santa Barbara is about 500,000 residents. We have about 5000 employees and IT staff. If you look at central it and then the other departments, we have about 170 IT staff throughout the county.
Joe Toste [00:02:15]:
Yeah, and Santa Barbara is very unique in the sense that there's a lot of colleges. There's quite a big, a few colleges there. UCSB, Westmont, Santa Barbara City College, and all the cruise ships that drop people off, they don't actually get accounted in the official stats for the population there. So that town is definitely hopping. So you said you sold two companies, but you didn't also say the third thing, which was you also sold a domain.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:02:35]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:02:36]:
I told you the story last night.
Joe Toste [00:02:37]:
And you sold a domain.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:02:38]:
So back in the mid nineties, I started buying domain names back in the early days, and I bought Nike shoes, I bought Nordstrom, I bought all these different companies when you could do that. And then within about a month, I started getting letters from attorneys saying, you need to turn over the domain names. And I was like, I'm not going to win this battle, and ended up there with one domain that I did sell for $11,000 in 1995. So that was, I guess it was a victory.
Joe Toste [00:03:04]:
That's a serious side hustle in 1995. Okay, Mike, you've been on the podcast also.
Michael Hojnicki [00:03:09]:
Quick intro, Joe, great to be back again with you. Mike Konicki, CIO, Newcastle County, Delaware so I started my career, 25 years of state government, spent last eight in the C suite central it, and then transitioned to local government, which is a whole different way of business from you have the state to the local where the rubber hits the roads. Great opportunity. I'm from the, I say Newcastle county, the first county in the first state. It's the smallest one at this table right here.
Joe Toste [00:03:34]:
Is it the only county?
Michael Hojnicki [00:03:35]:
It is the third. We are the largest. 60% of the state government is. Our residence is in Newcastle, about 570,000 residents. We have 2100 employees and an it staff of around 30 supporting the county.
Joe Toste [00:03:48]:
Great, Don.
Don Ingle [00:03:50]:
Hey, thank you for the opportunity. I'm the private sector guy, so please treat me well here as we go. But my career is a flip of these two gentlemen here. I'm industry executive advisor at SAP. Basically, I try to bring some credibility to our message. Having been a CIO in my past, I actually spent about 25 years as an IT executive in the local government here in the west, most recently a little over a decade as CIO of Boulder, Colorado. And my role is to try to modally communicate within our company and with our customers what our vision is. Represent the needs and the dreams, if you will, of public sector.
Don Ingle [00:04:21]:
Try to bring some sensitivity to some of the unique challenges that exist within, particularly the state and local level, and really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Was that your San Antonio event? Absolutely outstanding. You got me hooked.
Joe Toste [00:04:35]:
Even though someone took our riverboat for our last roundtable.
Don Ingle [00:04:38]:
I remember that.
Joe Toste [00:04:39]:
And we ended up in a restaurant. It was great. The art of being agile and flexible when your book is missing. Yeah, it worked out great. Rich, since we're in Arizona, let's kick off with you. Last year, we recorded episode 157 on Maricopa's one stop shop strategy for providing residents with the best possible unified experience for consuming services. You had mentioned a lot of CIO's in the state of Arizona are talking about this, which I think is really interesting. How are you thinking about a seamless experience in Maricopa county? And what are two to three projects that you can share with the audience today that are in flight?
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:05:13]:
Yeah. So we're, as you mentioned, talking with junior and others in the state. Everyone is trying to tackle this improved resident experience. It's a huge priority for our board. So for those of you who may not be familiar with upcounty, we're federated, we have elected departments, we have about 50 lines of business. So if you're coming in to do business with Maricopa county, if you're a resident, if you're a business, you hit the website and you try to figure out, where do I go from here? What services are online, what's available to me here in Maricopa county. So the general approach for us is how do we improve that resident experience where it's transparent? Once you hit Maricopa county, you shouldn't have to know there's an elected assessor, elected treasurer. It's just one seamless, frictionless experience to get to everything you need.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:05:56]:
We saw some of this, the catalyst, unfortunately, it was an unfortunate catalyst in the pandemic. But we moved a lot of services, like I think many did, online, and we want to continue that journey and get, ideally, as much as we can in terms of digital services online. Many of our constituents, of course, they have to take off work. It's a rough experience for them to have to come into a brick and mortar, if you will, to get, especially in 2024, right? Everyone expects same experience you have in your personal life. You can buy a ticket online, you can check in with your smartphone. We want that same experience for the county. And while we're a little bit behind, we have some pretty serious ambitions to get there quickly in terms of improving that resident experience. Some of that is going to involve new technologies that we all hear every conference, can't go anywhere without talking about AI and how that technology can help revolutionize and transform some of those things overall, everything we can do to provide that single experience coming into the county, everything online to the extent possible, and leveraging all the technology we can with AI, because two sides of the coin are we want the resident experience, but we're also government.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:07:03]:
We have limited funding, we have limited staff. So if we don't leverage AI and other technologies, we're just not going to be able to advance and transform those services.
Joe Toste [00:07:12]:
Is there a favorite use case maybe as a consumer of those services that you're like, hey, as a citizen of Maricopa County, I really want this service. What is that service?
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:07:22]:
Okay, so this is probably going to be surprising, and if you'd like, that's fine. But believe it or not, in the county we have 50 lines of business. One of the most important things for our residents, adoptions, pet adoptions. As we look at our stats, as we're going through service design, and we're like, what are our residents really looking for as they come to the county? That is always the most prominent search. For me, that was surprising. We've got courts, we've got the sheriff, we've got county attorney. We have all these serious lines of business, but a lot of it is really driven by those kind of things. But again, we have 50 lines of business.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:07:54]:
It just depends on who you are as a resident. If you're engaging in the court system or you're doing some of those things that's important to you at that time. And one last point on that, I think part of our challenge, and others may speak to this too, is how do you handle with such a large variety of lines of business, if you will? Where do you focus your time and energy to get the biggest bang for the buck?
Joe Toste [00:08:15]:
Yeah, one of the things I've thought about is this proactive approach to government services. So this isn't actually for Chris, this would be for the city CIO in Santa Marburg. But I want to know when trash day isn't happening. For example, I didn't do the trash before I left here, but I want the notifications. Hey, there's a holiday here the following Monday that falls on the third moon that's rising. Won't do trash this day, right? I just want a notification. Great. I don't have to put out the trash.
Joe Toste [00:08:41]:
That's just like one small example of proactive services. But Chris, we recently released episode 172, and one segment of our interview included the technology modernization efforts in Santa Barbara county. What's one example of a one stop shop strategy or modernization effort in Santa Barbara county? That has directly impacted the residents.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:09:01]:
Yeah, I'll answer that in a second. So pet adoptions in Maricopa county. In Santa Barbara county, our number one website are the weather stations that are around the county. So public works website, so people can go see what's the rainfall and I this area and what's the reservoir levels, and you just never know what the residents are interested in. Right, but that's our highest traffic website.
Joe Toste [00:09:21]:
Wait, really? Because it never rains in Santa Barbara.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:09:25]:
That's why it's so popular?
Joe Toste [00:09:26]:
I think it's more recently popular because I'm like, I never checked the weather in Santa Barbara.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:09:30]:
But back to your question. I think every county is at a different stage in their maturity level of digital modernization. Unfortunately, Santa Barbara County, I would say we've got a long way to go. When I came on board just under two years ago, the county did not have a CIO. Has never had a CIO. We didn't even have a standalone it department. So when I came in, it was a tall order to say, okay, we're way behind. We've got a lot to catch up on.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:09:54]:
One of the first things that I did was form a standalone it department. So that took about a year to get that up and running, building the team, getting the right people in the right seats. And now we're starting to shift our focus towards more of that digital modernization, the resident experience, things like that, and some of the things that we're doing right now as Joe, we seem to have a ton of natural disasters in our area, whether it's fires, floods, mudslides, you name it. I think our EOC has been activated over 20 times in the last five years. And for our residents, access to what's going on is my area being evacuated? Those type of things are critically important to our residents. And so in the last six months or so, what we've done is we've really tried to centralize all of our gis efforts that were spread out amongst different departments and very siloed. So we're bringing that all in together, and now we're starting to look at some different services like evacuation management software and things like that, that are resident facing. That gives them real time information about, hey, is my neighborhood being evacuated? Or what's the latest warnings or those kind of things? And really trying to put an emphasis in that area because it has been such an issue for our county.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:11:04]:
Other things we're doing, the board of supervisors constantly is coming to me saying, hey, we've got to get our permits in a better place, the different departments, public works and planning and development, they just don't communicate. And so residents have to go and have separate logins for each of these different departments based on what they're doing. And so we're using Excel online, and what we're trying to do is really integrate different departments and so that the residents have one login, can go to one place, and whatever their needs are, it's one interface for them. So those are just some examples of things that we're trying to do in the short term while we're trying to build up the systems and processes and infrastructure to be able to do bigger things in the future.
Joe Toste [00:11:42]:
Yeah, I like the emergency management. Santa Barbara is, I think most people know is like, hey, this is a really beautiful place. It's crazy. The number of natural disasters that come through, you get two inches of rain. The place is flooding. Sometimes if it's just really dry, the thing just catches on fire, which is a huge problem, or the mudslides, which is crazy. But I'm excited that you're laying that foundation right now to then move on to some of the other stuff. Mike, I had to look this up because you came back on the podcast on July 2022.
Michael Hojnicki [00:12:11]:
Time flies, man.
Joe Toste [00:12:12]:
Was I in diapers. Yeah, Jackson, diapers. We released episode 103. You talked about driving agility and innovation within local government. How is Newcastle county thinking about the resident experience and how has that evolved since 2022?
Michael Hojnicki [00:12:25]:
As we talk offline, the local government is really where the rubber hits the road. We're right there with the citizens and it's our opportunity to really have a direct impact from it. Looking back, my executive has a software engineering background, so it, he's always asking, why not? When can we? And I said, if I have the budget, we can. So he pushed us, really challenged the team to like payments. For example, why can't we venmo our payments for our tax collection? Or so we're able to upgrade our platform to now accept marvel modern payment engines, but simplify the user experience there. Speaking about permits, that's my next major project. It's really unifying my land use with public works within a single system, with a single portal to really get. As the contractors come in, the information flows from public works to accounting for billing.
Michael Hojnicki [00:13:16]:
So we're really focused on that, from the, the outreach to the community. We do a lot of engagement with the community around our libraries. We're revamping, rebuilding libraries and building new libraries with innovative solutions. With a room with podcasting.
Joe Toste [00:13:30]:
Right.
Michael Hojnicki [00:13:30]:
You can go in. You can do your recording, you could publish your, produce your podcast right in our library. And we're setting up the esports with a four v room. So people come in and the community provides the input to what we want inside the experience. So it's not just it online, it's actually the innovation within our public libraries that take it on a whole new position within the communities today. So we're still driving our website for accessibility within government. We have to make sure we're accessible. So we just recently went through a whole process of putting tools in to ensure compatibility, accessibility and customization when you hit our website.
Michael Hojnicki [00:14:04]:
So that's really the focus as we move forward and continue to get the departments working together and sharing information, breaking down the silos.
Joe Toste [00:14:12]:
That's great. This story, I think was, you told it on the first podcast in 2020. I'm just going to highlight it because you definitely listened to it, but I think it was during COVID You need to get some stuff done. Procurement office was moving very slow.
Michael Hojnicki [00:14:24]:
That's my department.
Joe Toste [00:14:26]:
Mike's innovative approach to get computers to some key folks was just, would you go to best Buy Costco? Costco. Just start swiping cards, making it happen. I love that. That's a great story. So Mike talks about that story on the first episode. Don SAP is known for its powerful data platforms. How can these platforms be leveraged to improve the resident experience and provide decision makers with real time, actionable insights?
Don Ingle [00:14:50]:
One is, I feel pretty passionately, this topic is not only about the front end, the citizen facing side, but a lot of the back end processing. The other is, I've always been a firm believer that it's not anathema to talk about examples that coincide from the private sector with public sector challenges or even international stories as well. We actually aren't known that widely in the public sector as being what I'll call a platform company. A lot of jurisdictions look at us as being a big monolith. 87%, roughly, of GDP flows through an SAP system automatically in the public sector, the interpretation is big SAP, very private sector focused, too expensive, too complex, et cetera. But we have been through a process of really changing our entire paradigm by becoming an all in cloud company. So starting from food, shelter, clothing to being self actualized, we really believe that our platform technology is the food, shelter, clothing of what we do. And what it is basically is a business technology platform that includes in memory database processing, not having to go to disk or virtual storage, the ability to integrate AI capabilities, an integration platform, the analytics capabilities, a lot of those backend systems is really what makes possible for us to be able to deliver not only an ERP experience that is empowering for end users, but also bring data sources from all sorts of different disparate systems, integrate those and present those in a way that actually can be used productively, even outside that ecosystem of finance and HR.
Joe Toste [00:16:21]:
When we talked offline, you mentioned that there were a few jurisdictions regarding citizen experience, resident experience that we were talking about. Can you tell us a little bit more about any specific projects? The city, county leaders here would love to hear from you.
Don Ingle [00:16:33]:
Sure. Again, getting to that concept of this being a lot about the front end side, we have a lot of different organizations that we've worked with around the globe. Actually, in a citizen facing paradigm, we have a CRM system. It's one of the top ones from market share perspective, but we're really focused on what we call CX. You probably heard customer experience. We actually take it a step further and think of it in terms of voice of the customer. Some examples of that are the city of Christchurch in New Zealand. Going back to 2011, I believe it was major earthquake, major shake up to the infrastructure, to citizens lives there.
Don Ingle [00:17:09]:
The city came out of that saying we need to integrate our systems, we need to provide some public facing capabilities to give that, as you gentleman talked about, single face to government. And we worked really hard with them to provide the web presence, the CRM capabilities, what have you. City of San Diego for a number of years, one of the first to actually use both geospatial EsRi technology and ours to create the ability to report a pothole, things of that nature. That's pretty common now, but they used it as an ability to interface with their asset management systems and what have you, rather than just making it an onboarding tool. Lots of different examples of that I think exist, but I think the point that really gets lost, and I think Covid was an example, a lot of jurisdictions did a great job of changing the front end of how they communicate with their communities. The back end is still a little bit rotten, quite honestly. The lack of ability to integrate systems that provide a citizen response, whether that's the ability to feed to an asset management system, the ability to feed to a public safety system, what have you. We're really focused on trying to integrate on the back end those systems to make the whole customer experience, if you will, not only vivid but accurate in terms of the response and what have you.
Don Ingle [00:18:20]:
One thing that really charges me up as well is we have a product called Signavio. It is basically a process mining tool that uses AI and machine learning to help optimize business processes. It actually can take things like log data from disparate systems, not only SAP, and give you recommendations on how to improve business processes on the backend really paradigm changing for us, because our big challenge, I think, is any technology company organization is the balance between the people, process and technology. If you don't have a balanced stool, one leg is going to cause the whole thing to collapse. And so we're really focused on trying to not only be a software provider, but an organization that can help organizations take a look at their business processes and try to optimize those.
Joe Toste [00:19:00]:
That's great. Thanks Don Rich. That dovetails really well with the Genai LLMs and any virtual assistants. Can you just talk about that within the IT portfolio in Maricopa County?
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:19:11]:
I definitely liked your comment on the backend systems. Right. Because when we're looking at the customer experience, if we don't have a mature foundation for that, when you start looking at data back to all the departments in our federated structure, if we can't integrate and talk to those systems, it falls apart right at the front end. So we have to be able to do it all the way from the initial engagement, from that resident business wanting to do business with Maricopa county all the way through to all the different organizations, got solutions that are on prem in cloud custom. It's a big task. So I appreciate that. And I think part of what's going to get us there is aih. So we created a new position recently, chief of innovation and emerging technologies, really to focus specifically on that.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:19:58]:
Right. How we can't hire our way out of this. We have, I think everyone probably has the same challenges. How do you hire talented individuals in the public sector? Our pay, our compensation. I kid around with you. You get no signing bonus, there's no company car. You don't get a credit card. None of that exists in the public sector.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:20:15]:
But we can do things like leveraging new and emerging technologies so that we're not viewed as anything other than innovative. Because we have a lot of innovation happening in the county. I hear it from everyone I talk to at events like this. It's a lot of great stuff happening, but every time it's almost how many times we have to hear about AI, we get it right. AI is it. That's what's going to get us out of this. He's got a lot of exciting things that he's leveraging right now from things that he's built previously. So leveraging things like Watson to do a true virtual assistant again to the back end, the staffing challenges, if we can leverage those things, we accomplish a number of different things.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:20:54]:
We deal with the staffing issue, right? We can all that, I'll call it the mundane repeatable interactions, as long as those are a true natural language kind of interaction. All of a sudden we've got 24/7 virtual assistant, never get sick, ever takes vacation. So if we can get some of those things at a county level, we'll get over some of those challenges. And then it goes way deeper. And from talking to Aaron and anyone who's talked to Aaron, he's got some pretty big aspirations about how he's going to piece his legos together, as he likes to say, because it's not just the customer experience, it's the operational pieces. How do we leverage AI in all our applications, our business process automation, robotic process automation, all these things are in motion right now for us that I think will help us get into that true transformation base, right? Be viewed as a true partner to our business. They're desperate for these kind of solutions just for survival themselves as they deal with staffing challenges. So I think there's a lot of exciting things, and I know from others I've talked to locally here, just to promote our Arizona folks.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:21:58]:
Right? A lot of innovation happening at the state and elsewhere, no?
Joe Toste [00:22:02]:
Yeah, that was really good. When you were at the superior court, and then I saw on LinkedIn that you left, I remember turning to my wife, Aaron has a very memorable podcast, and he's got a giant ironman suit in the back. So my son Jack just absolutely loves it. I was telling my wife that when you made the move to Maricopa County, I said, this guy's gone in like a hot two weeks or something like that. And there's no way Rich is not recruiting him to this Maricopa county. And then I saw the LinkedIn post, and I think I couldn't help myself, I was laughing so hard. Chris, how is Santa Barbara county thinking about Genai? Any one to two use cases that really excite you for service delivery or now or even in the future?
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:22:43]:
We don't have an errand yet, but.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:22:45]:
Let me tell you, while you can't.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:22:46]:
Have, Santa Barbara was really nice.
Don Ingle [00:22:48]:
Hands off.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:22:49]:
No, I'm excited about AI. I think we barely scratched the surface of what its capabilities are and the benefits of it. We recently formed a county AI working group. Really looking forward to what that group is going to be doing for our county. So their focus is three things. One is education, the second is governance. And then the third is just opportunities. Right? How can we leverage AI? And so this working group meets on a monthly basis, and it's been great.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:23:16]:
Each month we also bring in someone that's either an expert in AI or further down the road than we are in AI. And so last month we had Microsoft come in and they shared what they're doing with AI, and that was really informative. This month, actually, believe it or not, coincidentally, we're having the city of Gilbert, one of their AI experts. I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's going to be the guest speaker for us. Because they've been down this road about a year ahead of us. They've put together an AI acceptable use policy and standards and things like that. We just want to learn what they've gone through and what they're seeing. We're just trying to really leverage what's the knowledge that's out there? How can we best utilize AI within our county? And I think a couple of things initially that we want to do is really start to implement large language models, private large language models within our county to assist us with just being able to find resources better.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:24:10]:
Right. We've got all these departments that have siloed data, and when you go to search for something, good luck. It is a challenge to find things. And so I think that if we can start ingesting this information into a large language model, it'll just help both our staff and then same thing, do an external one for our residents who have the same problem. How do I find what I'm looking for? Easily and efficiently. And so I think AI will assist us in just being able to provide that information in a much better format than we have currently today going down that path, whether it's implementing copilot or we'll see where we go. But I think it's something that is going to really change government services over time.
Joe Toste [00:24:53]:
I think this is like my favorite use case because I'm using it with the podcast. But being able to have a conversation with the data or even for city services is so powerful, because if you type in a keyword and it gets response, it's like, not valid. I'm like, no, you do trash. What's the right keyword? I'm trying to figure it out to.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:25:10]:
Help him with the trash. It must have contacts that they said he.
Joe Toste [00:25:14]:
Justin, cure. Right, Justin. So you better watch this episode. We gotta have. We're gonna go to handlebar we're gonna talk about this. The trash. He just launched that new mobile app, but we need to get the app updated. So no, that was great.
Joe Toste [00:25:25]:
Mike, back on our episode in 2022, talked about how technology enables government and citizen experiences with AI's growing influence. How do you evaluate or prioritize AI projects in New Castle county right now and how have you undertaken any, which is really great vendor offered pilot projects that align with your strategic goals?
Michael Hojnicki [00:25:46]:
I look at, I'm a part of a national committee for Naco, National association of County Organizations. Right. And we have a working group that's working through the policy. I'm on the application side. We're looking at what are the use cases, what applications could we apply and actually guide a county and help them start looking at what is the possible, what is possible. Where I see it is, it's a challenge from CIO's. We have to hold our leadership back and really set reasonable expectations. As all our vendor partners are talking about these opportunities, I'm looking out for low risk, high reward, but also do we have the right resources to actually engage that pilot, make it work, because it takes the business side and I think the data is where we really struggle on the backside.
Michael Hojnicki [00:26:28]:
So as we modernize our legacy systems, we'll start getting our data AI ready to be ingested and then we can start really understanding the value that's hidden in there. So right now we do not have a current project, but as we speak to vendors, I look for the opportunity. I like to be second sometimes in the new technologies, just to take the conservative approach at low risk, because if we're going to be successful, that first pilot has to be successful, yield the value and help us make the business case to get the funding to sustain the AI investments.
Joe Toste [00:27:02]:
Okay, so make the business case. Talk about how you make that business case to your boss.
Michael Hojnicki [00:27:07]:
So on a regular basis, I present to my elected official, the county council. I brief them on what we're doing, where we are, state of the county, state of it. Here are my challenges. I routinely brief my county executive, who's our highest elected official, and my leadership team. I bring the topics up in regular conversation. So when it comes time to justify a project, I'm looking at the cost of acquisition, what is the care, the maintenance and operation long term, and what am I going to actually retire to reinvest in? So it's that constant communication and I think it's the relationships we build with our peers to understand their business need. Because when I can get a department standing next to me saying, I agree with Mike. We do need this solution.
Michael Hojnicki [00:27:50]:
That's definitely a measurement of success. And I was able to do that with the consolidation of our land use and public works into one system, was really helping the two departments see the value, the benefit of, and leadership as well.
Joe Toste [00:28:03]:
That's great. So, Don, as a former CIO, what was one of the biggest challenges you faced? Procuring and implementing new technologies, and then how do you see SAP's direction in AI addressing some of those challenges?
Michael Hojnicki [00:28:15]:
I would say it's a procurement problem.
Joe Toste [00:28:16]:
But you gotta start. You gotta start with the CIO hat first.
Don Ingle [00:28:20]:
I talked about the three legged stool, overused analogy of people, process technology. I'm a technologist's worst nightmare because I have a liberal arts education and I tend to really focus on the people and process side. And I think that's where we have to work. And it's been an issue for decades. Obviously, I'm just going to tell a little story. As a former CIO, early 2010s, coming out of the great Recession, maybe some of you experienced this. A lot of focus on new budgeting techniques. A book came out called the price of government that really espoused an idea to almost take a look at kind of zero based budgeting concepts to get bound to the nut of what an organization really needs to do in terms of.
Don Ingle [00:29:01]:
Of its core services. And out of that came things like priority based budgeting. If you've heard of this, what have you. My organization was very much into that. At the same time, I was trying to shift my department away from a very kind of internally focused culture and also looking at the cloud coming, knowing that we are going to have to shift our relevance away from infrastructure and more toward direct customer service. Awareness of business processes within departments. A shift away from the blinking lights of the data center to bringing in business analysts, bringing in application analysts, embedding my team with the departments to learn the business processes better. So what we did, me being the liberal arts guy, brought in a well known consultant locally, a former CIO from the private sector, who also did a lot of work for the public sector, and introduced us to a book called the Diligence of Market Leaders.
Don Ingle [00:29:50]:
And basically the idea is you as an organization need to pick one of three silos. Are you going to be operationally excellent? Are you going to differentiate your product, or are you going to be customer? And you got to pick which one you're going to emphasize. And you need to focus on that. You need to be a little bit of all of those. And through that exercise, we really realized that we want to be customer intimate. That's our survival tactic, basically. But we got to work on the nuts and bolts, the operational excellence side. So we put a lot of effort into that.
Don Ingle [00:30:18]:
Again, looking at our structure, looking at our different business processes, we then took it forward for the departments almost concurrent with having to do a big ERP implementation and said, basically use this concept and let's take a time out and take a look at our business processes here. Technology is not the panacea. It is really not the panacea. It is an enabler. It's going to do wonderful things. But if you're trying to replicate the same kind of rotten customized business processes and not try to meet the software in the middle, we're not going to be successful. Obviously, Gartner talks about what's behind unsuccessful implementations. It's a lot of these types of issues.
Don Ingle [00:30:55]:
My answer to your question really is an organization giving itself enough Runway to really take a look at its business processes during business transformation efforts. That could be ERP, that could be a permitting system, that could be a regional public safety system, what have you. And I think ultimately it really is incumbent on the CIO to put on a little bit of that liberal arts hat and try to get the organization to think about the people in process side. And that's why I mentioned the product that we have. It gives you an opportunity to, instead of having the big room with the sticky notes, a lot of times we're trying to get executives and working people together to look at processes, automate that, but also give you data on the financial impact of optimizing a business process. I stood in front of councils talking about these are the qualitative things we're going to get from all these great technologies. Really excited about the opportunity to add technology in a way to address the process and people side together.
Joe Toste [00:31:49]:
Okay, so I love that and I just want to pivot to conversational AI that is recently being rolled out. I'd love to hear how you can leverage the predictive analytics and insights that you were just talking about as a CIO. But now, if you think about it as having the lens of this new age technology and the impact that would have for CIO's today.
Don Ingle [00:32:07]:
Joule. It's basically SAP's copilot, if you will. It's conversational. You can use text very much like a chat GPT feature currently being used in some different areas, fairly new, but just by way of example, developing job descriptions, basically. Jewel, give me a job descriptions for a park maintenance level. One person also being used for learning paths, education paths for employees looking at their job function and making recommendations based on their resumes and certifications as well. And we have a product called Concur, that is a travel and expense application that's actually we've been doing AI for about a decade now where it can do things like scan a receipt and basically interpret exactly what the charge was, what the classification was, things of that nature. It's used for fraud detection, things of that nature.
Don Ingle [00:32:53]:
Where it becomes exciting and also a challenge is its ability to use internal curated data and reputable outside sources. Our big focus with AI is that it be responsible, relevant and reliable. And the responsible part is a big part of what we're focused on. International company, one of the biggest software companies out there. We are being consulted by governments around the world on the responsible side, the ethics side, the legal, the privacy issues, things of that nature. The point I'm trying to get to is we believe as an all in cloud company now that what is absolutely essential for organizations to understand, and this gets back to the people and process side, is you've got to have a clean digital core. You've got to get off the customization sauce. We are the company that had a lot of dexterity to let you customize your systems.
Don Ingle [00:33:39]:
Now in the cloud, we are the company that's bringing the best industry practices in the public sector, saying, trust us, we're going to provide those very specialized functionalities. But by going to the cloud, you're buying into the idea that you're going to have to meet us in the middle. We'll give you configuration options, but you're not going to customize anymore. The clean core is really essential. It's not straying into weird data schemas, processes, things of that nature. And that's the story behind reputable AI, is getting organizations to normalize their data. That's the only way you get reputable outcomes. And so we're really focused on having reputable internal data mesh with outside data.
Don Ingle [00:34:17]:
Give you the example of the job description, reaching out, looking at a groundskeeper, one database of external data sources, bringing in the one that we have internally, bringing those two together, and coming up with a reputable recommendation. What really gets me excited is this idea of process improvement. Think of basically taking a look at a 311 call that was, we'll call it suboptimal and saying, joule, tell me what could have been done differently and what it costs to have messed up this 311 call and using this signavial process mining capability to look at the entire stream of activities that took place and tell you what you could have done better with that particular issue. Now that doesn't exist now, but all the infrastructure is there too.
Joe Toste [00:34:58]:
Okay, so I do like that example a lot. I do that with my own podcast. I told this to junior the other night. So junior, you've been on like five times. He's like, I know. And so I'll take your transcript and I'll put it in. I'll say, what did I miss? How could I have interviewed Junior better? And he starts, he just laughs at me. He's very kind, but I love having that conversation.
Joe Toste [00:35:15]:
I did the same thing. It was pretty nerdy, but I actually exported all of my own financial data, stripped out all the private stuff and just numbers, raw numbers, and threw it into chat GPT and start having a conversation with a spreadsheet and Morgan's. That's great, but it's very insightful. It starts to give you things where if you ever took a business class in college, I took financial accounting, managerial accounting, and other business classes. And the rate at which it can just process data is awesome, which is really great. It's super exciting. And again, SAP has got a way larger scale than tech tables, so I think there's going to be some powerful unlocks. But the prep to get that there requires the right data, which required me to go through hundreds of transactions myself to get that ready at that point.
Don Ingle [00:36:01]:
And what's cool for us just really quickly, is I talked about the stereotype of the big omnipotent company by nature, of the fact that we're moving to the cloud, that we're building this reputation on being a business process improvement company, a lot more accessible financially to these types of technologies. The complexity of implementation, the risk goes down. I'm super excited about our ability to help the middle market and the public sector access a lot of these things.
Joe Toste [00:36:26]:
That's great, Mike. This is just one section you'd mentioned an email that you wanted to touch on, but it is an election year, and I'd love to hear your insights on budget and funding cycles within Delaware. How are you communicating the long term value of investments to leadership, given the short term nature of the election cycle?
Michael Hojnicki [00:36:45]:
Being an appointed official would say this is a resume generating event. As the election comes out, you got to be ready for change. But in all honesty, it's really taking a look back and through that business case, telling that story over time and putting it to paper with a transition document and actually showing the successes and demonstrating where technology has enabled the government to be responsive, to deliver value to the citizens and make it sustainable. If you tell the story right and your agencies are sitting there next to you, they're going to tell the story for you. That helps validate what we're putting together on paper. So as we pull together our historical look back of what we did that was successful and what we need to sustain funding going forward is blending the successes with where we are today and where we can be tomorrow. And the story becomes real when you start seeing the dollar saved over time. I look at the escalators we deal with are software licensing, right.
Michael Hojnicki [00:37:43]:
It used to be three to 5%. Now it's north of 5% plus. So for the last four years, I've been trending that out. So when I went to the budget office to say, I need an escalator in my base budget, I was able to demonstrate that over time through data. So I tell my team, data tells a story and information builds trust. So it's that continual, consistent message of what we're doing, what we're going to do, and this is where the benefits are, will help get those budgets right. Even at the state level, a bigger budget, where I used to work, we'd have that transition document. We do our position policy papers and really try to lay out that, that smooth transition for continuity of government.
Michael Hojnicki [00:38:20]:
But we have to tell a story and show value.
Joe Toste [00:38:23]:
Is it your boss that's running for governor?
Michael Hojnicki [00:38:25]:
So, yes, my county executive is term limited out. So he is. Now he's running for governor. He's one of three. He has a high probability to be very successful at governor. And so I'm looking at a change at the state level and at the county level. September is the primary and that is the election in Delaware.
Joe Toste [00:38:45]:
And then if we have good news, we might be going to Delaware.
Michael Hojnicki [00:38:48]:
We'll gladly have you at the cumbersome.
Joe Toste [00:38:51]:
I love it. Chris, you're a big fan of remote work, and we're going to wrap this up with it. Culture and collaboration. If you could talk about building a strong culture and high performing teams in a hybrid work, remote environment, specifically any tools, platforms that have been effective in fostering the collaboration and connection that's just so desperately needed.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:39:13]:
Yeah. So in my former company, we went to a remote workforce back in 2010, but we had to because the cost of living in Santa Barbara is so high. The median home price today is north of $2 million, and that's for a 1500 square foot rancher home. And so the middle class has really largely been pushed out of Santa Barbara. And so for my former company to survive, we had to move to a remote workforce. And so we had employees all over the United States that worked for us. And so then I needed to figure out, okay, what's the best framework for a hybrid or remote workforce? Right? How do you make sure that everyone is doing what they're supposed to be doing? How do you hold them accountable? How do you build a strong culture when you're not seeing each other face to face? And I came across a great framework called the EOS, or entrepreneurial operating system.
Joe Toste [00:40:01]:
I love this, which we talked about on episode one.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:40:03]:
If you haven't read that book, it's called traction. I highly recommend it. We implemented that within my former company and it was a game changer for us. It helped us to create a culture of accountability, of goal setting, and just the ability to create a strong, vibrant culture. Even though we weren't together in person, when I came to the public sector, I thought, I wonder if the EOS framework would work in the public sector because I never heard about anybody doing it in the public sector. It's always been in private sector focused. I decided to implement it. Long story short, it works just as well in the public sector as it does in the private sector.
Chris Chirgwin, CIO, Santa Barbara County [00:40:39]:
And so our team today is following a lot of what EOS recommends. We have our daily huddles in the morning, we have our quarterly goals, our annual goals, that's all visible to everyone on the team. I can tell you that our it team today has accomplished over 500 goals already this year and everyone can see what those goals are. And so now that it's caught the attention of the CEO of the county and she's thinking about rolling it out county wide. So it's been exciting to see. So yeah, big believer in a hybrid workforce as long as you've got a good framework to follow.
Joe Toste [00:41:09]:
Yeah, I love that. And I've seen the spreadsheet, so it's pretty epic to see how many goals have actually been accomplished. Mike, how does Newcastle county collaborate? You have such an interesting background at the state level and at the county. Has that helped you been able to collaborate across?
Michael Hojnicki [00:41:23]:
Absolutely. Delaware, the size is our strength. Right? You could drive end to end in 90 minutes. So we bring, we have issues that are impacting state and local government. Like I chair the state federal Cybersecurity grant program, right? Dispersing funds across the state and it brings us all together, all the municipalities, because we have to distribute 80% of money to the local and 20% to the state. So my biggest challenge is fending off the state so they don't dip deeper into the try to get into the bucket of money. But we come together routinely through our meetings, through our general when we have issues. Because of the size, it's very easy.
Michael Hojnicki [00:41:58]:
But nationally, my goal is to get my team to really learn from others. We all fight the same battle and it's events like podcast live here event. We share information. You get to learn what's working in other jurisdictions and take that back to the local and figure out how we adapt it for us. But in Delaware it's easy because our size and we communicate very closely and quickly when things aren't going well, it's up close in personal politics.
Joe Toste [00:42:23]:
Rich Arizona's I think just myself traveling across the US, it's pretty unique where a lot of folks from the k twelve to higher ed, the cities, the counties and state level are all friends, which is pretty cool, by the way. That's not the case in other states I go to. Can you just talk about that level of collaboration and how that just benefits Arizona at large?
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:42:44]:
So you call it collaboration, I call it group therapy. There's so many of us that are tackling different things at different times. Pretty much someone has done whatever we're thinking of trying to do now, Aaron will look at me. I don't know, he's doing some pretty cutting edge stuff, so he's. We agree with sometimes it's good to be second, but there are times where we really want to push the envelope on being first. Right, but you have the risks associated with that. But that whole collaboration, I think we are unique in Arizona. We all do compare a lot of notes.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:43:14]:
We've talked a lot about AI. How do you put policies in place? Junior, Bianca and others have shared policies with us. I'm definitely going to look at the CEOs stuff. Very interesting. But I tend to gravitate, and maybe because I have a liberal arts degree as well, I gravitate to the people side of the stool. Right. We talk about all this incredible tech, but when we're talking to our county manager, our supervisors, we're not talking about any of the tech side. They get AI now because once chat, GPT came out and they all started using it, it was like AI was just invented and we've got to be in the AI business.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:43:47]:
But to me, the most valuable thing is the collaboration, learning from others, but then just having the best possible talent you can possibly have. Because tech is usually not the issue. Right. It can do just about anything we want it to do. But you have to have the people who can engage the business and our county leadership to say, what are you really trying to accomplish? What are the business outcomes? Because we are guilty of this at times. I think we all are. If we're passionate about technology, we just want to throw AI on everything, like hot sauce, as Aaron would say. But the reality is those conversations look very different.
Richard McHattie, CIO, Maricopa County [00:44:19]:
We have to have our business engagement manager saying, what problem are we solving? What outcome do you want to achieve? And then we put all the pieces together, as you've talked about, with data and the platforms. Those all have to be in place for us to really scale and sustain that kind of transformation, because that's what they're looking for, right? We try to be aware all the time that anything we're doing with technology, with those departments, all they care about is the business capability, the service delivery, what they can deliver with that technology. So it's great to hear stories. To your question, it's great to hear stories from everyone here, not just our local folks that hang out, but now Chris and Mike and others. It's really good to hear all the success stories and the challenges and the therapy. It is therapy.
Joe Toste [00:45:02]:
Attend Don in two minutes or less. Any closing thoughts on it? Culture collaboration?
Don Ingle [00:45:10]:
Great example from my past in Washington state, just really briefly had a really brilliant built suburban communities in the Seattle area, the tech corridor. I was the IT leader in Kirkland, Washington, which is next to Bellevue Redmond, where Microsoft is located on Issaquah and Mercer island. And we all got together during a time when there was a lot of business development going on a building and what have you, and we were really finding that there was a lot of frustration from both residents in the building community about permitting processes. And the business leaders got together with help from the a leaders and built a collaborative platform that's still in place 20 years later called mybuildingpermit.com dot. I was involved in the first two years. I'm not going to take any credit for it. I was in the birthing process, if you will. But I bring that up because I think there's so much that can be done regionally around collaboration.
Don Ingle [00:45:59]:
We talked originally about SAP and our platform, not an SAP story, but a lot of the technology. The business technology platform for data integration, data management, data scrubbing draws disparate permitting systems together in this one interface that gives an ability for a resident or a business to not only use consistent geospatial data, but get information on permitting requirements it's driven permitting, consistency and collaboration across jurisdictions. And now it's used by 15 different jurisdictions in the area, including King county and Snohomish county, which are huge organizations. I bring it up because again, people process. It really brought together these organizations to talk about normalizing their processes, making it easier for folks to go through the permitting process. And just a fantastic, I think, illustration of people process technology still being perfectly balanced in terms of a great story.
Joe Toste [00:46:53]:
That's fantastic. Thank you for coming on the public sector show buy tech tables hey, what's up everybody?
Joe Toste [00:46:57]:
This is Joe Tossi from Techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show buy tech tables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIO's cisos and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today and to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.
