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What if the fastest route to becoming a CIO wasn’t a degree or a title- but saying yes to the “one more project” everyone else avoided?
In this episode, we reveal how curiosity and collaboration turned overtime testing gigs into executive leadership- and what it really takes to modernize 40-year systems, lead six generations of staff, and build careers that outlast every technology trend.
Erica Early, Chief Information Officer, Washington State Office of the State Treasurer
Lisa Faison, Chief Information Officer, City of Goodyear, Arizona
(02:00) Overtime testing that launched a CIO career
(05:00) “Don’t tell me your problems” — building trust through business empathy
(11:00) Six generations, zero left behind — protecting institutional knowledge
(16:00) From low response to 78% engagement — redefining IT as a strategic partner
(22:00) Mom & Pop to Strategic Partner — Goodyear’s IT transformation
(24:00) The 17-year-old intern reviving legacy teams
(29:00) Slowing down to speed up — the 40-year system replacement story
(31:00) Be someone people want to work with — final career advice
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Joe Toste: Welcome to TechTables. Super excited to have Erica Early and Lisa Faison we'll just kick it right off. Lisa, just a quick intro about yourself.
Lisa Faison: Lisa Faison. I'm the CIO for City of Goodyear. Been in it for over 20 years and been in the government sector for my entire career.
So loving it, loving serving people, and excited to be on.
Joe Toste: Love it Erica.
Erica Early: Yeah. I'm Erica Early. I am the Chief Information [00:01:00] Officer for the Washington State office of State Treasurer. And I've been with the public sector for 14 years. 11 of those have been in it, specifically grown up in state government, public sector.
That's all I know. So it's been a blast.
Joe Toste: Yeah, and I'm excited 'cause we're gonna dive in today. I think it's just gonna be very. Inspiring. And I think sometimes people don't quite understand Joe, how is this gonna be inspiring? If you talk to any high school kids like I do, they don't know anything about public sector.
They think public sector is like the DMV. Why would you want to go work at the DMV? And so I think it's awesome to hear these type of stories also really helps for. Recruiting purposes too. There are college kids that actually listen to this podcast. And we've done events at a couple colleges.
I'm thinking about the University of Texas San Antonio at their data science school specifically. And so there's and kids in Houston and then all around the country. And so I think it's fun just to bring a different perspective to. What public sector can be, and I love these two [00:02:00] journeys.
Also, I probably should have invited her again, but she's been on a couple times, is the CIO for the city of Austin, and she also grew up in public sector. She went from intern to CIO in about 30 years, 25 years. Which is pretty cool. We'll jump we'll jump right into it.
Erica, when we had, Matt, you had said, I, you're a lifer, just like you said, started, 18 as an administrative assistant and now you're one of the youngest CIOs in Washington State government. Just walk us through that journey and why you decided to stay in public sector over the years.
Erica Early: Yeah, it's, like I said, it's been a lot of fun and I've had amazing opportunities. , I wish this was the norm. It's probably not, but yeah, I started off as an administrative assistant working in, for a technology manager, and they were in charge of quality assurance testing and stuff like that with claims, and I always had a knack for testing.
I've always had a knack for technology. Both my parents work in technology in some capacity and also for the public sector. I just been curious. I've always been really curious. And so I got in, got some [00:03:00] overtime offered to me once upon a time when I qualified for overtime. And I that's, that's how I made extra money and oh, I was going through community college and stuff at the time and so I volunteered for any and everything I could for testing purposes or to help the it section out because I just thought it was interesting and then.
I applied for a junior level developer, physician application developer on some web apps within the Department of Labor and Industries. It was the first here at the time we used the ITS classification, so Information Technology Specialist, and there was the first in training that agency had done in like 15, 16 years.
And they trained me from a junior level developer all the way up to, senior level staff, and they put me through classes and on the job training and all that stuff. It was incredible. I had great mentorship. I still talk to my mentor, probably weekly. She's one of my favorite people in the whole world.
And I had great management support, but I had a lot of initiative. I think I, I don't like to talk about the things I did right. But that was one thing I always did [00:04:00] is. I always had great initiative. I didn't wait for work. I went and found work. I got curious about the technology coming out and looked for ways to confuse my users and customers with new technology that we hadn't seen in state governments.
And and then yeah, it slowly climbed the ladder and turned into a supervisor, then a manager, senior manager, and now I'm at the executive level.
Joe Toste: I love that. So quick follow up. This is actually from Patrick Lencioni, the hungry, humble, kind. But I was thinking, after we had met like you, you listed those traits, right?
What's the story of staying hungry, humble, and kind throughout your years in Washington? How did you keep that?
Erica Early: Yeah. It's one of those things where I'm not, I'm never gonna know what I don't know, and that's okay, right? I've been at the table with a lot of folks who. Very pigeonholed into one way of thinking because that's just the way it's always been done and for me is, I like the what ifs.
I like, thinking outside the box at an enterprise level or enterprise capacity and like reusability and all of those things. [00:05:00] And but I don't know everything. And I think that kept the drive to stay curious enough to get engaged with the right people maybe at the right time. Because like I said, I'm always been curious and the rabbit holes I go through on my own time is.
Annoying, I think for the most part, but it has fed my career, right? And it's a sense of engagement that I have with my stakeholders that I get to work with today is, tell me about your business. Don't tell me about your problems. I don't need to know your problems, but tell me about your business.
I wanna understand you and how you work with, the citizens of Washington or that are partnering agencies with Washington Washingtonians and stuff like that. And that has always been a key factor and I think holding onto that, and it's easy in state government, we're underutilized, under-resourced, all of those things to get jaded and frustrated.
But having, that gross, optimistic mindset of. What if we did it differently? What if there's something out there that we just haven't tried yet, or we tried it and we got a new set of skill sets around us? Let's try it again. See what happens. Not being scared to [00:06:00] fail, and I've always had awesome leadership and managers behind me that allowed me to fail in a really safe environment.
'cause I've failed a ton. So
Joe Toste: I love that. And what a great quote. Don't tell me about your problems. Tell me about your business. A actually, in the gym at the high school I coach at, there's a, I dunno what you call it, but it's just imprinted on top of the wall and it's, don't tell me what you can't do.
Show me what you can do. And I love that. Lisa, so you've had very interesting stories. So 18 years at the state, which I didn't even know, and I think I've known you for a couple years now. I had zero clue. You were at the state then City of Phoenix. Now at the city of Goodyear. You had mentioned this non-traditional IT journey starting from the business side walk.
Walk us through what drove some of those moves and why you also kept choosing public sector.
Lisa Faison: Sure. So it was funny 'cause when we first talked you said, oh, you and Erica, you remind me so much of each other. Now I can understand why, because I had very similar, like I started out of high school into the state, working with the business side of financials in [00:07:00] seeing some of the like.
Oh, why are we doing it like this? Why are we taking 20 steps to do something that could be done in five? And going through that journey on the business side of trying to ask technical people like, why are you making me do it like this? Back in the mainframe side of things.
And it, it's just ugh. Can we do this differently? I've always had that notion that I wanted to work in computers and just never really landed on what in computers I wanted to do. Having a Commodore 64 is my first little computer that I, tic-Tac on a little bit. It was fun, but.
I think that drove me to the side to say, oh I wanna help the business people communicate better with those technical people to say what it is that can make my job easier. And that has where my journey has gone. Started off as like a business analyst, worked my way up through project management, program manager, managing analyst.
Eventually decided to leave the state after 18 years just to go see, that, am I really good technical analyst kind of person, or [00:08:00] am I just like a product of growing up in a system? So that was an interesting leap and journey over to City of Phoenix and. Finding that, okay, I guess I could really do this, and this is really fun and what I really have always wanted to do and started to go more into the data centric side of things and learning how to use data as that decision making point to say, where can we be more efficient with technology?
How can we use it to automate things? How can we use it to identify the needle in the haystack that can make business processes better? And that's what I've used as my leadership role as well, is, listen to the business more. Try to understand and translate things to what they're asking for which is sometimes difficult because they don't always know what to ask for or how to communicate what they're asking for.
So you almost have to do that psychology Hey, lay on the couch, tell me about everything. To your point, Erica. I don't necessarily wanna hear the problems, but tell me what your business process [00:09:00] is and see how I can help plug in solutions to what you're having as a problem at the end of the day. And that's just really been fun and exciting.
In Goodyear we do Clifton Strengths, Gallup, Clifton Strengths, which I've found very interesting because my top five strengths is being an achiever, a learner, and futuristic. Can you couple those together? And it's like the perfect business analyst out there, right? And found that it is actually a good leader role as well.
So having that vision and bringing in really smart people around you to make the visions come true is. So fun.
Joe Toste: I love that. Okay, so short follow up, I'm curious, what was the biggest difference going from state to local government?
Lisa Faison: That is, I would have to say financially driven. Working at this state.
To your point, Erica, like they don't have tons of funding and staff yet. Their workloads are huge, and so you really do have to work smarter. You can't. Say, we're [00:10:00] gonna take 20 steps to get that done. It just isn't realistic. At the city you could do that 'cause they have a lot more funding from different revenue sources and they can go add contractors, they can go add resources, they can add technology.
And that is a challenge because you get so much rogue shadow it that you're like, whoa, how do we control this a little bit better? 'cause I don't have staff to support. 50 asset replacement tools and I don't have support for, these 14, 15 different departments that all have their unique business models.
So I think that's been my biggest difference and challenges from a state to city and trying to incorporate some of those state attributes of working smarter. You don't have to throw money at everything. Maybe we need to just root cause analysis to see what is really the problem. Has been the big difference I've seen.
Joe Toste: Nice. Erica, are you gonna move to local government now? I heard more resources. What? I, that's what I heard.
Erica Early: It's always attractive, but I started [00:11:00] Don't finish there.
Joe Toste: I love it. When, so speaking of stuff you wanna finish what we said offline when we were talking on our intro call was that you did not wanna leave any of your staff behind.
I think the stat right now is there's six generations of talent in the workplace today. Walk us through your leadership philosophy and what has inspired you to not leave anyone behind.
Erica Early: So in leadership, right? We're fixers, right? We're problem fixers. That's people come to come to me all day of this happened, what do we do?
And so we get very goal oriented. And at least from my experience, it's easy to get goal oriented and say, okay, this, in five years, strategic planning all has happened, so many years we wanna get to this place and, come hell or high water, we're gonna get there.
I don't like the philosophy, I guess that's my leadership style is like what I don't like. I'm gonna try and contradict that with my own style is, we have this goal, we have this mission, and we're gonna achieve it. We're gonna get there no matter what. And if you're. Onboard.
Cool. If you're not, get out of here. And I hate, that's not me, is I am a collaborator. I want to hear everybody's ideas. Especially, in the state [00:12:00] government, we have a lot of institutional knowledge. People like to work here. Especially in this specific agency. I have a breadth of knowledge of people who have been here.
Longer than I've been alive. And that's a lot, right? That's a lot of institutional knowledge that I don't wanna lose. And I've said that to them. We've had those conversations, but but that's the part of it, is we train people how to do one very specific thing. We couldn't hold the skill sets when specifically technology is a creative job.
And I wanna make sure that they have the opportunity to be creative. And part of that is bringing in the tools and the resources and the experts to teach them how to do that and not leave them behind in the stone age with the mainframe systems, or get vendor locked into this brand new SaaS solution that will solve all of our problems, bring them to the table.
To help solve the problem that we have at hand with aging technology, the business processes that need to change to get outta that technology. Let them speak their voice, let them be a part of the solution. The solution gathering or the solution finding. And I've seen it where that hasn't [00:13:00] happened in agencies.
I've worked in those agencies where it hasn't happened before and it's frustrating. That's one of the things I'm so grateful for my experience. I've started from the ground all the way to the role I'm in now. I don't wanna recreate that. I couldn't stand it.
Joe Toste: Okay, so the reason why I was laughing, so if you're listening to this on like YouTube or on on video and you see me chuckling and laughing, the reason I'm laughing really hard is I just interviewed, I'm gonna release this episode tomorrow with George Williams, who's the CIO for the Washington State Cannabis and Liquor Board Department.
They had a 42-year-old system that they were trying to migrate from. And he said that no one knew how to actually maintain the system. And so he talked about he had to hire the 70-year-old contractor to help them just migrate and finish and to get to the new, to, to the new system.
The moment they went, go live on the new system, she retired. And I was just, that's exactly what I was thinking about. I was just laughing right there. Really hard. I also love what you said, technology is a creative job. It is a great quote. I love what you said also about not [00:14:00] getting pigeonholed.
I think sometimes you see this just. In a lot of different areas, you do one thing really well and it's dude, Lisa, guess what? You're the ERP. You're like, no. What Just, 'cause I know financials does not mean I am the sole person. And there's actually a great book on this, the Phoenix project. And there's the exact story of this where actually the whole system breaks down when you just think you've got one person who can manage.
The Phoenix project sums that up beautifully and it's the exact same thing of like, how can we really explore and be collaborative in our environment? To solve our problems, to get to the best solution.
And not throwing down the hammer because no one responds to that. My 7-year-old doesn't respond to that. And and he negotiates pretty well, but he doesn't respond to that. So Lisa, jumping to you, very similar. You have a annual business value survey that you do which is really great, right?
What projects do we wanna work on? [00:15:00] Tell me what you wanna work on and then you have the departments rank what's important and you use that to drive strategy. I really like that collaborative approach. Can you walk us through what inspired you to do that and to really put the other departments in the driver's seat?
Lisa Faison: Sure. When I came into this position, my focus was to reengage with the departments and create a better image of what it is here to do as a service. And so that was one of the integral parts of saying I'm going to hear you first. So here's a survey that says, here are all the services that we provide.
Tell us how you would rank our. Our ability to do those services and then tell us which of those are most important. And we've done it probably three, three years now. The first couple of times we have very little response rate, and so now we are up to a 78% response rate and we send it out to directors and deputy directors.
And we're getting their side of the story and saying, okay, this is what I heard you say, that you find we're doing well and we'll keep doing well, [00:16:00] and here's what you want us to refocus on. And so we're actually using that as one our metrics to say, how are we doing each year? Are we engaging better?
And then secondly, to drive what goes into our strategic plan. So we have a rolling three year strategic plan and that says, okay, we need to up. Our project management a little better. Oh, we need to up our little requirement gathering a little bit better. Oh, we need to refocus on our service desk and staff now know that will be our driving factor each year to say what's important.
But in contrast, our department directors now know what's our marching orders, so they're not gonna come to me and say, Hey, we need to pivot and we want you to actually work on this other thing. It's no. You answered the survey and this is what you asked us to work on. We need a little time to get that.
Accomplished. Otherwise, we've got this constant moving target and we'll never accomplish anything for you. So they've got a hand shaking with us now that says, yep, I hear what you're asking me to do. I'm gonna give you my prioritization and I'm gonna let you go work on that.
Joe Toste: [00:17:00] Okay. So I like that's on one side of the aisle.
But I would love to hear also, how do you handle the other side of the aisle? You've got elected officials, you have other people where they're like. I don't care about your survey, and I probably didn't take it like, this is what I want to do. How do you manage up or how do you lead up like that?
Lisa Faison: Sure. We actually communicate the same thing all the way up to the city manager's office and to our council members.
We actually had a technology assessment as one of our strategic citywide action items from the council members who wanted us to assess pretty much everything we do in it, which I was like, huh. Okay, that's a lot. So we did, we went back and we delivered to them and said exactly what we told our business partners in the departments that said, we are gonna go to our partners that we serve day to day because they have goals to you as well.
And we're here to help them achieve their strategic action items that you've given them from the council members. And this is what they're saying is important for us to fix [00:18:00] and do technology advancement with in order for them to meet your. Council member goals and to deliver products to the residents.
So we tied it all back to their original goals to the departments and just showing them that we're a support model for their overarching citywide strategic plan.
Joe Toste: , That's really great. Erica, also, I'd love to hear from you h how are you also leading up when. Whoever the executive is that's Hey, I actually guess what?
I got a new plan. I would love to, or a new toy. How do you manage that to keep the whole enterprise going?
Erica Early: Yeah. It's interesting because I work for a statewide elected official state treasurer is not appointed. And we have a lot of autonomy. The state treasurer and the assistant treasurer is who I directly report to and she's the chief operating officer.
And for one, they are two of the most collaborative people I've ever talked to. They, I get the privilege of working for actually the youngest state treasury that Washington has ever seen too. So we have a trend I think, going here. But in past and such it's I'm very relative and trying to make sure that I [00:19:00] can, whatever.
Issue or exciting thing that I wanna talk about them with is how do I get that into a way that they can understand, right? And it's sales, right? I that I am the salesperson of the IT department here at the state treasurer's office, and I have to make sure that I speak their language.
I. The impact of whatever we're dealing with at a time. And also too, making sure that carries weight. And I can be super annoying too, like I'm the youngest in my family, very good at this role and making sure that I get their engagement right. And actually just talking about the needs and such as my department is facing right now.
Me and the treasurer had a really candid, honest conversation and just ensuring that engagement is always there. We're gonna challenge each other and just being open to challenging each other and honest about it this has been one of the best relationships I've had in leadership.
It's not the case always, it's just getting that attention from the executive team. Who's so inundated with here specifically is legislature processes and decisioning [00:20:00] proposals and fight.
I'm down to get creative with how to solve problems or get initiatives going with the current resources we have. But it's gonna look different. It's gonna look different than how we've done it in the past, and being able to convey that and show 'em in a way that they understand that's, that is a key aspect to my success.
I
Joe Toste: really like that. Being open to challenge a lot of folks. Are not open to a different perspective and every single ecosystem has their own we don't do this, right? So like in high school basketball, it's oh, high school coaches never run a zone.
You always are gonna play man defense. So sometimes I just mess, I mess with other teams and they just, they can't make the adjustment. And, but I found even in the public sector, there's that kind of same, this is the way it's done. But I think being very open, and I love, like I ask the kids all the time, even on the floor what are you seeing?
What am I missing? And, oh there's this backside action that's happening over here. I talk about sports all the time,
but , I really like that piece of it. You're basically [00:21:00] advocating, right? You're advocating for your agency. I think both of you would probably agree. You have to do that if you need to, if you want the resources to go do the projects and stuff you want to do, you gotta advocate for yourself, right?
Super important. Love that. And jumping to just. Frame this as like enterprise services. Both y'all are in really distinct, but really great agency. I kind of use agencies all encompassing. I know you're in a city, Lisa. But what I liked is Goodyear is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, and I know that's, yeah, I, the it shop is probably trying to catch up to all of that growth. And that's what happens right When there, whenever there's growth, there's, there's gonna have to be some catch up. Especially I think it's like, what, like top three fastest growing cities. Yeah. It's crazy.
They're building that place out like nuts. So you had mentioned that you're not at the stage yet where you're doing that maybe exciting or great innovation 'cause you're really building the strong foundation. How do you balance building the strong foundation while also preparing your team for what's next?
Lisa Faison: That's a great question. [00:22:00] I always describe Goodyear as we're moving out of the mom and pop it shop where you're using duct tape and very creative things because everybody was a one man band and we're now, becoming more subject matter experts into our field and having to hire people who.
Actually know the technology that we're trying to move towards. One of the things that we do, and I mentioned Gallup Clifton strengths is we do Q 12 and that's the engagement side of our staff and to say, how engaged are you? And we've been using that as our driving force to say, Hey, what.
What makes you excited to come to work today and how can we help you develop and with that, understand technology is ever evolving, right? So we've gotta keep up with the trends. Yeah. We're maybe a behind the eight ball a little bit because the growth of the city expanded faster than we can keep up with it, but that doesn't mean we have to be left behind.
Just getting them thinking in that mentality of, okay, we're gonna go. Find what the [00:23:00] finish line is and how do we get there. And so personal development is one of their goals Every year, find something that allows you to get excited about work. Maybe it's not your current job, maybe it's shadowing over in the division next to you to say, Hey, what is it that you guys do?
So one, it helps me understand better how I interact with you and ask you to do things that I need done. But two, this might be something I wanna do in the future. And so it just getting them excited. Another thing we did was we brought interns in. It helped us in two ways. We brought interns into.
One, engage our staff because they were saying, I want to leave my legacy behind. To your point, Erica, we've got some seasoned staff here on the verge of retirement, but they wanna leave a legacy behind how do they do that? And so interns has been one of those invigorating things for them in their career to say, oh, let me tell you about all this net stuff that we're doing over here.
Let me tell you about this networking Minecraft thing we're doing over here. And that's been fun, but it also gives [00:24:00] us a pipeline of new staff to bring in when we have openings at that bottom level. So that has been really interesting and fun and to watch with our staff to get them excited in the things they're talking.
But really, ultimately, I tell my staff, keep your ears open. Participate in events that are free. Just go out there and listen to hear what other people are doing. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. Let's go see how we take what they did and make it apply to our model today. And that has been something that they've been doing and starting to get into that okay our foundation was weak because we were still the mom and pop shop.
Let's go do this. And so yep, let's go do that. And so they get excited.
Joe Toste: I love that. Brought the interns in. What are some of like your. Some of the favorite projects that you've seen that the interns have really loved Lisa.
Lisa Faison: Yeah, so we've got an intern for all of our divisions.
So one was our project management office brought an intern in and she is like above and beyond where she should [00:25:00] be. She's 17 in college. And just mastering the project management side of things so much. We're like, how can we get her to stay? We've gotta find a way because she's just amazing. And she's just so excited.
She's bubbly and she's, everybody's who is that? This is it. We're, introverts. And so it's fun. That was one and then the other, we've just had a lot of dot net applications that are coming into life. Brought an intern in and said, here, here's the foundation of what DO net is.
Go redo these sites to make them in compliance. And so that's been a fun little project that is internally for our departments. They're seeing value out of it. It's Hey, we've been waiting for that to be modified over the last five years. This is great.
Joe Toste: Yeah. Love. I love it. . Erica any intern stories. You were the youngest, at some point you won't be anymore, right? Over time. And so then what's that pipeline, what's that workforce pipeline look like?
Erica Early: Yeah it's always on the [00:26:00] table of just creativity to get, that right blend of, senior staff.
And the new the new crew, right? We want, we wanna figure out a way to, to allow that staff to leave their legacy. And we've gone through a big wave of retirements, with my predecessor, he was here for 41 years and then here I come. So it's a, we're in some change fatigue, I think at this place, but it's all good things.
And but that's a thing on the table is how do we make ourselves marketable again, and not necessarily a place where people can come and say that's a stable Mable place. Which it is. , We're enterprise service. We're very stable. We have a very important functionality in the in the state government.
We are pretty risk averse in some sense of that, but. In developing staff, like whether they get to stay here and grow with the agency that's the ultimate goal. Or if we prepare them for their next step, that is something that I'm always really passionate about and growing out our bench.
That's something that, that I was brought here to do and we're going through it and it's a little painful, but it's cool. [00:27:00] It's a good job.
Joe Toste: I love that. Change fatigue. 41 years in the chair, and then they retire. That can be a lot of new change. And yeah, I think there's a lot of way, this is a huge wave right now of folks who are just retiring. Not just in public se, I mean it's all across the board.
There's an article in the Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it was like maybe this past week about this next gener I'm the edge millennial, but this kind of, this next generation of millennials who, Erica, we're, I think we're right there, same age, right? Coming into that position where, you are gonna be taking over, right?
It's just what's gonna happen and expectations are different. And Lisa, I don't know if you're a millennial or not. I just, I have zero clue how old you are. I just know, 'cause I asked Erica directly. A little brazen, but hey that, just that next generation, taking those leadership roles it's gonna be to be a big change, right?
For a lot of folks who are still on the, on that edge both culturally and with technology too. Erica, real quick, I just wanted to get, you had this phrase when we had met that you said, very related to this. Like you just can't pull the rug out. And it ties in a lot with the wanting to be collaborative. [00:28:00] Could you just give us a quick example of where. You had to slow down a big modernization project to make sure your team was actually ready to execute on it.
Erica Early: Like that is pure life reality. Right now we have a huge statewide accounting replacement project off of a 40 plus year old system.
And we're highly integrated with that. And this is statewide. It's not just the treasurer's office.
Mission critical go live system and the dependencies of this. And we've done this thing in Washington State where it's like modernization projects have just popped off like whack-a-mole. And it's stop, and I get it. We all wanna get off these legacy systems, but there's a domino effect.
And the specific project is one of 'em where I have piped up I've poked my head out and said hey, hold on. If you want us to go live, you, this cannot happen with the Treasurer's office, right? We're all on the same page of that. If that's gonna happen, then we need to slow down and we need to get some better resourcing around this.
We gotta get some better documentation. We need to have, a build a little bit more defined sprints of how we're gonna go live. You've gotta stop [00:29:00] moving the deadline. Like we need to hold ourselves accountable, especially when there's such big that cost the state a ton of money.
And just focus in on us and we need a little bit different concierge treatment, I think. And wearing that hat and saying if you want us to go with you, then you're gonna have to bring us along a little bit. And that has looked like a really collaborative conversation with one of our agency partners and funding and, just the resource management around change management and what that really looks like because it's migrating to a whole new ERP and that's been the part of it. And I've, done interviews with my staff of what are. What is this causing you? Let, not just from a workload stand, what kind of anxiety are you dealing with?
How is this affecting your work-life balance? All of those things. Because it's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And so that specific project is something that I'm living on the day-to-day basis. And I got great support out. Some of my peers, the deputy treasurers and stuff that I work with, we're pushing back in the right way and we're telling them why.
And I think that's the biggest thing is not of. This is just different. [00:30:00] We don't wanna do this. No, we need to build up some skill sets. We need to consolidate some of these services if we can bring some contracting consultants along to help in some of the workload, so on and so forth.
And educating our partners on the current state of we are, instead of just hiding behind a and being like, we're just not ready or pushing back. Because it's simply change. The change needs to happen. There's nobody in the state that wants this project to. Be done and successful more than I do, because I got a lot more plans.
I have a lot more things I wanna do, and I cannot do that without this project being successful. And I do not wanna end up on the news for it not being successful. And I'm willing to partner with them. And I think that is part of just being solution oriented and, but also standing up for my staff, standing up for our agency and saying, we're supportive.
So we have a different perspective on how this is going.
Joe Toste: Okay, so as we draw this to a close, love to hear what's maybe one piece of advice you have for a rising technology leader in mid [00:31:00] 2025? Lisa, we'll kick off with you. Love to hear. What advice would you give to a rising technology leader who's maybe one day looking up like, Hey, I would love to be a CIO.
Lisa Faison: I would say I think you touched on some of the aspects of when you kinda go into a role where you've got seasoned staff who have been there for a while is to slow down sometimes and ask the why. Learn their why. Why have you always been doing it like this? Is there better ways to do it?
What is exciting for you? Are things you wanna learn. And so sometimes you've gotta have an agenda, but you need to pause your agenda to understand how you are going to relate your agenda to what their goals are as well. So it's gotta be a compromise. It can't be a hammer down approach.
Kind of we mentioned earlier with some of those is you've gotta listen to your constituents your, leaders that you're having to answer and lead up to. So your council members, your city manager's office, if that's what your government looks like. But more [00:32:00] important, listen to your staff because they're the most important people that make you successful.
And you're gonna have to find how to get them engaged, how to get them to continue to learn and just. Get excited about work. Nothing's worse than having somebody who just hates their job and then makes their customers see that they hate their job.
Joe Toste: Yeah. There's nothing worse. That is a tough, that is a tough one.
That's a good cue to maybe go get a coffee or a beverage or a meal outside of the office. Yeah. Erica. Same thing. What advice would you give to a rising technology leader in mid, mid 2025?
Erica Early: I really think this is how I just live life in general. And I think it really applies to the workplaces and to put it exactly in that format, be the person that people wanna work with, not that they have to work with.
Because I've done that. I've been the person that they send, and you gotta talk to me now, and that's not fun. I don't wanna do that. I much rather, be in the collaborative space than I'm a sponge. I try to obtain all the information I can. I [00:33:00] read a lot that curious mindset like that can't go away and just, it's hard.
It's hard to always be optimistic. It's hard to always, big forward when you're in in, in thes as I'm right now with my. But being able to pull yourself out of that and look at like the accomplishments and celebrate, the things that your team has done or that you've done even because that you can't get lost in this is really critical.
But the first and foremost is I love that people feel like they can just call me and be like, I should talk to Erica about this. And it's not because she has all the information. It's more of I'm willing to. Throw everything at the wall, let's see what's possible and what's not. Have those really wild conversations and then scope 'em down.
Joe Toste: The art of the possible. And just keeping those conversations. I love one of my favorite things to do. I'll do this whenever I've got like a whiteboard or something, but just could even be like a. Put up a bunch of colorful sticky notes. Sometimes I do this on just on my iPad when I wanna think do at a coworking spot.
Even doing this with C CIOs where they're just spit balling different [00:34:00] problems in a kind of more, less, less formal round type table type of way. But it's almost like a. Product strategy session where you're just throwing stuff up and figure and just seeing other perspectives from different folks.
Super valuable. Love the collaborative nature from the both of you. I think it's just really gonna drive the public sector forward. There's a lot of really great people across the nation. I thank you both for coming on today. Really appreciate you both coming on the Public Sector Show by TechTables.
Lisa Faison: Thank you. Thank you.