#192: From Forms to Freedom: Building Digital Services That Citizens Actually Want

Joe Toste: Today, I'm super excited to have Suman Dugupta, CTO for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Rob Lloyd, CTO for the City of Seattle, and Chris Chirgwin, CIO for the County of Santa Barbara. Welcome to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. 

Chris Chirgwin: Thank you. 

Joe Toste: Chris, since you're the closest to me and a returning TechTables guest, what are you at?

Joe Toste: Is this three? This is, 

Chris Chirgwin: Second live podcast, but third time we've done this. 

Joe Toste: That's [00:01:00] right. That's right. So for those who don't know you, quick intro. 

Chris Chirgwin: Join the County of Santa Barbara as their first CIO two years ago, prior to that was in the private sector for my whole career.

Chris Chirgwin: I've ran and owned a couple of IT service companies and most recently selling one in 2021 and then joined the public sector. Earlier today I heard one of your members say that they are a girl dad, and I've got three daughters as well.

Chris Chirgwin: Twenty eighteen and fifteen. A lot of drama in our house. Makes work sometimes easy. But so that's a quick overview. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, big soccer dad, right? 

Chris Chirgwin: I've, yes, played soccer for a long time. Coached soccer for about twelve years. Club and high school soccer, and all three of my daughters. Have played or are currently playing.

Chris Chirgwin: My middle daughter is up at Eastern Washington University playing for them. 

Souman: Samam? I joined Washington State December of last year. So probably most of the re most recent amongst everyone here. That you would have heard. 20 years in private sector. [00:02:00] Working in big tech both across consumer.

Souman: Product side of the house, as well as enterprise applications. Now leading the overall technology transformation that we're trying to do in our biggest health and human services agency. And yeah, looking forward to the conversation today.

Joe Toste: Love it. Rob? 

Rob Lloyd: I'm the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Seattle.

Rob Lloyd: I am 35 days old in the organization, so just came over in June. I was previously the Deputy City Manager for Transportation, Aviation, and Technology and Planning and Permitting for the City of San Jose. Before that, for six years, I was the CIO for them and had a lot of fun there. About 16 years as a CIO and CISO before that.

Rob Lloyd: But also fourth time here and have a lot of fun with the TechTables crew. Glad to be here. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, excited. Suman, let's kick off with you. You launched a newsletter, Customer First Thinking on how to build and apply a customer first mindset in everything you do. I did read it for those of you who are thinking, how do you just throw this in a chat, GBT?

Joe Toste: No, I did read the newsletter. It was great. [00:03:00] As the CTO for the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services. How have you aligned your technology strategies with the broader organizational goals, especially with your focus on innovation and customer satisfaction that you were touching on so much?

Souman: Absolutely, and I can attest you did read because you commented on it, so I know you read it. So while we, so when I came in our secretary was very clear when she hired me that she said, One of the primary reasons I'm bringing you on is because of your background around human centered design and the work you've done around customer mindset in, in various roles that you've had.

Souman: And she's that's what I want embedded in this organization. We over the last six, seven months since I've been there, we've been working on setting what we call as a vision and the foundation for our agency. And in that article I put I demonstrated the house of DSHS, as we call it, that we released publicly.

Souman: And you will see the foundation of that house is technology. Because one of the things that we are really trying to drive [00:04:00] is everything that we do in the agency is amplified by the leverage of technology in those actions, right? And it's the only mechanism in which we can truly identify how clients engage with us.

Souman: And whether those engagements have both positive or negative reactions to it. Because without that measurement factor in place, it's very hard to say how is our services being perceived. And a simple thing that we did to drive that customer first mindset within our organization, was we used to, every time we used to kick off a project, we used to define outcomes.

Souman: And outcomes would be like, oh, we can get The outcome is to be defined by we are releasing this new form because the Ledge asked for this or we're doing this new application because it makes our lives easier. And we started saying that, okay, every project that we're going to do from now on, we need to write what is the client facing outcome that originates from it.

Souman: And [00:05:00] if a project does not have a client facing outcome, they'll really have to justify to me why the outcome It's worth the approval. Just having that mindset of defining an outcome from the client's lens has been very motivating for the team because that connection was not as evident in the past as it's now for everyone.

Joe Toste: That's great. Rob, the One Seattle Plan is a bold initiative by Mayor Harrell, developed over two years of community input to address housing, affordability, equity, and sustainability while preparing for significant population growth. I know that because I came here a month ago and I drove all around Seattle and you just have water everywhere, which makes it tough for new building.

Joe Toste: You can only build up, right? This is like Santa Barbara. You got the ocean and the mountains. As you get up to speed in your new role as a CTO for the city of Seattle, what excites you most about the mayor's plan and vision for the city? 

Rob Lloyd: So I think if you take a look at all the big and mid sized cities right now, they're all facing some of the most transformative challenges that cities have ever run into.

Rob Lloyd: And the other part of it is that none of those [00:06:00] challenges is just one department anymore. Once upon a time, it could be just a policing challenge. It could just be a transportation challenge. It could just be a parks and rec challenge. But if you talk about how we deal with homelessness, how we deal with public safety, how we deal with lower acuity response to mental health crises.

Rob Lloyd: How we deal with Vision Zero. Everything now is multi departmental. And technology plays an integral role in how we deal with information, how we connect work, how we connect people, how we collaborate. And so the joke and analogy that I usually have is there's no longer swim lanes, there's water polo.

Rob Lloyd: We have a goal, we're all together, we're shooting at that goal, and we're working together. And we have to play that role masterfully and relentlessly on some of these things because we're Nothing before has worked and Mayor Harrell's approach is is wonderful in that it does three things exceptionally well.

Rob Lloyd: One is it engages the community and says, these are your priorities, and we are going to go at these fearlessly, and there's nothing [00:07:00] sacred about the old ways we've done these things. They've deconstructed the old public safety answering points where we said 911 was sacred, and the old way we did it.

Rob Lloyd: No, it's not. And we have the care team. And we're going to approach it differently, and we've taken it out of nine the police department, and we're going to try different things, and we might get some things wrong, but we're going to get a lot of things right. And we're going to give ourselves permission to try some different things.

Rob Lloyd: If you talk about the partnerships he has actually a joke. Sometimes you have to step on the scale even though you don't like the number. We're going to look at data, and we're going to tell ourselves the truth and we're going to work with the community and go at our problems very hard.

Rob Lloyd: TechTables. com but we're also going to go at them together. And so he's demanding collaboration between all of his departments. And that level of cooperation, collaboration is actually, in my experience, really rare in government. Often we're allowed to be a little fiefdoms and that's not okay anymore.

Rob Lloyd: And so he demands that of himself and his team, and that, I think, percolates all the way through the organization. And the last [00:08:00] thing is just the demand that technology play its role because it is the catalyst and the only tool we have in the organization that makes one person look like one or three or ten, and that can give situational awareness and wisdom pervasively through the organization.

Rob Lloyd: And he comes at it because he has a tech background and a law background and he's played that leadership role for a long time in Seattle and he grew up eight blocks from City Hall. So he has this investment. this knowledge, all these relationships, and it's very much his personality and his wisdom and his perspective in that.

Rob Lloyd: But a mayor to have that kind of focus and that kind of insistence and that relentlessness, this is a magic moment, so truly excited by it.

Joe Toste: That's awesome. Chris, so Santa Barbara County is actively consolidating its GIS resources to improve data sharing and collaboration across the departments and other counties, and I know you're big on collaboration.

Joe Toste: How are you aligning the IT consolidation with the broader objectives of the county? 

Chris Chirgwin: It's really interesting to listen to what Rob [00:09:00] was just saying and what they're doing at the City of Seattle. At the County of Santa Barbara, we're doing some very similar things. In fact, yours is one Seattle, ours is one county, one future.

Chris Chirgwin: And so from the top down within the organization, we're really trying to break down the silos, the fiefdoms that you mentioned. Twenty three departments at the county. And traditionally, and I think this is probably not dissimilar to a lot of other counties, the way they're structured is you've got these 23 different organizations that kind of do their own thing, right?

Chris Chirgwin: We're really have a concerted effort right now through a new strategic plan coming down from the CEO's office IT, central IT. We just completed a county wide IT strategic plan that aligns with the master plan and really going above and beyond in terms of Understanding not only the departmental needs, but understanding the constituent needs.

Chris Chirgwin: Really trying to gather as much input, as much information as we can, as much feedback as we [00:10:00] can, as we put these now strategic plans and tactical plans in place to start sharing data. You mentioned GIS, right? We had five different GIS groups within the county that were not working together. Now we're working together.

Chris Chirgwin: It's just one small example, but we're trying to do that across all departments, across many different initiatives that are taking place at the county, not just technology, but in, in many other areas as well. So it's a large effort. It takes time. There's a little bit of politics that, that come about, but I think that's pretty normal.

Chris Chirgwin: But I would say we're already starting to see some significant strides in what we're doing. 

Rob Lloyd: And Joe, if I can double down on what Chris said and maybe a point that you made as well is. The human centered design starts with listening first and where technologists often fail is you bring your knowledge and your solution too early.

Rob Lloyd: And as CIOs and CTOs, the trick is listening hard for a while first and working with your departmental [00:11:00] peers and listening to those problems and seeing that constellation of needs and saying what problems are you trying to solve and then painting that technology picture. But I think you're hearing three people say the same thing is if you're really trying to build that collaborative bridge, you listen a lot first, and then you paint that picture of technology direction, and then you can get that, that, that support and that, that architecture, and that strategy that actually can honor the organization.

Joe Toste: Agreed. That's fantastic. So ma'am, your department has placed significant emphasis on technology innovation. for the purpose of service delivery. How have you scaled those innovations to serve the 2. 7 million residents?

Souman: Let me start with a basic principle that we put in place, which is when we came in, we said we're going to start making our agency and walk the talk of making our government transparent, accountable, and accessible, right? And one of the ways we do, did that was when we [00:12:00] published our first made in five year strategy plan.

Souman: And we published it on our website. We very clearly articulated the objectives that were priority for us from a technology perspective. We even wrote down measures, and we committed to the public that every quarter we're going to report our progress against those measures. So you exactly know where we stand, and there was some concerns like here, what if we don't achieve, and I'm, and my point is trust me, the public today believes we are not achieving anything, so even if you get to 50 or 60 percent, they would at least love that transparency, then saying we are not achieving 100 percent of it.

Souman: In that, we made a very strong and bold commitment of institutionalizing what we call as the Customer Satisfaction Score, and taking a target to achieve 85 percent Customer Satisfaction Score by 2027. We have never measured it, but we've taken a target. There's a real risk that we won't meet it, but [00:13:00] aiming for that high bar, even if we come short by a few digits, that's fine, because then there is a dedicated attention to it.

Souman: Now what are we doing to achieve that? There are multiple initiatives that's going on within our agency. I'll talk about two that's very central to our strategy. One is the 2. 7 million residents that come to us are all seeking benefits. On an average today for a person to seek benefit to us takes them about 50 minutes of form filling to even submit an application.

Souman: Our caseloads are so high that there are clients waiting for over two hours to speak to a Benefits Manager to understand what's happening with their application, what the status of their application is, and answer very basic questions. We have a huge intra agency program called the Integrated Eligibility and Enrollment, where we're going to give a single door for citizens and residents of Washington State, To apply to [00:14:00] all of the benefits related to health and human services through one single application.

Souman: We actually created one common application form, ran a pilot, and we were amazed to see that people actually were able to cut down their application enrollment filling time by over half with that new application. So we are now going to start rolling that application out. The second thing that we do, that we did was we looked at kind of questions people were calling in and asking on to our contact centers.

Souman: And we identified ten questions that were being asked all the time. And we straightaway put those ten questions up as FAQs. Very simple examples, right? Nothing rocket science in it, but simple FAQs on the website, on your application page, and a chatbot. That is a very, it's not a very elegant chatbot at this point in time, but If you asked any of those 10 questions, you would get very clear answers to it.

Souman: It eliminates more than 20 percent of the inbound call volume that we get. Another simple thing that we did was [00:15:00] 40 percent of people calling to us were basically calling in to just ask, Hey, is my application approved? And they were waiting over two hours on the phone to speak to somebody just to know that answer.

Souman: We started building on an application tracker, and that's going to go live before the end of this year. TechTables. com Where those cust clients won't ever have to talk to somebody to know what's happening with their application. They would almost like a pizza delivery tracker, know, What's happening with the application, which stage they are in.

Souman: So simple things like these doesn't have to be a, everything doesn't have to be a space colony, right? Very simple things drive very meaningful impact in the day to day experience of our clients. Another big initiative that we are doing is, we run a lot of state facilities that provide care, right?

Souman: Medical care, behavioral health, and so on and so forth. Many of these facilities didn't even have electronic records. TechTables. We're starting to institutionalize electronic health records. In the absence of electronic records, this is what our clients have to do. They would have to [00:16:00] carry with them bags and bags of actual records over the course of their entire treatment plans with us and bring it in every conversation and every appointment that they had.

Souman: Some of those we literally used to see somebody would come in and load it on a tray and they would roll it into the doctor's office and there for the appointment. In today's day. And H that's a very ridiculous experience to give. So we're in the process of digitizing our entire electronic health record system and all of our health care facilities.

Souman: Those are the two big ones that are countless small. So we are a very large agency and we touch a pretty big footprint. So there are like another 20 plus things that we are doing all catered towards those small I would, you can even call it paper cuts on customer experience.

Souman: That we are taking the time to solve for. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, that's great. I love the Domino Pizza Tracker example that you used. When I could eat it, because I'm gluten free now. But, back in the day, that was my favorite, to see the tracker. When, remind me when JR was the guest speaker on the [00:17:00] Collaboratory, he was showing what tracker was he showing?

Joe Toste: I don't think it was Emergency Management. What was he showing the group? Project Management. Okay, Project Management. Okay. So I think it's really great just to get visibility across the organization. We're going to talk about it later, but I did share traction with him. Yeah.

Joe Toste: Yeah, big fan of that. But Rob, real quick, I just want to build on the One Seattle plan. And what role will and it'll be a big role, will data and digital infrastructure play in ensuring that the developments in the plan are both equitable and sustainable for the city?

Rob Lloyd: And so I think that can be answered two ways.

Rob Lloyd: One is on the equity level, every department is looking for ways to make sure that the decisions that we make are extensible to those equity decisions that, so on the infrastructure level, for example we have a huge bond levy that's out there to the community. And as we make investments in bridges and streets, TechTables.

Rob Lloyd: We want to make sure that it's informed by, for example, the Payment Quality Index, but also that those [00:18:00] investments are being distributed to neighborhoods on an equity score as well. So we have an equity atlas, and it's informed by both of those and community feedback. Same as we have with other services and police and in hiring and in our education, we have a special revenue source.

Rob Lloyd: That we can invest in schools and programs. Seattle is actually a national leader in making sure that the community honors who matters and that representation is there. And we have a balancing of things where that was a really high priority, but right now we also are trying to balance that with public safety, homelessness and other priorities that are really high right now too.

Rob Lloyd: But those are not competing. They're actually equal but to be balanced with each other. Equity and some of the housing priorities were even higher maybe about three, four years ago. But right now our priorities are even higher on public safety and [00:19:00] homelessness and and the housing equation.

Rob Lloyd: To answer your question in another way is the systems that we have, the data, the insights, the skills that we have, the AI innovation drives the innovation demonstration program, the partnerships with our community and companies, that's all part of the engine that we have where we're trying to unleash the brilliance of our organization and our community.

Rob Lloyd: And that's part of the mission that IT really has to hold because there's a lot of potential and brilliance in everything that we have in the human capital. And the assets that we have that are the information, but just the people that we have that are amazing and a community that is tech oriented and a bunch of companies that want to be partners, not just to sell us things, but as they promise us to solve big city challenges.

Rob Lloyd: Even one where we're helping create the AI safety and security framework. For the nation under the Department of Homeland Security to say how do you create an AI framework that [00:20:00] companies, non profits, education, universities, and government can create something where we can lean into this without legislators saying, hey, we don't trust AI, so we're going to give you some rules to follow.

Rob Lloyd: And, whoa, will we all be loving that. Department of Homeland Security has convened this, but all that to say is we have leaned into this at all three levels of that is we want to give those tools, that information, and those capacities to our organization. We want to engage in partnership with our community and our community's companies all the way to AI House, which is a partnership with our economic development, the state.

Rob Lloyd: And companies and the Allen Institute to incubate and accelerate these companies and do responsible use all the way to national leadership, which is how do we define how we're going to use these technologies in a responsible way and the GovAI coalition and other things where we can say let's define this for all of us heading [00:21:00] forward.

Rob Lloyd: All that then connects to just one sum is unleashing our people, solving city challenges, and community problems for all of our benefit.

Joe Toste: Chris, in transitioning from the private to the public sector, how have you, and we actually did a whole podcast on this, but it's still great how have you leveraged your experience with the Entrepreneurial Operating System, known as, there was a book that they wrote, Traction, to set ambitious goals, yet attain those long term goals for the county?

Joe Toste: Working backwards. How do you ensure accountability for yourself and your team to really drive projects forward, drive those initiatives forward? And I know this because you've shared it inside personally, but you've got your own goal tracker that you demoed, but just love to hear your thoughts on that.

Chris Chirgwin: Yeah, so I got to go back 10 to 12 years when I was running a IT services firm, and we were growing, but as we grew, I was recognizing that we were just having all kinds of issues with communication and process and [00:22:00] accountability, and it was just becoming very disorganized, and I recognized that we needed some type of an operational framework That would really help all of us be on the same page, improve how we ran meetings, improved our hiring processes, just all those things that are so important to growing a successful organization.

Chris Chirgwin: And so a peer group that I was in recommended a book that was published in 2012 called Traction. And in the book, Traction, it talks about this entrepreneur's operating system. So basically a framework for how an organization should run. So we began to implement that in my former company. And it made a significant change in how we ran the business, and how we hired, just through all the processes.

Chris Chirgwin: Really launched our company to, to, we doubled in size in a fairly short period of time after we put that in place. When I joined the County of Santa Barbara, I [00:23:00] walked into an environment where there was a lot of really good people, but there wasn't a lot of structure. There wasn't a lot of the operational framework that I had become familiar with, but I didn't know how the, this EOS model that I had learned.

Chris Chirgwin: How it would translate into the public sector because the book was really written for the private sector. But I said, I'm gonna give it a try. And so sat down in the first six months of being there, sat down with my leadership team, introduced them to the concepts, introduced them to the book, had them all read it.

Chris Chirgwin: Became familiar with it, and then we began to implement just little pieces at a time. And I can, fast forward to now, and it's made a huge difference in how we run as a department within the county. When you refer to the goal setting and the accountability that we put in place, so what we did was we said, okay, I got my leadership team together, and We looked [00:24:00] at the strategic plan and we say, okay, these are our five major initiatives.

Chris Chirgwin: Now go back to your respective teams and your teams now need to set up goals that help us achieve those five objectives, right? Now every member of your team, they need to be responsible for choosing their own goals that align with their team goals, which then obviously align with our department goals, right?

Chris Chirgwin: And so we captured all these goals across all, we have about 75 staff members now. We captured all their goals, documented them in a smart sheet. We've got a yellow, red, green, right? So it's transparent to everybody on the team. And, but the goals were chosen by each member of the team. And so we implemented that over a year ago.

Chris Chirgwin: And when I went back not too long ago and looked at how we did in the first year of accomplishing those goals. Combined, the team did over 400 goals that they were successful at. Those [00:25:00] would not have been accomplished if we wouldn't have followed this framework had the transparency, had the accountability that created.

Chris Chirgwin: And the team loves it. They've really bought into this because they've seen the improvements that have been made. within the department in a fairly short period of time. So it was just exciting for me to see something that worked in a prior organization in the private sector translate and work just as well in the public sector.

Joe Toste: Yeah. I want to unpack this cause it, it seems so basic and it is, it's just that nobody does it. And so what I loved about when I was reading traction and going through the EOS framework was like taking the time. So everyone like jumps into an organization and they. Want to start tackling initiatives.

Joe Toste: But what I, why I thought the two of you got it would get along really well was actually with EOS, you sit down and figure out like, Hey, what's. What's this 10 year vision we have? What are the core values? What do we actually believe? Like you said, there's great people coming in. There's great people, but you've got to take time to listen to them, right?

Joe Toste: [00:26:00] You can't just start giving orders. All the way down to getting very tactical with quarterly goals, which they call ROCs. And and then what they call L10, Level 10 meetings. And I was doing this basically by myself, but it's you rank the meeting at the end. And I'm like, how would I rank this meeting for myself?

Joe Toste: I'm like, man, this is like a four. I'm like, this is bad. I gotta get structured, right? So this is like very helpful as I'm running, as I'm running this. And even just the red, yellow, green, just like understanding oh, okay. It's very clear. These are the goals. Very quickly, where are we at?

Joe Toste: And I've got a kind of backend system, same thing. So when I come back to Seattle got a system, right? So it's got the podcast, got this I want everything green. If this is yellow or this is red, I got to address this quickly. I got to prioritize, I got to reprioritize. And so I really love that framework and how you started to apply it to the city and just seeing the buy in and all that.

Joe Toste: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Suman, your strategic plan includes, you mentioned it, you [00:27:00] jumped 85 percent customer satisfaction score within, within two years. And you may or may not achieve that. I actually love what you said about hey, if we don't achieve it, but we have a massive improvement.

Joe Toste: That's awesome, right? I'm a huge believer of like setting those big goals, and maybe I don't hit them. And actually, I think I've thought about it, I don't hit any of my goals. I always come up short, because I just set massive goals. But it's still a lot of fun, and I'm still, I'm not like disappointed or anything, right?

Joe Toste: So I love that you mentioned that. But what strategies are you implementing to reach You mentioned it briefly, but, I want you to really drill into the, like, how are you measuring the IT excellence on community outcomes? 

Souman: Yeah first, just a small comment on the goal, right?

Souman: When we took the goal the 85 percent was benchmark against what an industry average good looks like. And it is slightly higher than the industry average and the reason we is that we want to set it at a level that inspires people, but then does not do that. It's not [00:28:00] so far away that it demotivates even the start of it, right?

Souman: So that's, that was the logic of how we picked that. In terms of specific IT actions we are taking that's measurable. There are There are two ways, in addition to the CSAT, there are two specific metrics as a team that we are starting to monitor. So one is what we are calling is the cost to serve which is and it's, it shouldn't be a new concept, but think about it this way is, we are in the business as an agency of delivering benefits, right?

Souman: So benefits are hard dollars that we give, right? Your productivity and efficiency as an agency is a function of how much dollar is spent in delivering a dollar of benefit. And the lower the number, the better you're doing your job at. The cost to serve is what we're using to measure inflation adjusted, are we bringing the cost to serve down through the use of technology.

Souman: That's a very direct measure of productivity improvement. And if it doesn't, if technology doesn't drive that [00:29:00] down, it doesn't help. The second measure that we're using is what we are defining as penetration rate. What that means is if you have in your state A hundred people that qualifies for a certain program and a benefit that you have released.

Souman: How many of those hundred are you getting to, right? Are you giving the benefit to 70 of them, 80 of them, 90 of them? The goal there is to get to 100%, right? How these two combined works is, if you reduce the cost to serve, which means you put more money in the ledger's pocket to actually expand those programs and try to get more people covered in those programs, right?

Souman: So you, these two work. And then how does it link to customer satisfaction? Because if you did these two well, what clients really want or residents really want is, if I need a benefit and I get it and I get it now, that's all I expect from you. And that's going to drive the customer satisfaction automatically, right?

Souman: The customer satisfaction is an output [00:30:00] metric. These two kind of are our input metrics to keep an eye out on. Very simple things that we're doing, right? So cost to serve, right? One of the biggest drivers of Cost to serve reduction is what percentage of our tasks needs manual intervention, or human in the loop intervention, right?

Souman: There are some statutes that necessitates us that a human has to do certain things, right? Eligibility determinations. We can't use AI, even no matter how advanced AI is. Statute prevents you from using AI to make eligibility determinations, positive or negative, for any of the benefits, right? So we can't use AI there, but In getting to that decision point there are a lot of manual actions that happen.

Souman: Collecting records, looking at them, parsing out certain financial data to then compare against thresholds and so on and so forth, right? All of those things can be automated. Leveraging, we are going really big on process automation or RPA, Robotic Roads Automation, and we are looking at every [00:31:00] element of process that's today human touched.

Souman: How can we start automating that so that we can now add capacity? So it does two things. It reduces the cost to serve, but it also adds capacity, which increases the ability to reach more people. So it also increases penetration. So that's one example. On the penetration rate One of the things, for instance, that blocks us from, going and awarding benefits without too much check is we believe there is a lot of people who might start committing fraud, right?

Souman: People who don't qualify would start availing benefits, right? So we are right now in the process of actually again, we did this thing on the state, we are doing it, Vortec did it once. TechTables. And we are the second agency doing it. We have just released a challenge procurement where we have said instead of the standard procurement mechanism of this is the SOW, vendors come and tell us who will deliver it at what cost.

Souman: We said, this is the problem we are trying to solve. Come back and tell us the most innovative solution that you have to solve [00:32:00] that problem. The outcome is what we are trying to write the SOW for. And we are inviting, we don't even know what the solution is. We are not writing an SOW for a solution. We are writing an SOW.

Souman: We're writing a challenge for a problem we want to solve. And we made that live. We're going to select our vendor there. That's going to address the fraud part. So once that fraud part of it is solved, now we can go in and say, OK, what relaxation in our checks and balances can we do? Because the fraud side is in control, which then allows people who are not applying or who are getting cut off because of the barrier to solve the problem.

Souman: Hey, I need to provide 50, 000 things before I even get a benefit, why bother? I will never get there, right? Those two together is helping, will help, not is helping, will help start driving down that penetration driving up the penetration rate. One of the examples, right? So there's more that we are doing, but these two I would surface because they go well together.

Joe Toste: Yeah, those were really great insights. Rob, one of the things that I [00:33:00] really picked up on and appreciate from you is just your genuine love for the community. And and where I'm going with that is I like how you were like, hey, don't, just don't give me, don't pitch me like a solution you're looking for this innovative problem.

Joe Toste: And where I feel like that ties really well in with you, Rob, is you're looking for hey, how can Wiz help the city of Seattle, right? Not that it's this AI Cloud Platform. And yeah, no, I would love to hear from you around really on the technology side what you're looking for to make those impacts.

Rob Lloyd: Sure. And I can answer it a couple different ways. One is outcome based procurements is a strong tool. More recently, CitiInnovate and others have called it challenge based procurements. But the model is outcome based where you define here's the inputs in my environment here's the outcomes, industry, you show me your brilliance in the middle and that, that's a good general partnership model.

Rob Lloyd: Another one is where you have an innovation demonstration program in your organization where you say I'm gonna have a zero dollar engagement but I can use my [00:34:00] city time or county time. And assets. You bring company or non profit or other government, your assets and let's create something together.

Rob Lloyd: So that's where, for example, we teamed up with Facebook and created Telegraph technology and created that downtown high speed network. And then they OEMed it and now that is a technology that's for sale that's nano meter. So it's The very high speed small cell technology. So you can do that too.

Rob Lloyd: And the other ones are where you have a really strong team, and you've executed really well in your projects and you're engaged with your community, you have good political leadership but you have a reputation of innovating and delivering for your community. And companies come to you and say we don't just want to spray and pray and pitch you and sell you something as a transactional relationship.

Rob Lloyd: TechTables. com But we want a strategic relationship with you. So a couple examples. Partners with Zoom when they were a 20, 30 million dollar company. Because Eric Yuan said, I want to do right by my community. You want to [00:35:00] do right by your community. We want to invent public engagement technologies.

Rob Lloyd: And we think this new standard of of remote technologies, high fidelity on this R455 standard as opposed to these old technologies like Webex and the old teams, we think we can do better. Will you work with us? And we said, yeah, you're really invested. Let's do that. And we created that low dollar PO.

Rob Lloyd: And then we worked with them and then COVID hits and all that work paid off. And we were instantly a virtual organization in three days. And they turned into a 20, 30 billion company. ChargePoint was another one where they said, Hey, we have this idea about doing charging stations. We think this would be really good one day when the world adopts EVs.

Rob Lloyd: Could you imagine the day? We said we think we could. But that was a long time ago, before Teslas were really big. And we said, but yeah, let's work together. That's part of our long term value and goals. And so ChargePoint now is one of those standards where you can see We worked with LLMs [00:36:00] before when it was just GPT, no, no 0, no chat.

Rob Lloyd: We worked with Claude, with Armor Blocks, and we were immune to BEC attacks and spam and phishing for a couple years. And we were just hoping that the bad guys didn't discover LLMs either. But we were just dreading the day that they would. But we could work with Armor Blocks and then Cisco bought them in Splunk.

Rob Lloyd: SASE technologies, you could work with them, but those are different models where you can say we can work with our assets and you work with your assets, we can procure in a specific mode, or we can have these strategic relationships. But to your point it's the different modes, what you're trying to accomplish and what time frame and what you're capable of.

Rob Lloyd: And the kind of reputation and team that you can develop sets the paths and capabilities and the engines that you have at your disposal. But the technology organization of cities and counties can be pretty, pretty brilliant. And they can unlock a lot of what's possible in departments.

Rob Lloyd: And once you do a few of those the departments are partners at a different level. And they come to you [00:37:00] with all kinds of new ideas. And you're their first partner as opposed to the partner of last resort and the one they come to thinking you're going to say no. Because they're engaged with their community members.

Rob Lloyd: You're engaged too. They see the world of possibilities rather than just doing the basics. And the community is a laboratory as opposed to just the world as it is and what must be. And the last thing I'll tell you is sometimes I coach my organization. Our council sees the world as because they work with the community as it should be.

Rob Lloyd: Staff often sees the world as it is because we're working with resources. TechTables. com We work with the limits every day. We work with contracts. We work with the city attorney. And if we're doing our job really well, that gap is really small. The world as it should be, all those complaints, the world as it is, all the things we do, there's not much gap.

Rob Lloyd: Everything works. But where there's a big gap, people get voted out of office. There's lots of complaints. People say the city or [00:38:00] county doesn't work. And lots of things break down. But when that gap is small, there's lots of support. The community is talking with each other. We're solving problems. And the community is in sync.

Rob Lloyd: And CIOs can and CTOs can be really valuable in the sense that we bridge that and we cause that bridge to be shorter and smaller. And the leaders of our organization can tell the community, we're solving your problems and we are, we have the capability of listening to you. And bringing you solutions, and making you safer, and making the community cleaner, and bringing you opportunity.

Rob Lloyd: And that's a wonderful wonderful career to have. 

Joe Toste: So everything that you said right there, I really like. And the gap between the expectation piece is, I want to hone on this for a second. Travel around, all around the country, one of the biggest gaps I see, especially like with CIOs, is they actually They might leave their office to go to an event, but the kind of office I'm thinking about is they never like, walk down the street.

Joe Toste: They never go out into the community. A lot of times they can 

Rob Lloyd: And I'll push [00:39:00] you on it a little bit more. They'll complain when their council member says, the world's not working quite right. It's they don't understand how hard it is. And they don't see the world quite as they should be as We should be helping them connect the world as it is and as it should be.

Joe Toste: And you can only have that empathy when I think, honestly, like you go out there and start. So if I take your job position it's like actually meeting the people who fill out the applications. There was actually a, there was actually a really great book. I think it was endorsed. 

Rob Lloyd: Oh, 

Joe Toste: what is it called?

Joe Toste: I know the author too. She's going to come on the podcast. I think Obama wrote a review about it. But basically there was this story with on the federal side. You're not 

Rob Lloyd: thinking Palka? Jennifer Palka's Recode? 

Joe Toste: It might be that one. There's a story where they're saying they had some medical health forms and it was taking something like two or three hours to get the forms filled out.

Joe Toste: And suddenly they were figuring out hey, why does it take so long? Because they didn't hire Sumam yet. Exactly. And the forms had something [00:40:00] like 80 questions on it. Of which 90 percent were irrelevant. And it was like, huh, that's very interesting. They whacked it, and they actually had the executive team come in, and they did the first round where they had them fill out the forms that were 90 questions, and then they had them come in and fill out the other one.

Joe Toste: And they were shocked and who would ever fill out the 90 questions, right? And they're like this is because it was, this was the way it was always done. And until they got leadership involved into actually hey, why don't you have a little bit of empathy? And this is just what is the end user experience, right?

Joe Toste: And so the end user experience is horrible, but the leadership is so disconnected. And so it's you could. Bridge that gap together. 

Rob Lloyd: And, I'm sure those questions are really important, but making, expecting perfection up front from someone who's struggling to get through a process not very nice.

Rob Lloyd: So there, there is a better way rather than putting all our internal problems on the front end of a resident. 

Joe Toste: And it was like, the people filling out the forms were like, single moms who've got a kid crying, and they don't [00:41:00] have time for that. Yeah. 

Souman: Like when we looked at that whole form experience in, in, in our project like we made the partner who was working with us on this start documenting the overall process flow.

Souman: Like every step that a resident has to take till the point in time that they actually get the benefit in their bank account or whatever be the mechanism of the delivery, right? And then they cleared this and then they were showing it on the presentation. It was like, I don't know, some hundred plus slides.

Souman: And we said, Let's do one thing. Let's print it on pages of paper, and let's start laying it on the floor. And let's invite people to see. People have to walk over 200 steps from one end to the other end to complete, to see the process. But they got their steps in. They got their steps in. Yeah. But that was very powerful as a signaling mechanism, and as a empathy mechanism to understand what is happening with your constituents.

Souman: When they are asking for this, and these are the [00:42:00] other pieces, a lot of these forms is not just about the 80 questions. Many person, if I am, let's say, of need a benefit, it's very likely that I qualify for more than one benefit. I'm asking my name when I'm filing for benefit A. I'm asking my name when I'm filing for a benefit B, for benefit C.

Souman: If you look at those 80 questions, across those three forms, 60 questions out of those are being asked three times over. Because there's only 10 or 15 questions that are different, depending on the benefits. And we are making the 

Rob Lloyd: Can I give you an example of, so the city of Seattle worked with Google.

Rob Lloyd: org, their non profit arm, on a project called CIVIFORM. And CIVIFORM actually says that question is, if you have this benefit and we get this information, what other things can you qualify for? So by submitting one simple form, you get thousands of dollars worth of benefits. And that's one of the One Seattle initiatives.

Rob Lloyd: is you literally get thousands of dollars of assistance by going through one transactional [00:43:00] form that's pretty simple. Yeah. But that's trying to make life easy and get people help. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, no that's really good. Let's finish up with some closing thoughts. I really like this conversation a lot, especially as we start to dig into the real applications for the users.

Joe Toste: But Chris any closing thoughts? 

Chris Chirgwin: Yeah, I was just, as I was listening to what we were just talking about, I was thinking how important it is for, Any public sector organization, really any organization in general, is how do you create that culture of How do you create that culture of collaboration?

Chris Chirgwin: What we're working on right now is in, instead of just these projects coming in that we don't know necessarily if they're the right projects that we should be doing, right? We, that was the question you were, that we were just talking about is rather than just, Dealing with this flood of, when we all deal with it, there's more projects and we have resources, right?

Chris Chirgwin: Are we doing the right projects? And the only way to know if we're really doing the right projects is we have to be asking [00:44:00] the questions. We have to be understanding, is this really going to impact either the organization or impact the constituents? And so one thing that we've done within Central IT in Santa Barbara is we have created a team that's the Business Relationship Management team.

Chris Chirgwin: And their whole entire role is to go out and meet with all the departments, all the leadership, the Board of Supervisors on a regular basis and ask really good questions, right? How can we help your department? What are the ideas that you have as a department head to improve how you serve your constituents, right?

Chris Chirgwin: And when those, when that information comes back to IT, now it's business and operational needs leading the discussion, not technology leading the discussion, right? And I think that's where it really, you start to gain some real traction when you're solving real needs and prioritizing those [00:45:00] real needs.

Chris Chirgwin: And so that's something that we've taken a real concerted effort to just. Ask a lot of questions to gather information and then work to prioritize the initiatives and projects based on those, those areas that we really feel are going to make the biggest impact. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. And I like when you ask questions and people feel heard.

Joe Toste: Then people get excited. People get wow we're gonna get some, no joke, traction. We're actually moving the ball up the court, and wow yeah, this is then you get more feedback, and it's this vicious loop a little bit, and a good way of wow, okay people are excited, we're moving in the right direction, we're listening yeah, it's, that's a good one.

Joe Toste: Ma'am, any final thoughts? 

Souman: I'll say, I think there are two things that are super important in, in, in pushing a customer first mindset within organizations. One is giving people the ability to [00:46:00] try and fail and being okay with that failure. That's super important to exist as a culture. Because what, one of the things that I came in and I sensed is that people are afraid of getting things wrong.

Souman: And Whenever they were at that risk, they would either try to defer the decision as long as they can, so that if there is a failure, it doesn't come to them, or move up the decision as much as they can. Because then they can say, oh, it was not my decision, my manager took it, or my So we have to create a culture where you are allowing people to fail at the lowest level, and it's okay to fail as long as you're learning, and iterating, and improving.

Souman: The second thing that needs to be solved for is There is never a perfect state. Today's perfect state is going to be imperfect tomorrow. So it's more important to continue to move, even if it's incremental [00:47:00] improvement, versus waiting for the perfect solution. And I've seen so much time lost in trying to find the perfect solution, versus saying, Let's just be a little bit better than yesterday, right?

Souman: And when you start adding it up, over a year, you'll realize you've come a long way. But it's very hard to fathom that our brains are not tailored to calculate 001 raised to 365. Step that you can take.

Souman: Absolutely. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, our minds don't comprehend that at all and compounding is something that doesn't really exist. It's not linear, right? Our mind's just don't get it. And yeah, and I love the if you've ever read Atomic Habits. I was just going to say, that's exactly 

Chris Chirgwin: the whole premise of that book.

Chris Chirgwin: Yeah. 

Chris Chirgwin: Consistency. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. It's just consistency. Doing those little changes. Rob, any closing thoughts? 

Rob Lloyd: I have a couple. I think you do have to get that culture and do it right internally before you can ever do something exceptional externally. And so if we don't have great services and have great interactions internally [00:48:00] and create that culture and collaboration across departments we won't be able to do it for our residents.

Rob Lloyd: Number two is that ability to work across departments and Our model, what I work with is a Portfolio Product Project Office concept where you do that road mapping. It's the right product and project at the right time. And there's clarity, commitment, and urgency, and if there's not, don't do it.

Rob Lloyd: But also as we do our things, about right in time is always better than perfectly right too late. And in communities, we have to make some of those trade offs. And our councils actually are wonderful when you express it in those terms. They are willing, almost always, to own that decision if you just communicate.

Rob Lloyd: And you'd be amazed how willing and solid a partner they can be when you engage them in that way, rather than not engaging and just bringing out, The end result where they have no ownership and so use the budget process use the communication through the year [00:49:00] talk about the impact on community but there's relationships at those sets.

Rob Lloyd: And the last one I'll say is if we're doing our jobs right, there's value we're bringing at three levels, and we have to deliver it at three levels. Otherwise, I'll tell you there's an immune response in the organization to technology that develops and innovation. One is you have to be delivering value at the line level because the people day to day need to see their jobs getting better.

Rob Lloyd: There has to be value at the management level where they have to say I'm able to organize the work and over a course of a year get things better. And the executives and counsel have to say the big initiatives that I want to push, I'm getting those too. But often we see those big initiatives and one or two get done and then the immune response kicks in and those line levels say I'm out because I'm not getting anything I need.

Rob Lloyd: That's content. And then that executive, CIO, city manager, county manager is gone. Or the elected person gets out of office. But if we're really good at our craft, we'll make [00:50:00] sure that value gets delivered at all three levels so that everyone stays plugged in, and they say, I'm getting what I need out of this, and the engine keeps working.

Joe Toste: That's great. Thank you all for coming on the Public Sector Show by TechTables. Thank you.

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