#215: CapMetro Built AI So Human Callers Can’t Tell + How Austin Put Data Stewardship Before AI Hype + UTSA’s “Humble, Hungry, Kind” Culture — All With Limited Resources

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Episode Summary

Austin has a talent pipeline that runs from high school Shark Tank to executive leadership. CapMetro has an AI paratransit agent so human that riders can't tell the difference. UTSA turned nine frustrated leaders into collaborative innovators with a framework built on being hungry, humble, and kind. And a homeless services app quietly discovered 40% hidden capacity that's helping vulnerable citizens show up to job interviews with dignity.

From transparent budget conversations during declining revenue to failing twice before breakthrough, this episode is a masterclass in leading with creativity, community, and purpose when resources are tight and the stakes are human.

Featuring

Tanya Acevedo, Senior Vice President and CIO, CapMetro
Kendra Ketchum, VP for Information Management & Technology, The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA)
Kerrica Laake, Chief Information Officer, City of Austin
Chris Stewart, Chief Technology Officer, Freeit Data Solutions (former CIO, City of Austin)

Transcript

Joe Toste: Welcome to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. All returning guests with Kerrica and Tanya just came on the podcast. This is awesome. We'll link to that episode of the show notes. And Chris, let's kick off with you a little bit about yourself and then we'll go all the way down for those who don't know.

Chris Stewart: Chris Stewart, 23 year City of Austin, employee former US Air Force Veteran. Started with the city at the Utility electric utility. With desktop support. So doing some of that, the IT work when [00:01:00] you make a phone call. I was Johnny on the spot. Worked through a lot of IT roles around the city.

Ended up being A-A-C-I-O for Austin Water. So I got to do both sides of the utilities and then eventually CIO for the city of Austin, which was really great way to end that career. For the past year, almost a year and a half went to their private sector, which has been a really great transition.

Now the Chief Technology Officer for Freeit Data Solutions. So I get to work with great leaders like this really aligning their IT strategies, their IT visions to technology solutions that work for their communities. It's been really great. 

Joe Toste: Love that. And we're gonna link to episode 170 with Chris from Big Sky Montana, the Airbnb experience.

That was incredible. That's great that we had a bear come on at one point outside, so we had to pause the podcast and go say hi to the bear and then come back. Yeah, it was. It was epic. Yeah. I 

Kerrica Laake: would not say hi to the bear, just telling. I'm glad we're here at la. 

Joe Toste: Listen, it was a great bear.

It was a great bear. It was a great bear.

Tanya Acevedo: Tanya Acevedo. I'm the Chief Information Officer for [00:02:00] Cap Metro in Austin, Texas. Previously I've served as CIO for Travis County, also in Austin and in Houston. I had the opportunity to serve as the chief technology officers for the airports. 

Joe Toste: And you were in the county and Orange 

Tanya Acevedo: County as a as a program manager for Orange County and Florida.

Joe Toste: And Florida. 

Tanya Acevedo: I did a stint with Miami-Dade College as their CIO about four 

Kendra Ketchum: years ago. 

Joe Toste: Awesome. Kendra? 

Kendra Ketchum: Hi, I'm Kendra Ketchum. I'm the Vice president and CIO at the University of Texas in San Antonio. And I've been at the university about six years now. I came down from the University of North Texas where I was the CTO for about five years.

I've spent about 26 years in higher education working in technological areas and fields, and I think really looking back on my career and pivoting from the military, which was healthcare. It's landed me in a good spot now because as you've heard the news, UTSA is now merging with the UT Health Science Center, and so [00:03:00] I'm going back in, in time I think to, become familiar again with all of that health information system.

So it's been a great ride. I love San Antonio. It's a beautiful city and just love being here. Thank you guys, 

Joe Toste: and excited. This is this is several times we've now been to San Antonio. This has turned into like the hotspot. I don't know what it is. So 2023, you hosted us. So we didn't do any video recording, but we did all these kind of private round tables and everything at UTSA.

Yeah, at 

Kendra Ketchum: the School of Data Science. That was right after we had just opened that new building. And so that's where our cyber operations sits as well. So it was a great experience. 

Joe Toste: Got to see the tour of the soc and then last year EDUCAUSE happened to be here, so we'll link to that one in the show notes.

Yeah,

Kendra Ketchum: That was a great episode. That 

Joe Toste: was a great episode. I'm glad you 

Kendra Ketchum: edited for sure. 

Joe Toste: Awesome Kerrica. 

Kerrica Laake: Laake. I'm the Chief Information Officer for the City of Austin, a long time. City of Austin employee. I've been there 33 years. I started as an intern in college and it's a big city.

You move around, you do a lot of different things. I spent 28 years at the electric utility and [00:04:00] since then I have been with the central IT Agency for the City communications. And technology management first as a deputy CIO and then for the last couple of years as the CIO, when the guy at the end of the couch retired.

Joe Toste: I love that. I said this on the last podcast, but I have never met a CIO who was once the intern at the age to Rise. That is just, i'm sure if you see the interns today, just the nostalgia has to be incredible. So we're gonna kick off with Chris over here. So you've been on both sides of the table hiring as a CIO and now advising with Freeit, I'm curious, I specific qualities do you look for when identifying future technology leaders and how has that perspective evolved since your time at the city of Austin?

Chris Stewart: For me it's two of my core values are integrity and accountability. So I look for that in any leader and frankly any employee, but in particular leaders they need, they've got to really lead with integrity. And then accountability for me is just huge. So I see a lot of [00:05:00] cultural issues around the lack of accountability, and that goes both ways, both from, the staff side and management side.

In the city of Austin, when I was, when I took over for CIO. We really took a hard look at ourselves and we held ourselves accountable to employees and let them see that every level was accountable. There was a sense that at some point you weren't, you may not have had the accountability that you do at staff level and you know that really destroys culture.

It's really hard to lead an organization that has mistrust. So we really needed to build that trust back, and I think that's just critical. So if you lead with Integrity accountability's at the core. I think you're gonna have that foundation to be able to leave a, a large scale IT organization.

Joe Toste: I think sometimes accountability can be a scary word for some folks. I had a great podcast. I interviewed one of the very rare private sector podcast, but I'm sure you're familiar with Dave Ramsey. Sure. Who runs like a $400 million organization. I actually interviewed A CTO Brendan Wilco, and all on a presentation he gave actually on, on accountability.

Which I'll link in, into the show notes, but, integrity, accountability, it kinda goes [00:06:00] hand in hand, right? You immediately just be like, you say you're gonna do something, you just wanna follow through, right? That's what builds trust. That's what builds that relationship

kerrica how are you intentionally creating similar pathways right now? So this is like workforce development a little bit, but at the city of Austin are there any programs or specific approaches you're using to identify hidden talent at the city of Austin right now? 

Kerrica Laake: Formal internship programs. Definitely the city has formal internship programs. We try and participate in those as well as those that are sponsored by other agencies. And, talent comes from a lot of different places. There are a lot of veteran programs that we bring in veteran interns for a period of time so that they can translate the skills that they've had in the military into our workforce.

Into our workforce. So I think that development of talent happens just throughout the lifecycle of someone's career. It doesn't have to be just. That intern coming in from college. And, or it can [00:07:00] be earlier. We have a high school internship program that is amazing. I think this generation they are just gonna knock our socks off.

I do a six week program with them. They come in, they have a set of problems they develop technology around that problem and they do a Shark Tank style presentation on here's the solution to this city problem. So start very early while they're still in school, but you also have to take into account people who are in the middle of their career and there's still lots of innovation and development that can happen there.

We just went through a titles exercise to make sure we had the right titles and had some level of career path in the organization. So all of that works together in your organizational design to make sure that you're healthy from those people entering to the workforce through the whole lifecycle when people are ready to exit.

Joe Toste: So for the kids, were you one of the sharks? 

Kerrica Laake: I have [00:08:00] not been a sharp, but I've heard their pre presentations amazing talent. Sometimes you wonder, do we have that talent right now in our organization we do. But they are just just so attuned with technology in making presentations.

And the curiosity. Sometimes along the way, we use the curiosity and they have all the cur curiosity in the world, and you wanna continue to develop that. 

Joe Toste: Next time I'm in Austin, there happens to be a, high school presentation. I wanna be a shark. 

Kerrica Laake: Im signing you up.

Same. I'm signing you up. Same. I love that. 

Joe Toste: So Tanya, we talked about this in the previous episode, but. Having span nationwide, you've been able to build several teams. Today's economic climate is tough. Everyone off camera's talking about that. Talk about maintaining that team cohesion and motivation when resources are limited

Tanya Acevedo: the most important thing is that we need to be transparent and especially right now and with so much [00:09:00] unknowns because it is. Being shaken, right? I don't think that anybody anticipated some of the changes that we're seeing in our communities. And so it's very important to be transparent and we rely at Metro, we rely a lot on our sales tax.

And if it wasn't for the transparency that our CEO and our CFO have been and have shown say to us that. The sales tax revenue is getting is much lower than anticipated and has been in the past that's been preparing us for the last year. And so how that's been a downstream impact for my team and how we work together is that we have to start scaling back on some of the professional services that we're used to in better economic times.

We scale back on extended staff. And so with that, we have to be more creative in how we handle our precious resources, internal resources, [00:10:00] and how we skill across our organization and share ideas and share opportunities to be more efficient and that work smarter mentality and really acknowledge the fact that yes we're hitting some burnout and we're seeing it.

But now's not the time to burn out. We've got to keep that. And so that's that leadership that comes in and how do we get creative in celebrating our wins within our teams and acknowledging the fact that we are being spread thin and encouraging that comradery and continuing that excellent customer service to the citizens that we serve.

And the attention to the mission. That we're delivering and how important it is. 

Joe Toste: Kendra, in our last episode at EDUCAUSE here in San Antonio, 196, you talked about hungry, humble, and kind love that leadership model. First, for those who haven't heard about this give us just a quick snippet.

Kendra Ketchum: It's a, obviously a combination of [00:11:00] works, but Pat Lencioni's work and it's finding that ideal team player and so who is the ideal team player and. All the research has led to people that are, like you had mentioned, curious that curiosity is bred because they wanna learn. And so when you see those people come into your ecosystem and your, like your stratosphere, it's investing in that doubling down and saying, okay, they're hungry, they're humble, they're kind, now let's polish 'em.

What can we do internally to give them a trajectory to polish them so that they. Actually go as a student would in matriculating through their program, let 'em matriculate through our service line, or, learn the engineering skills. They may not have the best technical skills in the drawer.

Those are things that can be taught and learned. But behaviors and how we treat people and those things are ingrained in us with value systems, right? And so when you find hungry, humble, and kind, you're already tapping into a resource that's going to deliver. Now just because they're hungry and humble and kind does not mean you have to do things to keep them hungry, [00:12:00] humble, and kind.

You. So that's that intentional leadership that's giving them that guidance, that direction. And I often use the analogy of a ship. It's, you are guiding this. They are leaning into the direction of which you're guiding, make mistakes. And when I make a mistake, they will know about it because I want them to learn as we make this mistake together.

' cause that's when mistakes don't happen twice. And so to encourage that hungry, you can't turn around and discipline or oh, you can't do that. No testing and no dev and no learning any of that. Right now it's just operations and you got that immediately goes against what you just set up, right?

And so that, keeping that curiosity there is, I, and it's a motto you've heard me use before, is fail fast, pivot faster, and that's the expectation. But it takes the leader. To set that pace and tone so that I am now safe. Back to what you had mentioned about trust, if you were to look at Maslow's Hierarchy and Needs trust is at the very bottom.

[00:13:00] Okay? The very top is results, and then there's communication. Obviously all of those, things in between. But those two things to get to results. If you don't have the foundation of trust and you can't get that by just, I call it that seagull leadership. You've seen it where they come in, they're let me fly back out.

That is not the kind of leader that is demonstrating those those characteristics to lead a hungry, humble, kind team. Now I also say don't mistake kindness for weakness. And so that's an important thing too, is because you can learn together. Back to accountability. Accountability doesn't know anybody's name.

And if I hold myself to that same accountability. Teams mirror us folks. They do. And then they mirror your next line down and your next line down. And so if that mirror is reflecting what the leader is setting as that north star, they're going to mirror that. And here's where it gets really interesting, because it, that's just in it, that's just us working in, in, in technology.

And I always tell people, it's not the widgets folks you wanna transfer, it's the people. The success of any org is the people. So [00:14:00] now we take that and we amplify it sideways in our org. Because that's where the problems u usually happen, right? It's Joe's a manager here. Sally's a manager in that line over there.

Different departments, different divisions, but they need Sally to do something so that they can test something here. And if they can't communicate and collaborate, we got a problem. It's usually in the form of egos, bravados, and blocks, right? So what we try to do now is run that parallel in our org. That means me and the cabinet leaders.

Are treating each other the same way and mirroring that in our org. So now their leaders are starting to mirror them. Culture will trump your strategy all day long, and if you don't focus on that first, you can spend 700 pounds of effort to get to a place that just is halfway of what you want it to be.

So that's why the world doesn't exist in those orgs and it's often in technology teams that are commodities, they're not looked at as resources. They're, the demand's still coming in, even in tight times. So how do we take them out of the commodity mindset? It's [00:15:00] ownership. I wanna own the outcome of this.

That's accountability, that's integrity, that's hungry, that's humble, that's I wanna learn, I wanna share with my partners. And so anyway, I'm passionate about it because I really feel that is, yeah, that's an area where in technology teams, and I had mentioned this in my last podcast, I will not repeat it again, but I will say those brilliant people that are mean.

And not necessarily ideating together. And the knowledge is power folks, that's not the case, right? That's just, we've seen them be individual successes. But if you wanna go far, you go together, you wanna go fast, go alone, see how they go 

Tanya Acevedo: for it. And on the flip side, you can be very nice too. And not deliver, yeah, just focus on keeping your job rather than doing your job.

And so that's that balance. That you need to gotta ensure. Ensure accountability and 

Kendra Ketchum: execution. Yes. Back to that 16 personalities and some of the teams didn't know about themselves. They were not ideating across platforms. I was asking for new [00:16:00] ideas, we're not getting them. We brought in Pat Lin and Chris Laing who runs, he was part of the table group and we did the 16 Personalities and the Working Genius and the working Genius.

Basically widget spells out Widge. It's wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing tenacity. So if you look at all of that and how, or in invention, sorry, I left out the eye. That together. When I walked into a meeting and they did not know what their working geniuses were, I was like, let's ideate, come on, let's share ideas.

My working genius is wonder and invention, their working frustrations. Nine out of the 11 people in the room. Had a working frustration of wonder and invention because their working genius was tenacity and discernment. I immediately recognized, I was like, oh man, this is beautiful, because now we know why.

Now we can do actionable strategies to work through our frustrations. So now I know when I walk in that room, I'm gonna frustrate them, so I need to meet them where they are. They [00:17:00] realize if she's coming in here all ideating, sunshine and Skittles, it's gonna be, we're gonna get frustrated. So they need to meet me where I'm, and when you have people striving to meet each other where they are.

A lot of beautiful things can happen. So Kendra, have you created an app for that, an AI app for that? No, but we need one because let's ideate and put it, Hey, don't put that on. We need to keep that in the, but yeah, that would be a great happy. It really would because it gives to quickly, yeah, and it start the teams, the seeds that you can plant by doing that man, which you, and you don't care who gets credit for it.

That's the other thing. I don't care who gets, but the seeds have been planted in higher ed. That is our business. We generate knowledge and if we don't share it, then that's a big problem for me. But yeah, it's good stuff. 

Joe Toste: No, I love that. There, there's a lot I could unpack. I'm not going to just for time but the fail fast.

This is, coaching high school basketball, the, as a coach, it drives you. The turnover doesn't kill you. It's the kid not getting back on defense after they turn the ball over that you're like, you just, sta just, 

Kendra Ketchum: he's what did I just do? And he stops completely [00:18:00] dead in his tracks and.

Joe Toste: And then that there's the coaching point where halftime, you're like, dude, it's just next play. It's just next play. You gotta get the ball out. You cannot dwell on the fact 

Kendra Ketchum: that you turned the ball over. Back to that too, I think we all have probably learned the most from our failures goes back to accountability, right?

The people who have held us the most accountable man I've learned the most from, I tell you. And that's the truth. It's on the other side of that comfortable zone of being uncomfortable where you learn. I, 

Tanya Acevedo: our team is working on a project that I've failed twice at so far. And so I'm like, if this is their time and we're gonna fail at this, 

Kendra Ketchum: I don't think it can be done.

Yep. I always say, ' cause you know those people that walk in and they're usually in the, in their boardroom and they're like, failure's not an option. Wrong. I'll prove them wrong every time because. That means I'm not going to go above and beyond to ideate because it's not an option for me to do that. So I'm gonna do just what I need to do to execute that because I don't wanna fail, so anyway, I, it just creates some bad behaviors. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. And I think I dunno how much [00:19:00] time Karica you've had to spend, but I don't know anyone in Dallas actually, but Lisa Kent in Houston, and then Craig here in San Antonio. I think you would love getting to know them, like they are absolutely fantastic.

I actually had a, when I was in Houston, I had a three and a half hour dinner with Lisa and it was, we covered technology, people relationships. Same thing with Craig. Just like absolutely fantastic. And so I think where I'm going with it is she's part of a all monthly breakfast.

Yeah. We 

Kendra Ketchum: were talking right beforehand about that. We're planning now. Yeah. Tanya in our plan. Yeah. It comes back to that connective tissue and then get folks at the university there too. That goes back to that. We're gonna research something that's like way out there. Let's do a test lab over here.

But I think those are great. I think every great city has to have those partners public and private in a university needs to be sitting in that stratosphere somewhere. Yeah. 

Joe Toste: My last thought it. If you've ever emailed with Craig at the bottom he has one team, one mission which I just, I absolutely love that.

At UTSA, what was so great [00:20:00] was, mark from Bear County, he showed up Evan from CPS, a lot of folk. It was just great to see the community come together. And there's just a no egos in the room and. Yeah, it was great.

And Austin, it's got a fantastic community.

Kendra Ketchum: We should even look at bringing one of y'all down to ours and, Hey, meet these folks and then up to there and do a little interchanging. That would be great. Yeah, 

Joe Toste: absolutely. Yeah. I mowed, I got some chips on the table, city of Houston, Harris County to come.

'cause I had Craig came to Houston last year and and so it's on their turn to either come to. He lives in San Antonio. He, so he's gotta come to, they gotta come meet in Austin maybe? Yeah. Is the next meetup maybe at the Commodore? Let's do it. She got married at the Commodore just for it.

I did, yeah. 

Kerrica Laake: Yes. 

Joe Toste: So Kerrica, you've probably noticed I love books, so I'm bringing another book in. I know I've been bringing all these books in for the podcast. But in extreme ownership by Jocko and Leif Babin, the first law of combat they talk about is cover and move. So to summarize, individuals and teams must support one another working together in order to [00:21:00] accomplish the mission.

Like we've been talking about this, so I was curious, like we've talked about relationships, but how do you build those across the city, both horizontally and vertically? 

Kerrica Laake: There's a structured way to do that. And then there's the informal is more fun. Okay. You go and you have the coffee, you have lunch. I, myself, I try to reach out to directors and we, we go and we meet for a coffee, we. Teach each other on a personal level, and then we, talk a little business. What are those things that drive that, that keep them up at night?

What's driving them? What are they striving for in their delivery of service for the city of Austin? So those informal relationships like that, that relationship building is really important. And then. More formalized. So we have a business relationship management program. We assign the business relationship managers to executives across the city, and they understand their business.

They understand what their requests are, they see the patterns and the trends between the different departments, and try and bubble those things up to much [00:22:00] larger city initiatives and things that we need to start planning and looking for. So having that, that link into the technology organization where they can always reach out.

Sure. They can always reach out to me. That's not a problem. But having that BRM that's more connected to what they do on the daily is just it's that critical piece of, that you bridge the technology and that business component and they feel like they're being heard and they have someone to reach out to.

Joe Toste: How big is your leadership team that directly reports to you? 

Kerrica Laake: I have three deputies, a chief of staff and someone in hr. Someone in security.

Joe Toste: And then those folks each have their team that bubble up. 

Kerrica Laake: Absolutely. And they do work, every manager does work with other managers and staff across the city.

So those relationships are in informal and develop over time. But we've tried to do a lot more with collaboration and sharing information recently too. So in February we had our [00:23:00] first ever City of Austin technology conference. So we invited technologists across the city for a day to collaborate, hear presentations on data and AI and what we're doing with our other digital transformation efforts.

And people were just. Stunned by the amount of services that were offered. Sometimes people feel in their departments, they have to do it all themselves, but we have this wealth of services that we could be providing in the departments. They had the opportunity to go to different kiosks and learn about the services.

We had great keynotes on AI and, I keep I guess my, my, my piece in the organization about AI. We, you've been a good steward of your data then. Yeah, we'll have great AI ha. Have you been a good steward? So we had a lot of discussions just on data and data management and data hygiene so that we can get to all these great things we wanna do with AI.

You have to have the foundation. So we talked a lot about that and how to [00:24:00] get there. 

Joe Toste: So I've got two thoughts in my head. First is. I know it might be a little biased, but do you have a, like a favorite use case? You got a wide portfolio across the city of Austin. Is there a particular use case you're like, I just really that use case

Kerrica Laake: anything that gets back down to the citizen, to the individual and the person. We did an application for our homeless strategy office. And it helped people who were experiencing homelessness. They have a place to keep their things while they go and do job interviews, right?

They get to go and interact and they don't have to keep their things in a bush or hide them. They can put them into a safe locker while they go have their interview, and the team thought they were outta space. They didn't have any more space. And we were able to write a simple application for them to say, no, you have 40% more space.

If you just allocate these things and make sure things are getting turned over, that's 40% more people you can help than you thought you could. So those things that [00:25:00] actually help an individual in our community, I think are just so important. I 

Joe Toste: love that. That's a great practical example technology touching the human side.

My other, back to the Austin for the citywide, was there any way that you were able to package that to where I'm thinking about Austin's so large and you've got folks in different departments. Is there any way, like basically like a private chat bot, LLM, anything to be able to go research and find.

Information without having to, 

Kerrica Laake: I go back to the are you a good steward of your data? And so I still feel like we're in that phase where yes, we're exploring different use cases, AI, but we're really focused on data and analytics and making sure things are. Are ready and actionable.

Lots of talk discussions about do we use, public LLMs? Do we create our own? There are probably some really good use cases. There are where a LLM will make sense, public health data, things like that. So we [00:26:00] continue to explore and determine where we need to put our focus and our time and our energies for the city.

Joe Toste: Exciting time. We'll have to have you come back on. Later, I dunno, six months, a year from now and get an update to see what the city of Austin. So Chris, so last podcast, oh, I got it right here. One 70, how large city CIOs are building responsive government, regional collaboration, and future talent pipelines.

That was a stacked local government podcast. And we had you Rob Lloyd, mark Wittenberg, who's now in the city of Raleigh. And Rob was at the city of San Jose at the time, and then you were representing Austin. So you had mentioned, I actually went back, I just pulled the transcript. I didn't listen to the podcast, but I did pull the transcript.

I wanted to know what did Chris say two years ago? You had mentioned restructuring your leadership team and addressing the challenges of having too many interim positions how did you create that team where teams support one another during that transition

Chris Stewart: First it started with communication.

We, we asked employees how they were. So we had some third party assessments done really focused on culture. Which I [00:27:00] don't think happens all the time where you actually focus on culture. Usually it's the technology landscape. How are we doing? You ask customers how you're doing. But city management wanted to really take a strong look into the department and get down to every employee's opinions on what's going on, to see where we could make effective change.

And that led us to a good understanding of kinda where the issues were. And so we were able to start rebuilding. And again, I think it goes back to trust. We've talked about, I think everybody's mentioned trust. So one of the things I found is the interim positions are, they're, they have to happen.

And a lot of it happened during the COVID time where we had a hiring freeze for almost a year. We weren't allowed to hire. So we had people move around and leave the city and each one of those positions just got left for a year. And so you have to bring people up and you have to give them opportunities to fill these roles, and that's fantastic for that individual.

But what we've found is a lot of mistrust then. If that person was eventually placed in the position, if they earned that spot through a competitive process, it was seen as unfair. Of course they got the job, they were doing it for a year and a half, [00:28:00] whatever. And I could see where that perception came from.

I go of course that's a heck of a leg up if you've, if you're doing the job to then get the job once it's posted. That's a pretty, pretty good pretty good leg up. So we really committed to turning these over much, much faster. And we put resources into hr. I actually had every position had to go through me to get approved, to get posted.

So we were able to, instead of first come, first serve, it was we put some strategy to how we're hiring. But it was, again, it just went back to that trust. They had to have some trust that we're gonna do this the right way, we're gonna focus on this. And then we also did some work around how we choose our interim selections, moving some interims around, giving more people more opportunities.

Reaching even from outside our organization. So reaching into other departments, there's a lot of it in a big city that doesn't belong in the central it. So we were able to pull some folks over and give them opportunity, which was really great. 'cause it also has a lot of collaboration. So a lot of times where you work in electric utility for 28 years, you have a good understanding of what [00:29:00] happens in the city, but you've never been in the seat.

So it brings someone over, they get to see what's going on in our department and they get to bring that back. Whenever they go back to their individual department. And that kind of also helped out with some of the perceptions that may have been not quite correct both ways where maybe you thought this group doesn't do what I think they do, and turns out they do a heck of a lot more and you never had any idea the responsibilities.

So it was actually a really great opportunity. And it all came from, again, the employee feedback and listening to what they had to say. That's where it all started. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. No, I, that. One, it's like marriage, right? Like communication breaks down your son. You're like, okay, this is the first thing we need to fix.

Highly recommend the book Extreme Ownership. It is so good. It's part military history, part business, the application side. One of the stories in the beginning of the book they talk about is the Battle of Ramadi and, I actually interviewed the lead sniper, JP Dinnell, who's featured in the book in the beginning that reported to Jocko.

Episode 96. It was [00:30:00] fantastic.

I don't normally talk about kind of the sections that I group the podcast in, but I like this section a lot of breaking through the way we've always done things right, like that mindset of hey, this is just the way we've done it. This is black Swan is coming to take you out at this point.

'cause if you are always thinking, this is the way we've done it, that's another great book. Why, by the way, black Swan? It's just, it's very tough to. Push for innovation, push for even just change in general. And Tanya, CapMetro, pretty large organization we've talked about this, I think I, I wanna really hammer home, the leadership approaches to specifically breaking through.

You talked about the innovation lab and the last podcast, breaking through the mentality of this is the way we've always done it. 

Tanya Acevedo: That's if you're in government sector, you've and other, and private sector too. This is, can be one of the huge culture and we, Chris talked about it, Kendrick talked about it, character talked about it, is that it will eat your strategy all day long and culture can be.

[00:31:00] As simple as, I have five weeks of vacation that I get every year, and so I've accumulated, three months. Therefore I will take three weeks off every, three months and therefore multiply that by three other people and it's perfectly fine. And so the little things like that culture of, yeah, it's fine if we keep the, SLAs where they need to be.

And we're delivering where we need to be, but that's not, you can't do that. And so those are the, just an examples of how we, just, because it was okay in the past, how do you move, how do you move forward? And it's always a challenge. And it's especially a challenge when a new CCIO goes to a new organization.

And gets those things. So what do you do? Do you do workshops? Do you talk about that? Do you talk about the elephant in the room? What is the single most effective way to change [00:32:00] that culture? And because that's it, how, if you've always done it in the past and it's always worked well, then great. But with this evolution, it's not gonna work with ai.

It's going to be a disruptor. And it's that whole, have you ever experienced that plane emergency landing? And the, if you haven't, the literally the the flight attendants will say, if you don't jump, we're gonna push you. And so they, and it makes sense because you're gonna hold, you're gonna, you're gonna risk lives.

And in your government. These can risk lives, right? If we're not doing our job, we're not delivering our services it, it impacts, that whole, the domino impact of it is huge. And so that's where I think you really need to get that purpose driven public, steward and focus on that within your leadership and stay being stagnant is right there with, is the worst thing that I think that you can do. And that's why it's, as a leader, you have [00:33:00] to focus on doing your job and not keeping it. Because a lot of leaders, that don't press their, teams to succeed and change culture when it's uncomfortable won't succeed in these jobs.

Joe Toste: So in the last podcast I'd asked Kerrica, she was hiring an AI coordinator. Position. I've actually asked a lot of CIOs behind the scenes because right now is, this huge transformation. You have your existing staff and I'm actually gonna meet with Infotech next week with their research group as I'm actually, it's funny, I'm known for the podcast, but often we'll research topics that other CIOs are talking about in my private community.

So I just jot down, what are you thinking about? How can I go talk about this? And then I go pull people around and research it. And this role is like in general pretty fascinating because when you're getting the data cleaned up right now Yeah. Fantastic. Start and what does it look like to, what does this, what does the staff look like?

How do you train people for something that they've been in a job for 30 years? How do you It's tough, right? I [00:34:00] worked at, when I was young, my, my first job I worked at a property management software company. Called Yardi Systems, which is cool. So I learned SQL, which I didn't know first day.

I didn't even know what a web server or a database was, but team leads drawing this on the whiteboard and I'm just like, mind blown right outta college. Yeah. 

Kendra Ketchum: So that's so awesome that you said that because a lot, I think all of us are seeing this transformation in our orgs. And by 20, here's just some facts too, that I had research.

By 2030, we're gonna reach super intelligence, right? So AI is capable of doing these individual tasks, right? And there's not a lot of beautiful tasks, right? They're just in individual tasks. So when that happens, if we're not now repurposing our workforce to level up and be more skilled architects and engineers and understand that those individual tasks are going to be done.

By our automation orchestration stacks, period. So recognizing that, I think one of the things I stepped into, everyone's oh, AI is, I called it a hype cycle. I looked at the hype cycle of how [00:35:00] long it's gonna last. Look, what are we talking about? Because cloud was a hype cycle. Oh my gosh.

Cloud, and then everyone went to cloud. Everybody came back from the cloud and there. So I wanted to lean into it with a framework. So we tried to create A-U-T-S-A AI factory framework, if you're gonna bring us a use case. Governance is at the very beginning, going back to data integrity, quality, data, veracity, all of those things, right?

So your use case has to demonstrate all through the stack using our resources, open source and in-house to secure our data. Again, we're a state agency, right? And so we have to ensure those controls and security in place, but that framework should help guide what we're going to do on the next. So an example of an exciting piece of AI that I'm.

I want some chat bots that are human. And you guys have heard of digital human. Yeah. Digital humans right now are, and so I keep thinking to myself, imagine the old days of we walk up to a kiosk. We imagine if you interacted with somebody, 

Tanya Acevedo: I'm gonna jump right in. We are deploying for our paratransit.

You have to get, you have to become [00:36:00] eligible to get our paratransit service. It's very specialized and. You get it's Uber for special needs paratransit. And so our AI assistant that we're rolling out sounds just like a human. Yeah. It is not Siri. It will, it is it amazing and it interacts. So human like that.

I don't think that anyone's going to know unless they start getting in true arguments with our agent. 

Kendra Ketchum: It is going it. It's mind blowing. Blowing. I wanted to looking at how you can even bring that into your in-house. Going back to what you had mentioned, you guys remember the day as a SharePoint, like you go, where is everything, right?

You walk in, you're onboarding, you spend two weeks trying to learn where everything is at, right? Imagine a world where that is gone. You come in and you have, so I want to, we wanna roll out Rowdy. Rowdy, right? So rowdy. Our, we're the roadrunners. So roll out, rowdy where we can, I can be sitting anywhere.

And my ai, it's AG agentic AI is [00:37:00] what it is. Obviously using the agents, but looking at ag agent AI and how we could deploy that small scale. I don't have to consume a lot of resources now. I'm protecting my data. It's similar to coot. It's gonna change the way. Interacting with an i, I wanna see, yeah, call centers.

You look, you spend how much time looking for a document or you spend how much time actually delving in. I call that technical debt. A lot of people don't, but I think anytime I'm having to leave what I'm doing and jump into something else, I'm acquiring debt, going back and forth between these two worlds because I have to go back and reread or re and our engineers are doing that daily.

So let's look at how AI can do that transformation for that small indi individual task. Level them up. Now they're strategizing and you'll find out engineers, they, and I say this 'cause I came up through that world. We love lists, we love do it all and be done. Imagine the day where the engineers now working like an architect.

Okay? I go back to chocolate and peanut butter. When they chocolate did not know peanut butter was gonna taste good until they came together and it's oh my gosh, it's a [00:38:00] Reese's right. That is the style. When you see these engineers start talking, they're like, your thing can do this and yours can do that, and they're like, whoa, we just invented something, man, that's beautiful.

And that's going back to making it a safe work to do that, to innovate, just like you said with ai. But I would love to even work collaboratively with both of you all on some kind of project with students or anything. I would love to see that happen. So that connective tissue's important. 

Tanya Acevedo: This one is going to blow people's mind, like calling and having this it is so human and they know who you are because they already, we already have our, a system program.

So they know that the person calling for service and just to have that interaction, it's 

Kendra Ketchum: just, it's gonna transform healthcare. It's gonna transform every, yeah, everything. And so now going back to what I originally said, it may be that. Buzzword sitting out there on the periphery right now. But if we are not learning and seeing what we could do intentionally with responsible ai, fair equity, like [00:39:00] all of those things better be looked at folks because we're gonna create a situation of haves and have nots.

And so you have to be very intentional on that responsible AI piece at the very so governing your data's next, then your outcomes, right? So 

Tanya Acevedo: is there going to be a dedicated position like a Chief AI officer? 

Kendra Ketchum: I think. So 

Tanya Acevedo: great. I 

Kendra Ketchum: don't know. They're your digital officers. Were those folks now digital officers, CDOs, were running that. You CCAs 

Tanya Acevedo: the skillset though and needs to make sure that person has that breadth of understanding of all your business. 

Kendra Ketchum: Process it. Oh yeah, you can automate a bad thing. You can speed up failure quick if you automate a bad thing. So you, and then you gotta watch that egos, 

Tanya Acevedo: because if your ego gets involved, all of a sudden you're just doing chatbots.

And 

Kendra Ketchum: that the sincere add value. But I, one thing I will say is, and we should all probably learn from that use case. Many years ago, Dell went private, then public, but they outsourced the one thing that made them successful and they brought it back in and it was customer service. You [00:40:00] can't put a price on a peace of mind of your brand if you're not able to deliver that simple, basic customer service.

So that's one thing when you go into orgs and they start talking about, oh, given your first tier to an AI chat bot, man, it better be humanized and it better have multiple l LMS sitting behind it to power it. That's what we're 

Tanya Acevedo: doing. Yeah. We're still testing it and, but every time we test it I'm like, this is blowing our mind, my mind.

Amazing. 

Joe Toste: This is the era we were just talking about inside the collaboratory. This is the era now where it used to be back then where you have Microsoft Office on your resume, you're like proficient in Microsoft Office. You're now proficient in a, in, ai. Gen ai. Yeah. Having those conversations, this is the craziest part.

It is so 

Kendra Ketchum: disruptive. Yeah. I think I even told you a while back, or told him on the last podcast my end of year review normally, 'cause I report through the president and in cabinet we have to write these big, long higher ed loves words. And they're like 65 pages of this, everything we've done.

And so our action plans and everything. So I was like, I wanna build a home L LM model [00:41:00] using M, brought it in Nassos. And I sat down, we started adding things in, started doing it, and all of my data points were added and it spit out this beautiful 32 page, just all images, all of it, right? So I had both documents.

The one I had done, the one A and I go to my president for, man, I slide those, that one over there, and he's this is phenomenal. I was like, here's the 70, like almost 70 page one that I had to actually take about 70 hours just in the last, I said so, so think about where you would rather have my innovation and my mindset and my vision on a report, or let this tool do it for me with my data.

And he was like, done. Boom. So that was pretty cool. But going back to use case like it, it sounded a little selfish at the time 'cause I didn't wanna write 70 more pages. But yeah, it's what we all do, right? Technology wants to simplify things. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. I, this is just a personal use case, but Claude has got a direct integration with Gmail and Google Calendar.

So what I did was you can now just with a [00:42:00] click of a button and it gives you pre-made prompts. It combed every email I'd ever sent in my calendar. I came back and told me and Beau and gave me beautiful charts, told me When you travel for events, you don't work out as much. In fact you should probably work out a little bit more, but then when you get back into town, you're working out two to three times per week.

And then it gave me this chart and based on seasons, and then it showed me you have event seasons here and here. And that was just for working out. Then it came back and was like. You've emailed these I didn't ask you, which is these are the top 10 people you email the most. Here are these relationships you have, and it goes through this whole thing.

I'm sitting here going, oh my goodness. This is, yeah, we don't even 

Kendra Ketchum: waste time on 

Tanya Acevedo: media this. Imagine that in the human-like avatar. That's gonna start. You're gonna talk. 

Kendra Ketchum: Yeah. That goes back to digital humans. I would like to see that service desk where I could be like, and Jane AI was one of 'em. Jane's really cool, but.

Kind of creepy. I'm gonna be honest. Creepy. I looked at it and it was creepy. I was like, oh my gosh, she looks like a person. But

Joe Toste: so what's funny is we talk about privacy in a [00:43:00] lot. So it's funny how even for myself, I'm sorry I'm guilty of this. Take TSA, oh, you want my eyes, you want my fingers?

I can go through the airport. The benefit's just so great. I'm like. Want the whole hand and out. I 

Tanya Acevedo: have to, I cantor tell you stories about that. It's like everybody, when we first put that in airports, everyone's oh heck no. It's no way. Especially your facial biometrics. No way. As soon as it sped up the line, 

Joe Toste: oh yeah, I was a L.

I was a LAX. It's slammed. They've got a clear handed, clear and a TSA, let me just scan your eyes. There's one person in line. I'm like, all day. Take 

Kendra Ketchum: my boss. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. 

Kendra Ketchum: Make it easy for me. I don't wanna wait either. Okay. 

Joe Toste: Chris, I just wanna wrap up with you because you've been pretty quiet on this side of the couch.

I know you I knew you wanted to let the ladies have their time, but wanted to hear from you just as we wrap up just around, how you view Freeit Data and helping these agencies. You've been on you've got that very business partner like perspective. Both being at the city and now love to hear like where you see [00:44:00] that relationship going.

Chris Stewart: Oh, it's been great. Being a city CIO and a utility CIO, it was awesome to be able to focus and, I had a city, it's a large city. It's a lot of departments to manage and there's a lot going on in a city, which is a lot of fun to get to know how that operates organizationally and how these things happen in a city.

That was really great. And I was a little worried going to the private sector, I would lose some of that sense of service. But in the organization I'm in now where we do so much with local government education large government too, it's been great to utilize all those skills that I used to use for one city.

I get to walk around and take that to towns and counties and cities and the states all over the place, and it's been really great and it's been a learning experience for me also. Getting out and really talking to other CIOs and these it leaders. It's good and humbling a bit to know what's going on and the problems you knew exist in your organization.

It exists elsewhere. You're not the only one that's going through stuff. Everybody's got things they're really good at [00:45:00] and things that they don't want to talk about. And they wanna highlight the things that they're doing fantastic. Like they should. And they're still working on some things over here that aren't, they're not gonna make the papers and they're not headline, innovative stuff.

It's, we also have this stuff over here. So it's been really great just understanding what's going on out there, and then being a part of that and helping out. And in particular, the, there's a lot of resource constrained folks out there. The smaller counties, the smaller towns that they're, they struggle, they have zero resources to get things done.

And when I thought about it, they really had to do the exact same things I had to do as CIO for City of Austin. We had to do certain things. You've got to make sure you do. You have to do all the same stuff at smaller scale, but with almost no resources. And it's amazing the inventiveness and creativity that I've seen to get things done ' cause they still get it done regardless of what's offered to them.

And that's a lot of collaboration. It's a lot of. Working with their partners and their vendors, like really leaning on them, Hey, I need some support here. Yeah. You can't just come in and tell me something. I walk away. I [00:46:00] really need you to be at the table. So that's been really great to, to see that and work with them.

It's been really great. Yeah, no, that 

Joe Toste: if I was in a smaller town, smaller city, didn't have those resources, I think probably one of the first things I would do is if I was a local government, for example, I would be building relationships. Kerrica with Craig because access to resources, but also influence and there, there are other intangibles where you're a smaller city.

I don't know, you might be able to get a cybersecurity hookup. You might be able to get some additional, you could talk to Kendra. She's got a SOC. There are other very interesting collaborative ways where, going back to, we talked about creativity, right? This is, sometimes an abundance of resources can actually be a.

Problem. You start stop thinking. 

Kendra Ketchum: That's why certain smaller groups are more nimble. Their lack of resources creates that ability to be nimble

Joe Toste: I could probably hang out all day with you all, but you are all fantastic. Thank you for coming on The Public Sector Show by TechTables.

Love the conversation today. 

Kendra Ketchum: Thank you so much, Joe. It's been great. And I wanna connect after, even to stay connectedly because this is a great group knowledge think [00:47:00] tank here.