Ep.106 From Networking Admin to CIO of Texas HHS w/ Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services

Joe Toste [00:00:39]: Today we have Rick Blanco, CIO at the Texas Health and Human Services. Rick, welcome to Tech table.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:00:44]: Thank you very much.

Joe Toste [00:00:45]: I'm really excited to have you on. So today's podcast is titled from networking admin to CIO at Texas HHS. When we first talked and we first met, something that we chatted about was the number of veterans that you end up hiring. And now, I don't know if it was intentional, but the workforce strategy piece really stuck out to me. And the hiring of veterans, in my perspective, does two things. First, provides a new mission to the veterans. And second, it seems to fill the leadership gap, what we talked about for the incoming generation, for leadership direction, mentorship for those younger guys. So I was curious, what human centric hiring practices or tips do you have for leaders looking to leverage veterans in their teams?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:01:28]: So those that might not be aware. I grew up in a military family, so my dad was a combat vet from Vietnam. And so if you can imagine, every day was very disciplined growing up. So from age five, we weren't learning how to ride a bike. We were learning how to do hand to hand combat and how to survive. It just happened to work out that way. During the pandemic, we had a lot of people transitioning from Afghanistan or Iraq, right, overseas, and they needed another mission, and we provided that, if you can imagine, during 2020 when we all had to go home, we had to figure out how do we stand up these systems in three days, right, from just discovery to production. And we are very mission driven at HHS.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:02:16]: And so we had a lot of retired lieutenant colonels, colonels. Myself, I have an administrative assistant who is a retired command sergeant major. And I'm telling you, she commands discipline. 30 years in the army, she commands discipline. But they're very mission driven. Right? And we have very dedicated staff in our organization. But we had to operate in a very high, intense command structure during the pandemic. And so with this mission driven objective, a lot of our retired Veterans provided that guidance to those that were coming in.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:02:55]: Believe it or not, during the pandemic response, that was probably our best recruitment stage. We had people coming in, wanted to be a part of the mission. We had good partnerships with other agencies. Everybody was mission driven. Right? And so I would say that if you do have veterans or those in general that are very dedicated, create that mission in your organization. That's how we get things done. That's how we continue to get things done. And then the veterans, they reach out to people that are looking for that transition because it provides them that second career and they're out there recruiting.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:03:33]: I'm not even asking to do it. They're out there recruiting. I have people that are either Blackhawk helicopter pilots, some of them have just received deployment to go overseas to european campaigns. I have some that have now taking on in the reserve status, different commands. And so it really keeps everything interesting. It keeps people very focused on the mission. Right. Because we are mission driven at health and human services and we are just getting things done.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:04:03]: We're looking for that next mission that is going to continue to move the needle forward in our organization.

Joe Toste [00:04:10]: So specifically on the hiring front, you may not be doing so much heavy recruiting these days, but what is your team looking for? How do they identify mission driven individuals?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:04:24]: What we did is we created a talent and development internally with an. It happens to be a Navy vet. Right. So he's looking for particular, I guess, characteristics and people through either social media or just people that are placing their resumes. And we're very transparent and honest. This is what we're looking for. Right. It happens to be that they're a vet.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:04:48]: Hey, great. If it's college grad or even someone from another agency that is trying to join the mission, that's what we really push. Right. And so our talent development director is phenomenal when it comes to certain characteristics that we look for in a candidate, making sure the understand that we are mission driven and having them understand what the mission is. Right. I think those qualities, those processes really have helped us with our retention currently within it. As you know, we're competing with everyone else in the Austin market. It's a challenge.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:05:29]: But I can tell you that right now, our retention rate or even our recruiting strategy within health and human services, particularly in it, we're in like not even the double digits. We've been able to keep retention and recruitment down in the single digits. As far as getting people to come over, we are doing whatever we can to incentivize, getting people to buy into our cause, our mission, making sure we have good partnerships with our different vendors, our different partner agencies here. And I mean, that seemed to work and that's what we're going to continue to do.

Joe Toste [00:06:07]: So one of the things I was thinking about, I love we're hammering home mission driven. I imagine the mission driven piece evolved from the early days of the pandemic to now. Has it evolved.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:06:20]: It has evolved. So those that understand HHS, we are making a difference, a positive difference in the lives of the people we serve. I've talked to several people here in the crowd about when I started in the director position in state government, my first tour was on an adolescent ward at a state hospital. If you can imagine, I had ten year olds approaching me with severe manic depression and so forth. I mean, that really touched me. I went home and I hugged my kids. And one of the things that I tell my staff, even to this day, a lot of the people that are providing those direct care services, we probably know what they make, and we probably know the difficulties and the challenges they face in providing those direct care services. I want them to focus on that care.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:07:12]: I don't want them to focus on WiFi is down, my laptop doesn't work. I have an unstable network. That's our roles and responsibilities as it towards the mission. It's all important, and we want to make sure that we continually serve that.

Joe Toste [00:07:31]: Yeah, I love that. So we have an audience guest who I think is a pretty big fan of yours. He's sitting right here, Krishna. Pretty big fan. So he texted me. He said, hey, I got to hear the journey from networking admin to CIO. So walk us through that journey.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:07:46]: It's been a long, hard road journey, to be honest. When I got into this position, as an interim in August of 2019 and permanent in November, I will tell you, one of the things that asked me to do is stabilize it, right? So I will tell you that do not turn down opportunities. I take all kinds of challenges. I don't care how hard they are. I think I can always make a positive difference. So when I started out, man, I worked in private sector. But when I came to the government, I'll tell you, to this day, I don't even remember applying for the job until I got a call for an interview and I took it. It was a very low system support specialist position.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:08:38]: I was doing desktop support. Hey, everybody has to start somewhere. And from there, I evolved. When people gave me the opportunity and the challenge, absolutely, I'll do it. I think in the last three years, I've changed positions, like four or five times. I was a CTO at 1.6 weeks. I think someone said, hey, we need you to step in. I was a deputy CIO for months, been in infrastructure and operations for a long time.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:09:10]: And then when the CIO position became available, I was asked to stabilize, and I said, yeah, I can do it. I'll do it. And then from there, put together my plan became permanent in this position. That was 2019 and then 2020. Here's Covid. What are we going to do? You got to remain calm again. You got to drive it home. You have to manage multiple personalities, and you just do it.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:09:41]: I have five kids, so I'm not embarrassed. Nothing really scares me. I've got five kids, various ages, and you just get it done. You surround yourself with a very loyal and supportive team. I've got a great team that gets the work done. We have good partnerships with our vendors and other agencies. Christian, I have worked on a lot of things together and have been in the fight, and you just keep moving forward. And, I mean, that's what I did.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:10:17]: I got exposed to technology early on when my dad came back from Vietnam, came back to Austin, very unpopular war, right? He couldn't get a job. He worked at various jobs trying to provide for us, and then he had an opportunity to open up. He worked at Texas Instruments. He worked in the data center. So when I was small, my summer job was hanging tapes for mainframes. It was awesome, right? These big o tapes. And I got exposed to the technology that was available in the data centers. And from there, I worked for various oil and gas, and I've worked for manufacturing in the private sector.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:10:58]: I came to the public sector. I wanted a little more stability. I had small kids. I wanted to provide back service. As my dad would say, he was a combat vet. Hey, provide back. Provide your expertise to those that need it and continue to serve. And that's what I've done for 23 years.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:11:24]: I love it. I love my job. Every day is a challenge, but we get it done.

Joe Toste [00:11:31]: Yeah, I love that about saying yes to opportunities. You never know where those opportunities come from. I said yes to work at a property management software company, and it's called Yardy Systems. So for those of you who are familiar with Yardy, you interview with eight managers, and seven of them told me, this kid is not good. He doesn't know SQL. And I asked, what? So. But I had one guy, this guy who believed in me, Anthony Harris, who. No, no.

Joe Toste [00:12:02]: He smiles. He got a great attitude. We'll teach him SQL. It's fine. We'll teach him SQL. And then that led to, I worked at a medical software company, and these are all kind of the technical account manager roles. And so, yeah, I learned SQL. I mean, the first day, the team leads, drawing a DB and a web server, and I'm sitting there like, what is going on right now? And so, yeah, I said yes to this opportunity.

Joe Toste [00:12:28]: And then I think I ran into an old team lead. It's like, hey, what are you doing? I'm like, hey, I host a technology podcast and it's like, no way.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:12:36]: Absolutely. And keep your say to do ratio high. So if you say you're going to do something, do it right. Keep that ratio high. So as you go, as you get up the ladder, it becomes even more difficult, right? Because there's all kinds of challenges, but people remember that. So keep that say to do high.

Joe Toste [00:12:56]: I love that. And for those who are, I'm a big military fan. There's a guy named Jocko out there. And so I've got the discipline equals freedom and the get after it. So I'd highly recommend extreme ownership. If you haven't read it, is a fantastic book. So recently I interviewed Tim Roemer, who's the Arizona state CISO and director of Homeland security. And one of the biggest takeaways I had from him was the importance of storytelling and making the key asks to get funding.

Joe Toste [00:13:26]: An example of this was when he would go to try and get funding, and he basically explained cybersecurity in the sense of a credit score, which I thought was a pretty great idea. And so he said at the time, I think he said, our credit score is like 575. And they're like, oh, wow, we understand 575. That's not good. How much money can we give you, right? So I had noticed on Cyberscoop that in the awards section, you had lobbied for and secured legislative funding to develop a more robust security monitoring platform. Can you maybe just walk us through how to craft a good story and how to make those key asks to get your projects funded?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:14:06]: So we were mandated through a writer to put together a modernization plan, which we had to publish. We had to provide a copy to the governor's office, to the LBB, and then we had to public it on our website. And the modernization plan was working with a combination of program and it to essentially tell a story about the good, the bad, and ugly of it, technology in general at HHS, which is a big risk that I had to take, but I wanted to be fully transparent. And we put ourselves out there. We used that very heavily last session, as we had discussions with legislators. We told a story about if we didn't take some sort of action, and we continued with our current spend, that in the next two years, almost 89% of our environment would be end of life, end of support. I mean, you just got to put it out there. And some people thought, well, man, that's crazy, Rick, you're basically going to be somewhere else if it doesn't happen.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:15:17]: But you got to let people know this is the way it is. You're trying to establish some authenticity with the legislators who primarily will tell you, hey, we gave you money last session. What did you do with it? And so we were trying to be very authentic with the story. The other thing we've done here recently is we've identified the various technology that makes up and supports the program areas. So if we're talking about Medicaid, here's all the technology makeup of supporting Medicaid. But what is very interesting is here's the amount of money that you're investing, and this is the outcome as a result of it. And so we've had that conversation internally with our executives. We've also had it downtown here recently.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:16:06]: And so what's great about it is we've had to make this away from the stereotype of being very technical, and we put it in very business like speak, outcome based. And so what I had to do last session is I was competing with state hospitals who were asking for money for feeding tubes. And I'm talking about I need terrestrial cabling to put in state hospitals. Well, what does that mean? But I was able to tell the story about I need this cabling because it drives this technology. It supports the feeding tube system that runs on the underlying infrastructure, and it also supports the Abbott lab glucose monitoring systems that are required for a lot of our patients that are diabetic. And when you put it that way, and I was in Senate finance committee, it was one of these. Wow. Mike.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:17:03]: Whose story was very compelling. We're going to put him at number one, and we're going to put you at number two. And as a result of it, our request, we received 90% of our request for funding. And again, we'll continue to do that as we go down to the next session. But you have to have all your facts. You have to put it in a way that people can relate. I think a lot of mistakes from the IT perspective is we try to identify an outcome that's project based, but we're not doing it based on how it supports the business. Right.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:17:38]: How does it support managed care services? I think we had a conversation with someone here about, I want the direct care service to be focused on so they're not worried about the technology, but I want to be able to support that. And it's a partnership that you have to say it's a partnership with your vendors, and it's a partnership with the agencies about, hey, I need your support. This is what we're asking for. Is it the right way to ask, or should we ask for differently. I mean, the bottom line is we want to make sure that we're serving our citizens of Texas. Right. We want to make sure that we're getting that technology that's available to support direct care services to make their lives better. And again, I can't point out that that's our mission.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:18:28]: That's what we drive towards.

Joe Toste [00:18:30]: Yeah, that's great. Okay, so let's move to the audience for some audience questions. I will remind you, you cannot ask anything specific to Rick or it will not pass media or communications. Anyone have any questions for Rick? Yes, summer.

Summer Xiao, [00:18:48]: So, Rick, when you mentioned that the recruiting has a heavy focus on veterans.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:18:53]: Right.

Summer Xiao, [00:18:54]: So do you recruit experienced veterans or inexperienced veterans who are looking to make transition, especially those who are making a transition? How do you train them up? How do you help them transition?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:19:06]: So we focus on graduates, we focus on veterans. Right. And then we focus on private sector. Okay. It happened to work out that during the pandemic, because of just how we were operating, we had a lot of veterans that hired on and what we were looking for, not necessarily the technology experience. We were looking for the leadership. We needed people to come in and fill that leadership gap because we had to move very quickly. There's a lot of sensitivity that we had to somewhat bypass.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:19:45]: Right. Because we had to get it done. We had requests come in where the week before, someone was asking for a particular solution and product, let's say contact tracing. All this is new. And we needed something by the following Monday. Got the request on a Wednesday, the following Monday. We had to have something up and running. The whole concept of minimal, viable products and going from discovery to production, a lot of that was just kind of not really the norm in state government, but that's the partnership that we developed with the leadership provided by some of the veterans.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:20:31]: They understood that here's the mission. We have to go, we have to charge the hill, and we have to do it by this time. And this is how we're going to do it. And they stepped in. I wasn't really interested. It's nice for them to have the technology background, of course, but they were providing. This is how we're going to get done. Those that have worked in an incident response type agency like state health and HHS, it's a command structure.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:20:56]: Right. Incident command structure. So you have people that are leading, you have people that have identified roles. And if we don't work together as a team, we don't accomplish the mission, we're not successful. So a lot of them stepped in, like, I said, we had some colonels, we had some lieutenant colonels that were very, this is the mission. This is how we're going to get it done, and we got to get it done by this time. And they stepped in and they provided that leadership and the, it kind of evolves. Everybody sees that and like, hey, that's pretty cool.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:21:30]: It also minimizes the stress. Right. Because sometimes people during chaos, they want to gravitate towards the people that make them feel good and secure. Right. I feel good. I feel secure. I feel like we're going in the right direction. So they helped do that.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:21:47]: That was just kind of like an immediate effect.

Joe Toste [00:21:51]: That's a great question, Summer. Thank you. Who else? Any other questions for Rick? Some of you flew from a different state all the way here. I've got Rick on the couch with a podcast. Mike, what do you think is the number one thing that has helped you.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:22:10]: Be successful in your career the past few years? I think it's a say to do ratio, as I mentioned. So when you get approached by an executive or executive leadership, it's very important when they do approach you that you take that opportunity to be able to respond. I would not suggest that you put yourself out there if you know you're not going to be successful, but if you say, hey, commissioner, we have this, we can solve this issue, then you better have a response to whatever that solution or proposal or whatever the challenge might be. And so I think that's helped me quite a bit. The other thing is relationships. So I've been in the business for state government for 23 years, and I probably know all the, where all the bodies are buried, some, so to speak and some, yeah. And I think it's establishing the relationships with people say, hey, being able to go to another executive and say, hey, I have a challenge here. Can you help me? Or how can we work together? And again, understanding that at the end of the day, you have to get it done right.

Joe Toste [00:23:29]: Thank you, Corey. Anyone else wrap this up?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:23:33]: Can I ask about the know, his profile says fishing pictures. Ask about the fishing.

Joe Toste [00:23:41]: Big time Fisher. So is Kevin. Where's Kevin at? Where's Kevin? Is he hiding?

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:23:46]: Yeah.

Joe Toste [00:23:46]: There you. Kevin, you have a friend, if you haven't met.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:23:52]: I started, I started fly fishing as a stress reliever, believe it or not, the week before we all got sent home for the pandemic. And ever since, I've been doing. I love it. Right. I normally go around February, march when they stock the ponds and the streams, because that's like, guaranteed if you're not a patient person. That's a guaranteed catch a fish right when it's stocked. But that's what I do. During the pandemic, I also inherited some farm ranch that my dad just started going and buying animals.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:24:35]: So I've been doing that for a while. And there's stories there, too. Anybody want to catch a drink afterwards? I'll tell you all kinds of stories about that.

Joe Toste [00:24:45]: I love it.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:24:46]: Awesome.

Joe Toste [00:24:46]: Well, Rick, thank you for coming on tech tables. I really appreciate it.

Rick Blanco, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services [00:24:49]: Definitely appreciate it. This is a good opportunity. Thank you.