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34 minute read
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Featuring:
- Dr. Bianca Lochner, CIO, City of Scottsdale
- Feroz Merchhiya, CIO, City of Glendale
- Dr. Muriel Reid, CIO, City of Jackson, MS
- Ken Williams, National Sr Manager, Partner Solutions Engineering at T-Mobile
Note: At the time of recording, Feroz Merchhiya was serving as CIO for the City of Glendale. He is currently the CIO for the City of Santa Monica, as of release date on November 1st, 2024.
Summary
Guests share their expertise on smart city initiatives and digital transformation in local government. This dynamic conversation explores how cities are leveraging emerging technologies, from 5G infrastructure to artificial intelligence, while fostering collaboration between public and private sectors to enhance community services and resident experiences.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How cities like Scottsdale and Glendale are implementing smart city initiatives through strategic roadmaps and innovative technologies
- The role of GIS and data analytics in improving public safety and city operations during major events
- Approaches to implementing AI solutions safely and effectively in government settings
- How public-private partnerships and inter-city collaboration drive innovation in municipal services
- Strategies for balancing competition and cooperation between neighboring cities to improve resident services
TIMESTAMPS
(00:00) Intros
(03:55) Scottsdale's Smart City Journey and Digital Transformation
(07:32) Fiber Network Infrastructure and IoT Implementation
(11:00) Glendale's GIS Center of Excellence and Major Event Management
(16:44) City of Jackson's Approach to Technology Partnerships and Challenges
(20:27) T-Mobile's Role in 5G Smart City Infrastructure
(21:29) Glendale's Implementation of Generative AI Solutions
(27:59) Scottsdale's Strategic Approach to AI Implementation
(32:41) Public Safety Communications Future with T-Mobile
(36:05) Regional Collaboration and Competition in the Phoenix Metro Area
(43:53) Cross-City Technology Sharing and Innovation
(47:04) Closing Thoughts on Public-Private Collaboration
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Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:00:00]:
Hey, what's up everybody?
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:00:00]: This is Joe Toste from Techtables.com and you're listening to the Public Sector show by Tech Tables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs 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.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:00:34]:
Today, we're thrilled to have Dr. Bianca Lochner, CIO for the City of Scottsdale, Fraz Maracia, CIO for the City of Glendale, Dr. Muriel Reed, CIO for the City of Jackson, Ms. and Ken Williams at T Mobile. Welcome to the Public Sector show by Tech Tables. Super excited to have you all on here. Repeat guests, first timers. I love it.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:00:58]:
Awesome mural, quick intro and a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:01:01]:
I'm Dr. Mary Reed. I am a tech lover. I'm from Jackson, Mississippi, the city of Jackson and I am the Director of Information technology, slash Chief Information Officer. I'm also a adjunct professor at Dalehaven University in the area of computer information systems.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:01:21]:
I love it. Bianca, a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:01:23]:
I'm very excited to be here and finally be on the side of the podcast experience. I have spent my entire career, more than 20 years in public service. Really passionate about leveraging technology to make a difference in my communities and love to serve in that way. I was previously in A K District 12 environment serving as a CIO and now local government with the City of Scottsdale for almost three years and really grateful for the positive culture, the recognitions that Scottsdale has and also for the expertise and the brilliancy of my team that really all those ensure that we can continue to provide the best service for our Scottsdale residents, for the businesses we serve, and also for the more than 11 million visitors we welcome every year in Scottsdale.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:02:11]:
I love it. Ken.
Ken Williams [00:02:12]:
Ken Williams, I'm with T Mobile and I manage our solutions engineering organization that supports the partner channel as well as a team that supports our inside centers, call centers if you will.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:02:20]:
Fantastic for us.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:02:21]:
I guess I'm the youngest as far as.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:02:23]:
So I'm the youngest.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:02:26]:
Let me finish. Youngest in terms of public sector tenure. Previously I was with private sector, so various different industries, high tech, financial services, insurance. Glendale is my official outside of my consulting work as a public sector cio. It's been almost four years now. Fantastic experience, opportunity to do a lot of interesting things with the knowledge and understanding that what we do makes a difference in people's lives. Really enjoying that work and excited to be here.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:03:02]:
And if you want a very impressive long resume of Farah's, I watched a video on CIO.com and he said, faraz, let me just, I got to cut over and introduce you. And I think it's like a five minute intro and so there's a lot of impressive stuff. But if you want a full, the full background and full story that there's a great interview there. Bianca, let's kick off with you. Scottsdale has been making impressive strides in its digital transformation journey over the past three years, as evidenced by the recent recognition as one of the top smart cities nationwide for your population category by the center for Digital Government and which we highlighted on the opening night here at gmi. Thank you for coming on and touching on that. Gottsdale's Smart City Roadmap, developed in collaboration with the community and ecosystem vendors, showcases your commitment to leveraging technology to enhance the lives of the residents here. You mentioned that this was a five year roadmap.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:03:55]:
Let's start with a 30,000 foot overview for the audience. Where is Scottsdale on this journey today?
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:04:00]:
As I mentioned that we are fortunate enough to have the leadership that is a very visionary, one that is very citizen centric and with the community engagement. We pursued the Smart City strategy as one of our goals for the city. And in 2019 our roadmap was approved, officially formally approved by our city council. So we have several goals that were outlined in that roadmap and now in the process of implementing some of those goals. Again, using Smart cities to leverage data technologies and innovations to improve the lives of our community. And with that it's about really understanding the capabilities that are in the market and how our partner vendors can really support us to provide solutions to the challenges that we identified as a community. And we also partnered with the Smart City Council, which is a global organization that helps us advance the Smart City efforts and that really helped us throughout the 2020 to leverage their expertise and some of their partnerships with those vendors that were really at the forefront of IoT technologies and solutions. And I mentioned data.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:05:13]:
Right. Again, we have to be very cognizant that you cannot make a difference without leveraging data in a way that's really enabling. And smart cities or those solutions, they have to collect a lot of data. And as a city, we are always being very mindful about being transparent and providing empowering the community with knowledge of how we use the data that we collect and how they can have a say on how that data needs to be stored, safeguarded and used. In 2021 we also published our digital privacy policy again to bring that awareness and to recognize that the community has to have a say in that and analytics. Right. We evolved our data management program to enhance our capabilities to leverage some of the cloud analytics technologies as well then automations. Right.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:06:02]:
We as many of our neighboring cities are looking to really build a strong strategy around AI and those new emerging technologies. Connectivity was really big for us in terms of the roadmap as well. Building a city owned fiber network that is going to really be future proof for the city as well. And then most importantly, that's just an engagement piece. So we were fortunate to be able to develop an in house CRM many years ago, continue to enhance that with community input. And also we added to that a new platform that's called SpeakUp Scottsdale where we can really delve into specific problems and build maybe focus groups or targeted surveys and having that ongoing communications and engagement with our stakeholders. So all those kind of help us really execute on that smart CMAP and really pivot if we need to. And then obviously some of the use cases that we are implementing and then testing and collaborations with those partnerships.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:07:02]:
But also keeping in mind that those use cases, once adopted, they have to be sustained and they have to be also equitably used. Right. Not for an area of the city, but we are always looking at how we can expand that benefit for the larger community.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:07:17]:
So you're very busy. This is why you're very busy. This is great. I want to talk about future proofing the city of Scottsdale. You mentioned building out the fiber network. I think there's plans to build like 100 miles of new fiber. Could you just maybe touch upon that?
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:07:32]:
So that was a bond project. Again, the community identified that as a priority for the city. So it's really connecting all the city buildings, all city assets. And because of that we're able to secure those assets and the communications and we're able to rapidly expand on our smart cities initiatives. Right. Thinking in terms of IoT one with the use cases and priorities for us is to enhance our real time crime center capabilities and be able to react to what's happening in real time and be able to empower our first responders with that knowledge. Then we're also looking at sustainability is another area that is a priority for us, obviously water conservation. Right.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:08:13]:
We live in the desert and for us is how do we apply those IoTs and emerging technologies to be more proactive about how we're using our water. One of the solutions that we piloted and we developed in collaboration with ASU and aws, the center for Cloud Innovation that's located here in Scottsdale was to assess a way to really predict the water consumptions in various areas. Right. We have many golf courses here. So being able to target and really engage those agencies or stakeholders on making sure that they have awareness of how much they're conserving and how they can really narrow that. That's one example. Another pain point. We, we are very welcoming to global tourists and our old Town area entertainment center is a very popular one.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:09:03]:
And with that comes some, some challenges for neighboring communities with, with noise that are very prevalent, especially in the evenings and nights. And we're looking at leveraged IoT technologies to identify ways to assess the noise levels and then be able to partner with bar owners for them to be very proactive into lowering the music levels. At the same time notifying the first responders that everybody's involved, that something is taking place so that the neighbors can really not be affected in a very negative way. So a lot of use cases that we are either implemented or looking to.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:09:45]:
Leverage is the meter like as it goes up, it's like cops are showing up.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:09:48]:
Yes guys, they're already showing up. So the goal is for them to show up after. There's no need for them to intervene. And real time notifications, it's amazing. The technologies are quite advanced that real time we can assess that, but obviously there's still not specifically to this challenge. So we are partnering with those developers to refine them for this. Got sale use case.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:10:11]:
That's great. Do you like coffee?
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:10:12]:
I love coffee.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:10:13]:
Okay.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:10:13]:
So do you ever go to Berdina's in Old Town Scott sale?
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:10:16]:
Maybe? We have so many great options.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:10:23]:
Yeah, no, there are a lot of great options for us. Glendale is quickly becoming this go to destination. Now I know Scottsdale is known for the bachelorette parties, right? That's like party. That's the big one. Glendale hosted the super bowl last year, now the final four this week. These are like big high profile events which definitely increases the public safety visitor experience. You mentioned how Glendale centralized its GIS function, which is a core piece of any public sector organization. Do you want to just share a few examples of that centralization and how that's Enabled Glendale to provide better services.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:11:00]:
Before I do that, you missed one major event probably.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:11:04]:
Which one?
Feroz Merchhiya [00:11:04]:
Yeah. Taylor Swift started her concert series in Glendale. We renamed our city to Swift City. Not to mention that.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:11:15]:
Okay, I gotta ask, I gotta ask. Are you a Swifty? Are you a Swiftie?
Feroz Merchhiya [00:11:19]:
No. My function is enabling the best experience people can have. I don't get to attend the game, I don't get to attend the concert. I make sure that everything happens seamlessly. Yes. Coming back to our GIS center of Excellence. When I joined about four years ago, GIS was a function that was diffused and distributed in various different departments and everybody was using technology the way they thought was appropriate and were trying to get the best out of it. But there was no focus in terms of how you can leverage this technology to truly enhance the capability of your urban operation.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:12:03]:
Because GIS allows you to do so many things at various different levels. If you talk about sustainability, it has capability and we have built some of that which we have leveraged for our water services during water conservation. Especially a couple of years ago when we were in the middle of a drought and we declared level one emergency and then new construction was basically put on hold. We were able to produce dashboard for our water services so that they can utilize and see how water was being conserved, where the consumption was high, how they could incentivize our citizen to conserve water and come out of this drought situation without major significant harm. So that's one example. But use of technology is one thing. Creating an operating model that is sustainable was the first thing that we needed to do. So we created this center of Excellence where we created a hub and spoke model.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:13:05]:
So we gave department autonomy to do what they want to do. So you don't want to stifle the innovation, but at the same time the technical aspect needed to be centralized so you can enhance your capabilities following a standard playbook. So that's basically what we did. How we used it in various different situations of sustainability is one example during super bowl. And we're going to use it even in upcoming Final Four, providing capabilities to our first responder. Pre event planning. Pre event planning they used to do before was a literally a clipboard and they would go and survey the site and identify where they need to have their resources deployed in case of an emergency situation. Now they have an app on their phone, it's a GIS app and they can go literally point, click, point, click.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:13:53]:
And they have all that information not only available on their phone, but it's available centralized so others can Leverage it. Otherwise, the previous workflow was I go do a site survey, collect that information on a paper, go back to the office, upload it into the system, and then everybody has access to it. Now it's real time, national. There's a national body for missing and exploited children. So we partner with them. We create a site with GIS capability. So in those major events, if there are sightings of those missing children, we can notify our law enforcement national entity so that it can help. So it's a bigger level of an effort, but those are usually undertaken during large events.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:14:36]:
So we had three events that we just talked about. We're leveraging that. Another thing, from a GIS point of view, we do. We have the entire map of all our water supplies. So one of the things during super bowl preparation, what we did was looking at a cybersecurity tabletop exercise. And this is where you see our physical and digital world coming together. Any scenario that we started on the physical side ended up on the digital, or the one on the digital ended up on the physical side. Water services, intelligent transportation system, all those were part of our playbook.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:15:13]:
Leveraging GIS to identify critical assets, how do we protect them? How do we provide advanced notification to our first responders so they can respond to situations that may come up? So that's what our GS center of Excellence has done. Last thing that I would tell you about our GS center of Excellence, Nvidia. We all know about Nvidia, the big. Yeah, exactly. If you're interested in AI, obviously that name goes with AI. They run a competition. It's an international competition they run every year. Our GIS center of Excellence participated in it.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:15:47]:
We were the only one winner for last year, 2023. And basically leveraging Nvidia technology, taking a 2D image and converting into a 3D image. So we did that for a State Farm stadium, and that became a winning entry. Not only did we win, but the best part was that our developers who were part of that competition contributed to the product development. So literally, I can show you a GitHub feed where they were exchanging ideas and the product team on the other side was saying, yeah, we can incorporate that.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:16:21]:
So you're helping Nvidia's stock price go to the moon is what you said.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:16:23]:
We are. We like to think we made a small contribution to the industry, but that's our GS center of Excellence.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:16:31]:
That's fantastic. Muriel, the city of Jackson has faced its own share of challenges, from infrastructure issues to budget constraints. How are you leveraging the partnerships and collaborations with other public and private sector entities to overcome these obstacles.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:16:44]:
Basically, what I do is ask for help. That's one thing that I think in technology we must all understand. I'm sure everybody in this room understands that you can't do it all on your own. And I've heard that several times here. And a lot of times it seems like we have to do it all on our own, but we really don't have to. We do have local vendors that really have stepped up and come to the city of Jackson to say, hey, we want to help you, we need to help you. And it's been very interesting since I've been in the position how much people are gravitating towards the city of Jackson. We have a lot of good things going on in the city and we also have, like you said, challenges with water budget, infrastructure and things like that.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:17:35]:
But we do also have people that know how to assist and solve these problems and help us solve these problems within our budget. One thing that we've been able to do is assess, do a real life assessment of what we really need. Not, you know, what we think is cool and hip, but what do we really need? So that's the first thing that we've been doing. We're also making sure we don't have any duplication of services. If we do, we see what's working and what's not. And if they're, if we have vendors that's not giving us great customer service or great product, they're gone too. Just being realistic about what you need, what you can do within your budget, and partnering with the right people to get done what you need to get done. And we've had some great success over the last two years with partnering with the right people that really care about the City of Jackson and is interested in building the community up.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:18:35]:
And so I think that's what we've been able to do. And just leverage to what you said, just leveraging that and we come up with some beautiful success stories in the end.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:18:48]:
That's great. Is there one particular success story that comes to mind that I know you recently are moving? This consolidation of everything under one house. Is there one specific story that you would like to share?
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:18:59]:
We were having issues with the data that we have. We collect a whole lot of data, but we didn't have a way to really pull the data that we really wanted. So we needed some mechanism to help us sort this data. We don't have the manpower, like most of you all here, who don't have the manpower to do that from a human perspective. But there were two particular companies that reached out to us and said, hey, at this point, since you all have taken, let's just say JPD to, from paper and pencil to automation, there's a lot of data that of course our police officer would need on the street and just in house to provide services for our citizens. Right. They were able to come in and do an assessment and lend a hand with providing us some data analytic strategies until we can get to the point where we can really build that part of our department up.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:20:05]:
That's great, Ken. T Mobile has been a key player in the 5G space, making significant investments in infrastructure and partnering with cities like Peachtree Corners, Georgia and the Curiosity Lab to explore smart city initiatives. As T Mobile has collaborated with cities on 5G smart city projects, what are some of the valuable lessons that you've seen from your customers partnering with local governments?
Ken Williams [00:20:27]:
That's a great question. I would start with. We had to take a more holistic approach to what we did. We would go in a lot of times and we would talk about how we could save you money on a phone or a tablet or a hotspot. And for Most of the CIOs that we've met over the last couple of days, that's probably the lowest priority in their list of things. Right. I had a conversation earlier where somebody said, look, if I can just get our ERP program out the window, I'd be happy. That's not what we were there for.
Ken Williams [00:20:51]:
And so we had to take a step back and really look at what we were bringing to the table. And a big part of that was that we had to realize, I'm going to steal words from you. We couldn't do it all on our own. We had to ask for help. And so we built this massive partner community with partners such as gmi, which can come out and really talk to the C levels and say, hey, this is what we do and we're better together with T Mobile.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:21:12]:
Yeah, no, that's absolutely great. Faraz. It's impressive to hear about Glendale's proactive approach to implementing generative AI solutions. We talked about this on our call. We had a great conversation just around this, but curious around two to three use cases specifically that you would like to share with the audience today.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:21:29]:
Sure, yeah. So generative AI or AI in general was an area of interest for me before OpenAI and ChatGPT version to the scene. When this came up as an idea and everybody was curious, started to explore naturally within it, our department is called Innovation in Technology. So this was perfect opportunity to be innovative and figuring out how we can leverage this emerging technology. And two things were important to us. One was it's a new technology so you want to have a policy or a framework around it how you want to use it. For my from my previous experience I knew two things were important when you are looking at AI. One is data and other is algorithm.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:22:18]:
So if you have a messed up data and you have perfect algorithm, you're going to get a mess. And you have a good data but messy algorithm, you're going to get a mess. So how do we contain those two risks and still leverage technology and then benefit from it? So that started our search exploring various different options and we decided to pursue an AI option that leveraged our own data. So the first area was the area of technology. And the timing couldn't have been perfect because city hall for city of Glendale was an old brute architecture building that was due for replacement and timing worked out fine. Council approved it and we were about to embark on the remodeling which meant that previously I could send out couple of service desk folks to provide elbow to elbow support to our user community. 500 or so in the city hall. Now they were all in a satellite location somewhere, five to seven mile distance.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:23:21]:
So you have a travel time, all that and you still have the same team. So how do you solve that problem? So maybe AI can solve that problem so all your tier one support tickets can be handled through that. Then we started looking at various different solutions that were available. There were generation one bots which were basically hard to configure and even if you configure long maintenance time, all those things. So we settled on this generative AI solution that fit nicely with our existing technology ecosystem primarily with our teams platform with Microsoft Office 365. So we looked at the product beginning of 2023. We started the project May of 2023. We went live on September 20th, less than a year.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:24:09]:
It's in full production 1/4 and I can tell you about 882 tickets were resolved and productivity hours were restored for our 2,000 employees. They were opening the ticket and we call it Blaze. Blazing fast service and blazing heat of Arizona. So our Blaze was able to resolve those and it was also able to save our service desk time also. So you have saving on both sides. So once we were able to demonstrate that there is an roi, now we are rolling it out to our hr. So scenario benefit enrollment starts in few months and the HR department will be inundated with phone calls regarding various different benefit options, things of that nature. If you ask an employee to go to our intranet site and look up that information, sometimes that information is 5 level, 10 level deep somewhere embedded in the document.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:25:09]:
AI can serve up that information right there on an interface that they are naturally working in. So that's coming in next 90 days. That would be live and then very unique use case. Again, these are all related to the major event of city hall being remodeled, right? Choosing the use case, choosing the success criteria and the parameters under which you want to work is the best thing for us. Going and getting a large language model and building a solution didn't make sense at this juncture. In future it may. But one last use case I'll talk about which is interesting. So our city attorney's office, they review contracts, they develop right contracts and oftentimes there are situations where they have to look at say a privacy clause that they want to add and they want a precise language that was created in particular contract.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:26:05]:
So now we have an AI solution uniquely designed for that use case, such as for a city attorney's office where they can go through scan within our environment, not outside because we don't know the veracity of source that they're going to go and pull up information. This is our data. They're going to go check and serve up all those five permutations of privacy clause and let the attorney choose which one is appropriate or if they know exactly which one then it'll serve up the one that what it does is it speeds up time to value but it retain it gives you that control that attorney would like or any employee would like at any point in time. So you're not giving an AI free rein, but you're enhancing the experience of creating contract time to value is shortened. All those things are part of it. These things are. We did a recent presentation for our Maricopa association of Government Technology Advisory Groups, one of many of my peers. So we showcased how it was done.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:27:07]:
We demoed the product also.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:27:08]:
I like that use case with the health, health benefits. I being very curious, I live in California. So I took the, it was like renewal season in January or whatever. And I took the whole they send you like a 90 page document, right? I'm like I'm not reading this. Am I going to go through this? And the price like goes up 20% right? So I put it in and it didn't even like process. ChatGPT just said no, sorry, yeah, we can't process sensitive information like that. But I want to hear if you can get this working. I might ask for a side help.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:27:37]:
If you can help me for this upcoming year. That would be fan. That would be great. Bianca, I'd love to hear are there any use cases? I know you have a lot going on. I know because I also talked to Rob Lloyd and he had 27 questions. And I'm like, Rob, you don't get 27 questions. You get one question. But I just love to hear are there any use cases in particular that are on the product roadmap or that you're thinking about?
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:27:59]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. We. But I would like to start with the beginning. Right. As with any new emerging technology, we always build a strategy for that. Right. And the strategy has to align with the city's goals. And for the fall of last year, as all those things are, we didn't realize that Genai is going to be the future of impacting the future as a city.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:28:21]:
We realized that we need to come together as an executive team and really build that strategy. It's about really making it making sure that we have guardrails around this implementation or adoption. And like other cities, we one of the first ones to develop a administrative regulation. So this is internal policy to really ensure that our employees understand the risks, but also the benefits of leveraging this innovation. And then they can do that safely and in a way that's very empowering to them and making sure that they understand what some of the use cases benefits and then what can happen if they step a bit outside of those boundaries. And then with that, we also want to make sure that we have trainings that are really tailored to what the policy covers. And for that we realized that we cannot really do it as an IT department alone or have to put that burden on other departments within the city. We had to really implement a governance platform, a governance steering committee, and making sure that we are very again, we are very mindful about how we roll this out at the same time as really assessing what the value can be for this innovation.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:29:30]:
So we're in the process of implementing a platform that is going to really help empower the leadership to ensure that we have the risks online. The risks that we were willing to take are communicated throughout the organization. So we don't have shadow AI. And then any new use cases or individual desires to test this new AI capabilities are really formalized and we have a way to first of all track them, but also to then support those users in long term and make sure that as our policy continues to continue to enhance it, we interact with those changes within the organization. So really safely innovating safely. Right. So we're going a little bit slowly in the beginning, but we're going to be able to go fast, faster because we have this in place now for use cases again as a leadership team. So when I say leadership, it's not just executives, right.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:30:18]:
It's all those members within all departments that are very forward thinking. They see a way that this innovation can improve their own experiences as employees, but also the experiences of our stakeholders within community. So we came together again and we had Gartner facilitate a one day workshop where we, we just put everything out there, right. What are we thinking? Like big picture but also the art of the possible. And then we, by the end of the day we're also able to prioritize those in terms of value outcomes but also in terms of feasibility. Right. To mention we don't have a million dollars to develop our own chatbots or bots. At the same time we can now that we have this as a priority, we can assess the market and see what commercial solutions are that already have those AI's embedded solutions.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:31:04]:
Right. So one of the use case though that came out of this workshop that was a top priority was how do we make sure that we provide better service in terms of our citizens engagement with our through our call centers. So we had great experience, great ratings before, but we always want to install. Our mission is to provide better service for world class communities. So we always want to raise the bar. And we partnered again with AWS and we are now piloting a solution called AWS Connect. Again track all the calls in terms of the data and be able to real time assess that data and be able to report out to those making decisions what services we need to enhance, what services we need to add, but at the same time empowering those call center representatives to be able to faster respond or be able to forward a call or forward an ask to specific departments as they've never been able to do before because maybe some of the integrations weren't available to us. And the goal is to really expand that throughout the city with other use cases that will come from this.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:32:08]:
Right. 911 is one of them. We're not quite ready there yet, but definitely we're going to be assessing the outcomes here and we're looking at building then from this solution, expanding it to build a city wide, but internally, but also citizen facing. Again not quite there yet, but in the very, very near future. Doing it safely, doing it very transparently and very strategically.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:32:29]:
I love that. Ken, if you could talk about the public safety space, specifically how T Mobile is able to better leverage its resources now with the. In the post Sprint T Mobile era of public safety.
Ken Williams [00:32:41]:
Yeah, I think it's no secret to the general public.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:32:43]:
Right.
Ken Williams [00:32:43]:
Sprint had tons of spectrum. They just didn't have the finances to get it out there the way that we needed to. T Mobile, having purchased Sprint, was able to take that spectrum and in what I consider record time, less than two years, propagate a network dao that is the nation's only 5G standalone network. The reason that standalone component is so important is it allows us to do things like segment sections of the traffic off. So we had the super bowl in Vegas not too long ago. We were able to take all of the broadcaster traffic and segment that into a special slice so that a normal consumer didn't see any fluctuation in the network. Did the same thing with F1 and we can do the same thing for law enforcement down the road here. As we start to develop more and more around that, you'll also see we just had channel partners not too long ago.
Ken Williams [00:33:28]:
And so back to our partner community and how important they are to us. We had several meetings with partners all around public safety. I saw things from a box the size of a light switch that goes on the wall that will do gun detection. And we're moving the edge compute all the way into this box. So it's not putting tons of data, data latency into the process. And with an error rate of less than 110 of a percent, they're able to cut out the human factor where a human has to. Then look at the. How much quicker could we get first responders out if that was the instance? We're looking at things like body cam, live footage from body cams.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:34:00]:
Right.
Ken Williams [00:34:01]:
Right. Now, if you look at the way most police departments are put together, there's a delay anywhere from about last time I looked 60 seconds to 90 seconds. Right. That's a significant delay when you're telling people what to do in the field. With what we've done with the 5G network now, we can shrink that latency down and get it almost real time.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:34:18]:
No, that's. No, that's fantastic. I'm curious around, what does the landscape look like for public safety communications in the coming years? Like what does that look like for T mobile? What's their roadmap vision for that?
Ken Williams [00:34:29]:
Yeah, I think legal would get really mad at me if I shared Way too much around that.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:34:34]:
That's what he said. Where's he at? Did he already leave? That's what he said.
Ken Williams [00:34:38]:
But what I can share with you is this. I can tell you that from our SEAL suite all the way down, it is something that we're constantly looking at our product teams, which I liaison into through our partner channel. They're constantly looking at what's next for law enforcement, what's next in public safety. And not just let's go in and make smart street lights.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:34:55]:
Right.
Ken Williams [00:34:56]:
We're looking at things like can we route police officers to an incident faster than we're doing it today? And can we do that using some of the smart city appliances that are out there? Right. Partners like Digi who create modems and things that we can put into a box on the street corner that then control all of the smart analytics. Back to the AI discussion earlier, all that smart analytics and all the products and things that go into this box that now allow us to do that route optimization. Change the lights all green down Broadway. Imagine that for a second. In the old days, we used to tell police officers, used to tell you, my dad's a retired cop, he will always tell you this. The straight line is never the fastest route. You're going to go left to go right.
Ken Williams [00:35:32]:
You're going to go right to go left. Nowadays, with some of the technology that's out there and some of the things that we're seeing our partners work on, the straight line will be the fastest route here in the future.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:35:41]:
That's great. We're going to transition to our final section around collaboration and community. This is obviously my favorite section. We talk, probably talk about on every podcast because I actually have a friend who says without a community, you're just a commodity, which is so true. So Bianca, love to hear about how you've been collaborating with peers like Paras and I know, I've read articles, I know you.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:36:05]:
Very collaborative, competitive as well, I would say. But that makes us all better, right? Yeah.
Ken Williams [00:36:10]:
Yeah.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:36:10]:
I love that you just touch upon that collaboration and maybe even competition in the honor of Final four.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:36:17]:
There you go. So there are many examples. Right. And partnerships are key to our strategy and one of our collaborative is very, is one of the principles we can make lives of our communities better. Saskatchewan is one of the co founders, cities of the Connective. This is a regional smart city consortium that came together a few years ago to empower the greater Phoenix community with and to build the most connected smart region. I think we're the first smart region in the US to really develop and deploy technology that is scaled to share best practices, to share data and to implement solutions at scale. We many of our cities here in Greater Phoenix region are part of this connective and we come together a few times a month and we talk about our challenges.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:37:03]:
Some of the challenges are common challenges because or residents have similar expectations. But then there are some specifics that Scottsdale might be focusing on that might not be of importance to Glendale and or vice versa. One example for us, we looked at digital kiosk as wayfinding solutions and one of our sister cities, librarian cities had already implemented that solution. So we want to get excited about it. When we came back and we surveyed our community members, they didn't want that. They didn't want a kiosk in the middle of Old Town being a nuisance because it's not part of the city branding. Right. So they have other ways to find their ways is maybe it's easier because we're so centralized or so that's one example.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:37:43]:
But then we constantly talk about the unique identity of citizens, right to them they might not care that they live in one city and they work in another city. They want the services to be seamless, their experience to be seamless. And that's one of the ways that maybe we can serve them even better to have a way to access the services with one unique identifier id. So those are very much collaborative, very much ideation sessions we have and sharing. The other organizations we're part of is Water Cities. Scottsdale was one of the first cities I think in Arizona to be recognized as a waterworks cities. So those are cities that are really data driven, data enabled and really using data to make a difference. And now many of our Arizona cities are either silver or gold.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:38:30]:
Scatts will just receive gold. And one of the others we're hearing are platinum. So ready to in July we're going to be platinum too, right? So that's another example. And then US collaboration that we're part of last year we were one of the first 20 cities to be selected by Bloomberg Philanthropies for the City and Data alliance program. This is a program that in the next three years they're going to include 100 cities around South, Central and North America to again provide those opportunities for partnerships with global entities to make a difference in local communities. So we're one of the first and as an outcome of that partnership we were the first city to publish a data service standard. So that's really going beyond open data Publishing data is really, again, engaging the community to find a way that we can share data in an interactive way that's really meaningful to them, to get to understand what's happening and how we make decisions. So that was a great, great way to start that.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:39:28]:
And now, because we're members of that, we can learn from all the other cities that are going through this program and be able to leverage some of the solutions they're developing as well. So always looking to collaborate and share what we're doing and learn from others as well.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:39:40]:
I love that. For us, in the honor of competition and basketball, how do you like to push the ball up the court? I know you collaborate with Bianca, but what are some areas where you're like, I really want to recruit folks from Scottsdale to Glendale.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:39:56]:
Okay.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:39:56]:
And the camera is right there. The camera is right there.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:39:59]:
Okay. I'm going to look at the camera, say, I do not subscribe to that idea of poaching.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:40:07]:
Imagine that was a tall question that.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:40:11]:
Just in case you dig deep and then you find out, oh, there was somebody who was at Scottsdale, ended up in a senior position at Glendale. That really happened. But it was our fire chief.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:40:24]:
The fire chief, yes. And then some of his fire team members, too. And we all weep. But that was.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:40:32]:
That's how it works.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:40:33]:
But not.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:40:33]:
My fire chief also came from Glendale, and emergency manager also came from. So, yes, that's.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:40:40]:
Yeah, it happens. For this bidirectional integration of talent that goes on a nicer way to put it, but without collaboration, this thing doesn't work. This idea of leveraging technology and being able to produce technology that are acceptable and usable by our citizens. And what Bianca was talking about, that one may reside in one city and conduct business in other cities. So they want to experience that. So collaboration is important because then you can standardize on certain things. But at the same time, competition is also very healthy. It allows you to push the limits and push the boundaries.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:41:20]:
And my personal perspective is that it's not competition to say, I win and you lose. It's a competition to say, here is what I can do and maybe you can benefit from it. Bianca and I, we and our team, we talk about it and we discuss, but we at the same time build on what each other has done. So I'll give you an example. So the reason why I mentioned about the. Our fire chief coming from Scottsdale, he was used to getting certain reports and dashboards when he was in his role at Scottsdale. So first thing he did was when he joined us, he Came to my office and he said, hey, I need more data. I said, fantastic, tell me what you need.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:42:00]:
And I, in all honesty, I didn't know that he would introduce us to the person who was producing the data for him and then bring the person.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:42:08]:
Yes, yes.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:42:10]:
So he said, okay, yeah, I'll set up a meeting and you can talk to my guy in Scottsdale. He used to produce all these dashboards for me, and I need those. I said, okay. So we put together a meeting. We have this person on the call. We had my team on the call. We went through the dashboard that he was used to, we built, and we improved upon it. And I'm not just saying for the sake of saying, just an example.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:42:35]:
There's a dashboard that he used to look where it would give him a spatial view of hot zones where they were high risk of fire. And over a period of time, you can look at that. We built something, it had a spatial view, but it also had a temporal view. Why temporal view? Because now it gives you a time slice of that location to see really if your strategy that you applied to reduce your risk, did it actually work or not. That's how you leverage learning from other partner city and then build upon it and improve upon it.
Dr. Bianca Lochner [00:43:10]:
Now that I know that we're gonna help it as well.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:43:14]:
But yeah, it benefits. But there is always that spirit of, can I do better?
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:43:19]:
Yeah, I. There's some CIOs in California that I know. I'll keep them unnamed. But there is a very. There's a very healthy competition. One gentleman has a very at the office approach to work, and I'm a people person if no one el to notice. So I love being around people. And there's also a hybrid approach that another gentleman likes and.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:43:40]:
And out of county, and they started seeing some applications floating from one county to the other. So you're not the only two that ever happens, but they have a. We had a good beverage over it.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:43:53]:
But I'll tell you, in general, the openness. So I'm a transplant from California, so I spend most of my time. You know about this one example of leveraging this, right? We gave you an example of how Chief was using dashboards in Scottsdale, and we built upon it. Similar kind of situation came up when I joined. A year into my role. My team was building an app for our finance department because the sales tax, the way it is collected in Arizona, is collected at a state level, and then it's distributed to the city proportionate to their share. What started as a good Idea that smaller cities don't have resources, so state can help them out by collecting this and then dispersing it turns out that's not the most efficient way of doing it and that good ideas quickly turn into a bad idea. So we are building an app for our finance department, especially sales tax department, so they can quickly identify who has paid, who has not paid, who has incorrectly paid and how we can recover the revenues because it's the lifeblood of the city, the sales tax revenue.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:45:01]:
So we built that app and then I challenged my team, let's convert this app into a product. So we converted that into a SaaS product. Now that in itself is an accomplishment, but turning the mindset of a tenured public sector employee who is not incentivized to go take a product public and then make boatload of money, it's just normal job. But my team was able to do that. We won last year's CIO 100 award around this. That's not even the story. We launched it at Arizona Finance Officers Conference and we now have about 40% of Arizona cities using this application that we developed and it's a SaaS solution subscription. We can't monetize it to the fullest extent, but we at least cover our cost.
Feroz Merchhiya [00:45:54]:
So it's cost neutral and we run it the same way as a commercial software company would run it. It's going through its SOC certification. So just if you would go and buy a product and you would ask for SOC certification, we'll make sure that you have it. We are in year two, so we're getting that done and we'll publish that and others are benefiting from it. So there are ways to collaborate and there are ways to excel and stand out in terms of what you build and what you develop.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:46:24]:
Fantastic. Great, Ken Mural. As we wrap up, just any quick thoughts on collaboration, both from the public private kind of partnership side and then from the city of Jackson, we'll go with Ken.
Ken Williams [00:46:34]:
Yeah, I think collaboration is a very important piece of what we're doing now, especially in the government space. I talked a little bit about those partners earlier that Paul Spencer and George Fisher have built that program up to be what it is today. And it is inclusive of things across the ability to help public sector all the way into enterprise and small business. We're not stopping there. We're continuing to grow and add partners into that community so that when we come and we talk to you now, it's not about the cell phone anymore. It's now about here's a solution that's going to change the game for you as a city.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:47:04]:
For me, I think one thing that we've been able to do well for the past year is really harnessing the city's soulfulness. And this has enabled us to really rebrand ourselves and move throughout the community in a more positive light. And I think that that's been a real challenge at the beginning, and now we're, we are seeing some success with that. I like that. Just piggybacking off the soulfulness that the city of Jackson has, and we're harnessing that internally and it's being seen externally now.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:47:45]:
That's how culture works. Thank you for coming on the Public Sector show by Tech Tables. Appreciate you.
Dr. Muriel Reid [00:47:50]:
Thank you so much.
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:47:51]:
Hey, what's up everybody?
Joe Toste, Founder @ TechTables [00:47:52]:
This is Joe Tossi from Techtables.com and you're listening to the Public Sector show by Tech Tables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, 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 Podcast. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.
