Ep.137 Modernizing California's 911 System & Building High-Performance Teams

Today we have Michelle Gettys CIO for the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management Michelle welcome to
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the public sector show by Tech tables thanks Joe thanks
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I'm super excited we've had a great intro call and we were just talking before this too it's just been great
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getting to know you hopefully we'll be able to connect in person later this year I'm definitely looking forward to that but for those in
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the audience who may not know you quite yet could you maybe just talk about a little bit about yourself in just a
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I'm Michelle Gettys
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I'm the Chief Information officer for the Department of Emergency Management within the City and County of San
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Francisco but really what that means is I am responsible for all of the systems
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and the technologies that run the 911 function and the Emergency Management
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function for the millions of visitors and residents that come come into the
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City and not only do I manage standard systems and technologies that run I.T departments but I'm also my team is very
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specialized in running systems that support 9-1-1 the phone system the computer aided dispatching system the
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radio communications capabilities the emergency alerting function and cyber
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security tools and we actually are responsible for the city-wide data center in San Francisco so it's a pretty
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big responsibility but I've been working in the private public sector for about 15 years now before that I was in the
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private sector where I really learned how to design build and Implement
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enterprise-wide Mission critical systems so that was a super valuable experience for me in the private sector I say I
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would say I have a pretty challenging job but I think the two most
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the two things that I'm really the most proud of is the first is that I'm an engineer by trade so I have a degree in
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electrical engineering from the University of California Davis go Aggies and a master's degree as well in systems
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engineering and architecture so that really was quite an accomplishment I felt for me but then I think the most
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challenging role that I have is that I'm a mom and I've been a working mother I have two teenagers and
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it keeping up with them and keeping the systems running here in San Francisco are probably the two most challenging
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things that I do day to day what is more challenging running the household as a working mom
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or the systems in San Francisco oh they're both challenging and it's funny because if I'm in San Francisco
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and I'm here in the 911 Center I am checking my phone to see what my
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children are doing and then when I'm at home with my children I am checking and making sure that all systems are running
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so it's a constant it's the constant Balancing Act I love that I grew up with a working mom
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there's probably nothing more powerful than a woman who is a working mom that
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should talk about time management skills you just get it done I don't even know how to explain it I think I work hard
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but I even look at my in my own mom when she was alive and not even comparable so this is it leads
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really great to the stem piece of the talk the next but I was you led into that so super smart
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electrical engineering by trade who got you into that what's the background were you on campus and
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someone was talking to you was there a mentor was there a teacher what kind of galvanized you towards that
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direction yes I having the ship I was lucky enough to have a
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mud a mud father was an engineer they absolutely encouraged me to explore the
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Sciences math and they gave me so much confidence and told me that I was good
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at it and they encouraged me and honestly pushed me towards that direction I also had a high school
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calculus teacher who was the coolest Surfer he shaped surfboards on the side
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let's just say that and he was a myocalculus teacher and he said Michelle if you do anything in your life it
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should be in math because you have that gift and I didn't realize it at the time and honestly when I was looking at going
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to schools I wasn't thinking oh I need to be an engineer in fact my dad I was telling my parents I said I want to be a
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teacher I want to help people and I want to help people learn and my dad would say things like why don't you go get your engineering degree first and then
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you can teach engineering so it was just always encouraged and so that's what got
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me into it and so now I oh I just with my daughter I encourage her or even my
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son as well I just remind them how good they are especially in math and science
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and I I give them homework problems to work on at home and I do it with them and every
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test they get back I posted on the refrigerator and I celebrate them and their accomplishments in those subjects
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because I think it's been a foundation for me and I want to see others have that same confidence
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yeah I love that I do something similar with my daughter on the math I'm a big
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math I'm not really a big English kind of guy so I defer that to my lovely wife and but on the math side I used to tutor
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multi-variable calculus and for a long time that's I wanted to go into Finance
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but there's a big math part of that but she will come and usually it's like the extra credit problems where it's like I
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don't really have to do this so I can skip it and I'm like no you're doing it yeah you're doing it and so we sit down
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and it's funny like they typically know that how to do it it's just it just
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requires more steps right you're just like analyzing what information do we have what's true on the page and then what's
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missing what don't we know and then you just take it one block at a time and then it usually ends up as the same sequence where she's like Annabelle will
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go oh it was just so easy I knew I could solve it I'm like I'm just the guide
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just walking me through my house because my kids aren't listening to me anymore so I need you to help me with them and
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then maybe I could come down and help Annabelle yeah we can spot for a little bit okay we talked a little bit about
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love it got the parents and when I think about the world today because I
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interview a lot of folks and I think it's also and grown up a girl with a single mom and two aunts trying to get
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girls into stem and just really making them feel empowered and confident what
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what maybe advice or tips would you have for both parents or cios today and then
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and then if you were and then the second half of that is if you were talking to your kids what advice would you give to
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the younger generation you hear this all the time right industry needs
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females in these disciplines they we need female engineers and
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it's it's a gap right now and and here's the challenge and I felt like this when
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I was going through school and even in my early on in my career I almost felt
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like an imposter like I would sit around in these classes and there were these brilliant mathematicians all around me
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did not seem or look even anything like me and so I just didn't feel like I fit
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in and then even when I was in the private sector and I would be assigned as a female to be the lead engineer on a
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project I always felt oh they probably didn't want me here because I'm the female but and it's not necessarily that
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you have to be the best engineer and be know of the ins and outs of all the different Technologies and the road maps
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of products and things like that it's but there's so many other facets to being a good engineer things like and
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especially when you're working in teams and in government organizations you need to be a great teammate mate you need to
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communicate you need to be a leader and those at least for me those those parts
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of me were was what helped me through my career and I feel like they're women
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have a lot of of these strengths that they can bring to these types of jobs and so that's I would just encourage you
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to stay with it you might feel like you're not contributing or you might not feel like you're super confident in your
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skills but the reality is that these organizations need you and these jobs need you yeah I love that
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being a great teammate communicating being a leader you talked about imposter
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syndrome I was reading I think it was the Harvard Business review it was a great article on I gotta go dig it up
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but it was a great article on typically men like myself highly overconfident my wife editing
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this podcast is gonna die laughing but yeah I think they were saying like most of the time
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men are more or high or they overshoot their confidence on a certain subject
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and then women tend to undershoot the level of confidence that they have yes which I think is super fascinating
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because I think I don't know the exact step I would say it's true because I would say I'm a pretty confident person
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I would say my wife is like shy but man she's really smart once you get her once you sit down and allow her an
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opportunity for her yeah I'm like it's like the reverse imposter syndrome with
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me I'm like oh I don't belong here they're not gonna want me here because I'm not
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the smartest gentleman in the room per se thank you for stepping up and leading
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this is great and uh and you also said this too about having that kind of example which I think is super powerful
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to see someone and just any kind of any role go before you and lay the
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foundation which I think is super powerful and I was talking actually with one of my earliest episodes with this
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guy Gary Brantley who's the CIO for the City of Atlanta he's now the CIO for the NFL
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and Gary on the episode talked about how when he came to Atlanta the team
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didn't know how to win and it's he talked about and very similar with kids
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if you don't know what a winning environment or winning team looks like it's very hard to win so there's a kind
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of a cultural culture piece there I'm a Golden State Warriors fan so it's like when Steve Kerr Takes Over The Warriors
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number of years ago yes something about winning it just
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gives you that there is a confidence it also just gives you the road map a little bit to know hey
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and this is what I love about seeing in kids with the high schoolers is you can look at a high schooler and see
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something in them before they see it in themselves that's like the coolest part about leadership it's like my favorite
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part and the same thing with adults and a lot of times just these beliefs these
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limiting beliefs that we have about ourselves that end up blocking us and it's not actually a technical capability
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yeah yeah and I just talking about teams and building teams when I took over this
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team we had some retirements we actually had over 30 percent of my team retiring
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um within the first year that I I took on this role and so I have really been in the in the business of building my
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team and finding the right teammates and so I think I'm uniquely skilled to do
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this because I have the background in the systems and the Technologies but then also I'm a people person and I
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really love building High performing teams with unique contributors with
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different backgrounds and that's what I've been working to do here with this
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department for the past couple of years it's important I love that and I'm gonna
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say quote building high performance teams so I recently interviewed a new sribog who said the exact same thing
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quote love building high performance teams so if that's got to be a pretty deadly combo you're like both incredibly
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smart and Technical and the people person I feel like it's sometimes one of the other but that's a deadly combination you got the two of those
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together that's a great way to I am not technical I'm very relational but I am not the
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most I've got is SQL and maybe some math that's all I got I will say the more and
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more that I'm away from the server room and from the systems and getting in and
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digging into the configuration I feel like I'm losing it more and more but every now and again I'll make my way
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back in there and try my best to fit in but it's hard to keep up with everything it's really hard
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yeah the world's changing it's just moving so fast right now it's pretty crazy yeah so on the California plan
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for the 9-1-1 system move into the cloud we briefly talked about this could you maybe just talk about the 30 000 foot
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overview of that project when are we going to see that can I come to fruition
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and where are we at in the journey yeah so California has quite an Endeavor on its hand so I then in in general I
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don't know if your listeners know this about the 911 system in general but right now when you dial 9-1-1 your call
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gets routed through very old Communications pipelines that have not been modernized the state of California
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is has adopted a plan to do this to both not only modernize the back end Network
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that connects all the 911 calls together but then also is pushing all of the
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9-1-1 centers in California and there's about 450 of them throughout the state
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to move all of their 911 call handling equipment into the cloud
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and so this is a huge shift for Mission
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critical systems especially with very sensitive
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data and systems that need just up constant uptime right and so most peace apps have all of their technology on
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premise hardened backup power backup network connectivity and so we're being
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asked to move away from this on-premise environment to a cloud-based environment and I will say it is it is the way of
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the future but it is slow moving the state and it launched this in 2021 I
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know that there's maybe one or two of the 450 we call them psaps Public Safety
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answering points that are running on the new backend Network Technology and then
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there's only one which is like a two-seat Dispatch Center in a very small
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town that is actually running their call handling equipment in the cloud and so it's gonna it's gonna take some time to
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roll out there's a lot of just Lessons Learned and we need to see larger
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dispatch centers moving to this technology first I think before a center as large as the one in San Francisco we
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have over 60 dispatching and call taking positions and we're combined we serve police and fire and medical 9-1-1
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response for San Francisco and so it is imperative that our systems stay online
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and so moving into that kind of environment is just gonna it's still some time out but we're working towards
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it I have a team that engages with the state on this on a day-to-day level making sure that we're
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tied in with their plans and that when when the technology is will be ready to migrate
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no that is quite the undertaking I don't even know where to begin with that but that's a very large project something
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I'm I was thinking about is there any other I actually haven't researched this there are any other
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cities or states where they've had such a large jump that you're maybe they're
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they're a little bit more down the road from where you're at that you're looking at hey this could be a great example for
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us is there are I want to say the LA and there's not a ton of succinct data around where
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everybody is in this process the states and then the municipalities as well I want to say there's roughly 20 states
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that have started the rollout of the modernized network it's called the
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ezinet I maybe one or two that have actually implemented it Statewide small
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states and I don't have them off the top of my head but there is not
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anywhere that I know of that we are monitoring that has done cloud-based uh
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call handling equipment and I would love one of your cios on this podcast if they are aware of it
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please contact me because I will do a debrief with my team because I want to know everything about it before we take
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the big jump so that's really funny that's exactly what I was going to say so yeah if
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you're a CIO that's listening to the podcast and you've had a very large
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migration like this from an on-prem to a cloud with the 911 emergency management system
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you can just email me Joe at techtables.com I will connect you with Michelle and she's absolutely fantastic
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so if you have any Lessons Learned please share those don't hide those in a
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closet or drawer Michelle would love to know what those lessons are so we can
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help speed this up it's a super powerful and critical system so I personally have
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not had to call 9-1-1 but once upon a time like a year ago I was on a business trip and my wife actually had to call
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9-1-1 when I was gone it was pretty crazy so she had a piece of cartilage
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that broke off in her back in the middle of the night which is you're like how does that happen and lodged into her
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spine and so I was flying across the U.S and so she she's like why are you
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telling this on the podcast because people use the system also you can thank Michelle Jamie for keeping the system of
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today but I died yeah nope and when you call 9-1-1 you want it to work and let me see I've been in this role for three
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years I have lost the 911 phone system only one time for in and I we can count
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it in minutes and during that time it was a power incident power is always as any CIO
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knows power is always the one of the biggest challenges in keeping systems running and so we had a human created
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Power incidents that brought down systems and networks and so we lost we
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did lose primary and backup for a short period of time and what I had wished and
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what we are now working on is figuring out a way to get our backup system in the cloud even sooner than our
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primary system so that if and when we do have the issue in the on-prem building
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whether it be power or whatnot we have a cloud environment that we can move to
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and so that's actually what we're changing our strategy and just and trying to get our backup in the cloud
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even maybe even potentially before we put the whole primary system in the cloud awesome yeah only one time that's very
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impressive that's quite he said human created human created Power
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when you come up to San Francisco I'll give you the full story yeah involved a ladder let's just say that
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I cannot wait Jamie and I are looking forward to coming to San Francisco can you share any stories around the
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learnings or successful industry Partnerships that you've had over the
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last couple years and if you can't name the vendor it's fine but just love to hear from a broad level
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oh then vendors are my lifeline they are what keep honestly these 911 systems
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running I mean I'm not staffed if you think about it right and probably no government is staffed 24x7 Round the
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Clock to keep all these I.T systems running to support all emergency functions for a major city and so I Rely
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extremely heavily on the vendor partners that we have and I tell my teams that
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and you know because I saw it when I was in the private sector I would see these relationships with government agencies
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in the private sector where it was adversarial and they were constantly saying you're not delivering this thing
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it's not coming on time rather than and they just beat themselves up and it's wait hold on a second if you now
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look at this as a partnership and you work together to solve the problem and
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maintain the system and upgrade the network it your success is their success
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and their success is your success and I tell my team that all the time create and establish good relationships with
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the vendors because they will they will help you I will say for example my our
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cell phone providers both Verizon and firstnet at T have been really great
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partners for us for the longest time local governments were building their own Communications two-way radio and so
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we're used to managing and building and maintaining two-way radio systems but several years ago 10 years ago the FCC
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came back and said okay no more of that we're not going to be giving cities and counties the frequencies to build these
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Broadband wireless networks you need to start relying on your carriers and so that's where TNT and first snaps
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firstnet stepped up and then Verizon's has now now stepped up and they are now with us if I have a special event I call
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Verizon and they come into town they set up our Command posts they staff the command post they make sure that there's
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Internet available they make sure that all the cell phones are working and they bring in these hardened tools and have
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direct contact into their Network and so we always have the ability to communicate during these during these
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major events when usually you typically lose cell phone coverage right if you're in the middle of a big event and so
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they're with us hand in hand and then I don't have to staff my team and pay them
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overtime to be out at the command post all hours of the day they're here with us there are partners and they're
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providing us the service and it's been and they will they and there are many other industry partners that will come
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out and help us whether it be establishing internet service satellite Communications just providing tools that
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we need to manage our emergency incidents I love it yeah shout out to
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Verizon they're awesome now do we know did we talk about this is it Patty rose
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that we know did we discuss this I know Patty's yes Patty's great yes her
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present team there they do a great job of really listening to the needs of Public Safety and coming up with
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Solutions their whole the Verizon their front line initiative is really all about giving First Responders to setting
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up these communications networks and being available to them in times of
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Crisis yeah yeah shout out to Patty she is awesome she's been on the podcast live which has been super fun yeah
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plug for myself I guess episode 64 I had to pull that up how about that one because we're gonna be on episode 150
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very soon redefine the front line with Patty Rose beauty of public sector sales
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at Verizon check it out that was crazy I showed a giant train go by this is the nice part yeah I just put
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that I go cut train out cut train out that was a train there's no Train by me
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that was your train oh it was totally my train okay yeah it was a crazy train yeah so check
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out episode 64 redefine the front line with Patty Rose VP of public sector sales at Verizon and shout out to yeah
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the whole Verizon Team Real great they do a lot of great work super nice I know a bunch of them over there just fantastic women all of them um they open
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the inner they open revamped their Innovation Center in San Francisco They launched it I was there at their opening
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and they have some pretty interesting new technologies with 5G with private
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networks they're doing some pretty Innovative stuff satellite Communications definitely I took my team there and we
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are starting to rethink how we Implement comms for our department is
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love that that's awesome it is a small world in the public sector it is really small well okay that is fantastic final
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question a little bit of a lightning round question top two to three cios or Tech
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leaders that you would love to hear next on the Pod State of California if
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some pretty pretty great things with data initiatives they actually took the in
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almost the entire data team from San Francisco and they are now in the state
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of California and the state of California is also has it was running some Statewide data centers and they
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provide really great service to other municipalities throughout the state of California so I would say that they're
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doing a great job and hearing their goals would be ideal
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and then I will say one of the cios that I'm the most proud of and happy to call
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a friend is down in Santa Clara County Anita D'Amato is the actually acting CIO
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of Santa Clara County and she is she's got quite a story quite a
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background she is Marine so ex-military also a working mom and she is quite a
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leader and she has found herself in an environment surrounded by some really smart
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really Innovative people obviously in the heart of Silicon Valley and she is
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navigating that team and working together with the County Administrator
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to really modernize systems and they've got an interesting environment because it's it's all Consolidated I.T so she's
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got everything under her health the health care that PML many different
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disciplines all the Justice Public Safety Technologies are within her team so it's a very large organization that she's
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running fantastic but the state of California if anyone knows anyone at the State of
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California I will buy you Mojitos if you can introduce me that's my offer it'll stand
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for as long as this podcast is live which will be forever this is fantastic Michelle I had a blast late August I'm
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looking forward to it I don't think I have a live event in August which is great so he needs my calendar
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Jamie and I will make it up there and we're excited oh did you want to talk about that I didn't know if that was public yet should I the what you're
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doing should we talk about that it's not quite public yet okay we're working I'm working with the city the San
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Francisco city CIO also another female and we're working to pull together the women in technology forum for government
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employees here in San Francisco and we're really looking at this as a way to be to create a a voice and a means to
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communicate amongst other females that work in government the I.T space so
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we're exciting to launch we're excited to launch that love it maybe we'll have to bring you
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back on later at some point yeah with a few other gals to talk about
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the learnings successes that you have in California that can share with other
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women cios and the other 49 states outside oh that's great
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female versus male versus that is a great question oh I would love to know I
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wish I had a it's not something I track but I am I think I could maybe ask Jamie to go
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through the we've got a notion database of every guest who's been on we have
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that statistic for me in late leaders here in San Francisco this
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female engineer you get a live event in San Antonio and we don't have live events in the bay or in California we
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should we should we should have a live event in California yeah yeah it's coming at some point it's coming at some
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point you should go we should go to Sonoma that's to go and do wine tasting there anyways
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and Michelle come on come on this is a ton of fun
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yeah Michelle I will look out for the invite in late August I will get you the stat we will figure it out yeah and and
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then if the stat is really low which I'm taking a ballpark on it right now you'll have to help me yeah put it out there
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yes absolutely sounds like a plan thank you Michelle had a blast
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thanks this was great to connect