Ep.170 A CIO Roundtable: San Jose, Raleigh & Austin - Strategies for Tooling for Hyper Responsive Government Services with Equity & Beyond

Joe Toste [00:00:00]:
Hey, what's up, everybody? This is Joe Toste from techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, cios, cisos and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top lead. Yours are seen today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts. Hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.

Joe Toste [00:00:34]:
Today we have Rob Lloyd, deputy city manager for the city of San Jose, Mark Wittenberg, CIO for the city of Raleigh, and Chris Stewart, executive advisor and former CIO and now in retirement for the city of Austin. Welcome to the public sector show by tech tables.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:00:49]:
Thank you.

Joe Toste [00:00:50]:
Rob, this is number three.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:00:51]:
It is number three.

Joe Toste [00:00:52]:
How do you feel coming back a third time? Old.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:00:57]:
You've been around the block a lot.

Joe Toste [00:00:58]:
Yeah, actually, I went and looked at the first episode and you do look a lot younger.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:01:04]:
I do? Yeah. Covid aged me, I think at least seven years.

Joe Toste [00:01:08]:
Yeah, no, I believe it. Okay, Rob, let's kick off with you. One of the things you'd mentioned that you would love to talk about was tooling for hyper responsive government services. With equity, that means a lot of different things to a lot of different cities. What does it mean to San Jose?

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:01:22]:
For San Jose, we actually have a couple of different levels. That we approach it at responsive services means that people have fewer barriers. It's a customer friendly environment. It also means we have the skills with which we can listen and process feedback, so we can turn those into solutions. Two of the main tools we use is the IAP two spectrum for public participation. So we actually try to co create services. And then the other one is human centered design. Because truthfully, one of the flaws of technologists is we often come at it with solutions very quickly as opposed to really understanding, listening hard and understanding which, when the community talks to you, you really understand that full context and the richness of their feedback before you can get it right.

Joe Toste [00:02:01]:
That's great. Mark, what does that mean in Raleigh?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:02:04]:
Actually, in Raleigh, we've also been talking about how do we deliver services and how do we do that equitably. One of the things we've been trying to do is we keep hearing about, what is this equity lens? What does that really mean? And we're trying to define exactly what that means by involving, again, the community, bringing them in to understand what does that mean to them? Getting the different departments and saying, okay, if we were to develop this lens, what would that lens look like? And then how do we look at the different projects and how the city is spending money to ensure that we're using that lens and that it's equitably right. Not only are we using the lens, but we're using it equally across the different departments and how we're spending the money.

Joe Toste [00:02:48]:
Yeah, I had a great podcast with Jim Weber on this. I think it was the first one we did virtually. We talked about the lay of the land, specifically on the broadband front, and he just had some really great stats in North Carolina specifically, and how he's trying to address digital equity and broadband. And it was a fantastic conversation. I'm only saying that because I want to link it to the show notes, which I can't remember the episode. It's 70 something, but it was a fantastic episode. Chris, in the city of Austin, same thing. How are you seeing that?

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:03:16]:
Yeah, equity in Austin is huge, actually. It's way beyond technology. Of course, every department has equity goals, and they want to look at equity. We look at things like how services are delivered, of course, where people have to go, but digitally, we want to make sure that our services are accessible. Accessibility is a big deal, even in ways that I wasn't quite aware of before I was a CIO. I typically think of things like accessibility. You look out in the community, at people who. They have issues getting places.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:03:40]:
So maybe physically, and there's language barriers. In a city like Austin, there's so many languages spoken, and we want to make sure that they have access. And our digital services is a great example. We really try our best to digitize, to modernize, but if they can't ingest it, if they can't utilize it, it's of no good. But it goes way beyond language. We even look at things like the visually impaired and hearing impaired, making sure visuals on websites have the right metadata so that their software can actually read what's on the screen. If you can't see the picture, you don't know what's there, obviously. So we're really looking at, really deep into how to make sure things are equitable and accessible.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:04:18]:
Another great example was at Austin water. We rolled out an advanced metering infrastructure. So we're giving people data to their phones on their water usage. And it's amazing. You can find out when you have a leak within an hour. But if you don't have a phone with that kind of access, how do we make sure that you have that same experience? So we want to make sure we have mailers and we can reach out to people. And just because you don't have access to a digital platform doesn't mean you're not going to get the same services. So we really try to make sure across the board technology helps, but every service, we want to make sure it's equitable.

Joe Toste [00:04:49]:
Yeah, it's a fascinating lens. One of my favorite things. I've got two thoughts on this. One of my favorite things to do in cities, if it's walkable, not so much. In Montana, right here, I can't hop in a car for everything. Or especially in Phoenix, it's really hot. Or Vegas right now, it's like 115 point is. I love walking around other cities because I haven't found anything better than just getting in the shoes of where the people are at.

Joe Toste [00:05:13]:
And even in Santa Barbara, it's a very wealthy town.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:05:17]:
Very wealthy.

Joe Toste [00:05:17]:
But like all that, there's these different parts of the city, and when you coach high school basketball, you start to realize maybe half the kids really have access to Internet access to broadband, like I do at my house. And then there's kids who don't have that access, and then there are kids who don't have cell phones. And so then presents an interesting challenge that I'm specifically thinking about a kid that we actually gave a cell phone to, this kid, Jeremiah, who played for me, and I'm like, why are you failing your grades right now? And he's coach, I don't have Internet. Everything's online. Did they get you an iPad? And I'm like, coach. I'm like, did you sell the iPad? What'd you do with it? Right. It brings up a really fascinating perspective and a really fascinating problem set for different cities. And, yeah, for you, Rob, and I.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:06:03]:
Think you're going exactly the right direction because the community tells you when it's hurting. And we never heard that so much. And so clearly, as in Covid for us, we had done some experiments, for example, with digital inclusion on networks, the schools, the principals, the families came and said, what you did in this one attendance area, we need you to do in all of them quickly, because that summer slide is going to turn into a two year slide. Those partnerships, we connected 160,000 people covered. 160,000 people with high speed wifi. In title one attendance area, that's 80% at least. Free or reduced lunch, a proxy for poverty, the language translation, using machine learning to do translation for languages, that's higher fidelity so they actually can understand it. And fireworks notices don't come out as bomb notices because of bad translation.

Joe Toste [00:06:48]:
Very bad. Very bad translation to utilities help.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:06:51]:
And then even for our three one, one, we had some other data where when we went in with some data scientists, they showed us that there's actually two community sets of community needs. If you're thinking equity and how you use an equity lens and equity mirrors. People in affluent neighborhoods have quality of life issues. They want you to fix the pothole. There's a street light outage. People in less affluent neighborhoods are basic life needs. They want your help because they're about to be evicted. They want your help because they have no connectivity and even domestic violence type items, you actually need to solve and be able to perceive and listen and go where those problems are because your community isn't a monolith.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:07:29]:
And the deeper you listen, the more you see those different personas.

Joe Toste [00:07:32]:
Yeah, no, I really like that a lot. Chris, you mentioned something that I think is pretty interesting, regional technology. And I love this podcast because we've got the cities on, which is often a different perspective than the state, and there can be some crossover and some collaboration, but the regional side is much different. I was curious, what were some of your favorite projects on the regional side that you liked in Austin?

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:07:55]:
Early in my career, I went to, it's called CTEC. It's the combined transportation emergency communication center. It was one of the first combined number one centers in the world, actually. We had a lot of countries come visit, and a lot of cities come visit, and counties. So taking 901 services, fire, police, EMS, county transportation, our transit system, all in one building. One system was a pretty unique thing, and now it's pretty normal. Now it's pretty standard. So I spent a lot of time there.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:08:24]:
So getting this regional effort, seeing how getting everybody in a room working together, and how it can provide better services, and in this case, public safety, it saves lives, it gets people out quicker. We like taking that to other levels, and how can we do better in many areas regionally? So then we even took our now one center, and we now connect to other counties. And again, this isn't brand new stuff. We've been doing this for years, but doing it well is important. Getting the process down, getting people to work together, and then having all this stuff in place so that public safety is number one, no matter where you are. We also run a regional radio system. That's something that we manage at the city of Austin. It keeps growing and we have lots of partners now.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:09:03]:
And it's a really amazing thing. It stretches all corners of the state of Texas, actually. And it's something that we manage in Austin. It's something the city of Austin manages. So we're able to serve very small communities, in particular public safety, that can't afford to set up their own radio towers and get these leases. And they don't know how to work with the FCC and all this stuff, but they can buy a radio, connect with us, we can help them out with those services. It helps with interconnectivity. It helps with interoperability.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:09:29]:
Whenever we have large disasters, and unfortunately, in every state, we've got some pretty disastrous things that happen with natural disasters and even things like school shootings, we enable police agencies to talk to each other through these systems. Now we're talking about transportation. Transportation is a big issue. If you talk to Austinites, transportation comes up like number one as a problem. Regional transportation is how you can help resolve that. Even cities now, you can't do much just in a city. Our city reaches out people live counties away now. So you have to do things regionally, I think to be effective.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:10:04]:
Regional transportation is something that we're really looking at now. And how do we do that better at the same model as we did with public safety, making that regional, how do we take that same mindset into other areas?

Joe Toste [00:10:16]:
Mark, you went from Tempe to Raleigh.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:10:20]:
Yes, slight move. If you're going to move, it's don't move a state over, just move over from one side of the country to the other.

Joe Toste [00:10:28]:
Yeah. Was that 3000 miles?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:10:31]:
2200 and some approximately.

Joe Toste [00:10:35]:
How is that different between Tempe and Raleigh right now?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:10:40]:
What's interesting is what's really different are the laws. Is in Arizona, like Chris was mentioning, there was a big consortium and a regional collective. And that's what we called it, was actually the collective that was looking at solving regional issues because we had this realization that the issues that we had just didn't stop at our border. If you look at broadband, that's not something that stops at the border. And that digital divide. So getting the groups together, the different cities, the county, the university, so Arizona State University was involved, vendors involved, to really solve these regional problems was just incredible. Is looking at how do we as a group, and that's why it was called the collective. Is like as a collective, how can we look at resolving these issues? In North Carolina, the laws are much different as far as what we as cities can do as far as broadband goes.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:11:37]:
And it was interesting because I was actually presenting at a conference and I was getting ready to start my new job, and somebody said, hey, what are you going to do about the laws in North Carolina that restrict the cities from providing broadband? That's a great question. So it's trying to work with like the state with Jim Weaver is to start to look and say, ok, what are the things that we can do? Because broadband access is just one piece of the digital divide, but there's also the devices, and then can you use the device? And then those devices need to stay up to date, right as you need the access, the device, the training. It's that three pronged stool. So what are the things we can do in order to bridge that piece of it?

Joe Toste [00:12:21]:
This might be a little aggressive, but of the three pronged stool, which one do you think is the hardest?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:12:29]:
Honestly? I believe the hardest is the training and getting the devices to the people. And then the other piece is the school. If you can partner with the schools, with the libraries, to be able to provide free Wifi and that access, they may not have it at home, but at least you can provide it at the schools or provide it at community centers, somewhere where they can go and connect.

Joe Toste [00:12:51]:
I want to jump to, and actually a lot of you have the similarity. Organizational maturity, organizational change management. This is a theme, I think, across the three of you. Talent pipelines. Rob, love to hear you have the perspective of both CIO and now deputy city manager when it comes to building out those robust talent pipelines and teams, especially in Silicon Valley. Is there any learnings or lessons or advice that comes top of mind for you that you think cities and counties would benefit from?

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:13:22]:
I think the culture that you create often reinforces itself or doesn't. It costs you talent. And I know Mark well, know Chris fairly well, too, is when you create a culture that attracts people, it solves a big chunk of your problem. But there is a generational shift. You have five generations working in the same workforce for the first time. Hybrid work does require better managers. I'm convinced that we're in the age of managers right now, because if a manager knows how to coach, mentor, manage work, we don't see turnover, and when they don't, we see a lot of it. And so if we really know how to have a mature organization, an effective organization, we're going to be very effective about building our leadership.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:14:02]:
Two other answers for you is pipeline is absolutely important. So San Jose, for example, we have hundreds of interns at any given moment from the universities who are talent pipeline, and they come from all across the bay. And the are people. What we hear is a lot of folks wanting to do more and meaningful work and we have to get better about being able to converse in that language. But that internship pipeline gives us a head start. We see some of our stars come from young people who came into the organization, learned it shined, took on new challenges, and they are a big chunk of our stars three, four, five years later. But the other thing is the way we have to engage the public, we have to be able to talk about the work that we do and the impact that we have rather than these bureaucratic job postings of 20 some odd bullet numbers, a pay range, and you'd be honored to work for the state or city or a county. The meaningfulness of the work matters, matters more than ever.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:14:58]:
And the other thing is, as we get into flexibility, we're trying to figure out ways where we don't. And if we allow ourselves to win on flexibility, governments actually have a good opportunity of pulling in great talent. I will say in some communities it's still hard. Silicon Valley, we don't pay as well as a lot of Silicon Valley companies. Google, Apple, Facebook, they beat us.

Joe Toste [00:15:20]:
Salesforce.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:15:21]:
Salesforce.

Joe Toste [00:15:22]:
Sorry, Nadia, my bad.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:15:23]:
Yeah, we don't lose that many people at Salesforce, but the other ones around, they just pay so well. And it's just a simple conversation is if you're after money and perks, you should absolutely go. If you want a career legacy of purpose and impact, we'd love for you to stay or to come. And when you have clear conversations, we get good people and they tend to stick, is our experience. The other part of just that ability to come in and build that culture, we're still figuring out, which is that hybrid work is how do you create those connected teams that have good bonds but that are more fluid and dynamic and sometimes don't even see each other or talk to each other for extended periods? We haven't aced that part yet.

Joe Toste [00:16:04]:
Yeah. Mark, what do you think about that on the kind of robust talent pipelines and then almost building and keeping that team?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:16:12]:
First of all, rob stole all my answers.

Joe Toste [00:16:14]:
He always does.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:16:15]:
I know. Can you not go with him first?

Joe Toste [00:16:18]:
Rob, you go last.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:16:19]:
Do the changing job.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:16:20]:
Oh, as far as that goes, I would say definitely. Ditto is we're trying to do the same thing, which is really engaging with universities. In Raleigh, we have a tremendous collection of universities, top in the country.

Joe Toste [00:16:32]:
Never heard of them.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:16:33]:
I think one was mentioned earlier, but any. So we just leveraging that. And so I try to make connections with those CIOs to be able to say, okay, if we can bring in interns, and then what things can we do? And what things can we partner with the universities to start to develop that pipeline and say, hey, if you want to be a servant leader, or if you have that servant heart, that's what we're really appealing to, is we're trying to get those people that are curious, that want to add value to the community, that care about sustainability and care about the planet, and it's okay, what can I do? And so we need to demonstrate and show what are the things, and how can you engage with technology, with the city. These are the things that you can do. And then I would say the second thing is that once you get them in, is you have to keep them engaged. And Rob mentioned the hybrid. We're also still trying to figure out the hybrid, but there are just certain things that I think that you need to do in person. For example, we're going to be doing an it retreat.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:17:34]:
And part of that is to connect the city's goals, our goals in it, and the culture to what they're doing on a day to day basis. And so just to get them to connect with, these are the things that I'm doing, and then this is how it's impacting it. This is how it's impacting the departments I'm serving, and this is how it's impacting and adding value to the community. So I really do believe that you have to make that connection to build that culture in order to keep those new folks really engaged.

Joe Toste [00:18:06]:
Yeah, that's great, Chris.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:18:08]:
Ditto. I agree. The culture was really big for me. We wanted to come in and really change culture. So we asked a lot of questions of our staff. We did surveys and wanted to see what were we not doing well, where were we absolutely failing. And that was a big help to get there. The people who had been there a while, what's going on here? So we really focused on culture, and we really strove to change culture.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:18:29]:
It was one of the big things. And Rob had mentioned how important your leaders are, and I totally agree with that. One of the things we found is we had a lot of managers who were in interim roles, and that was tending to be a citywide problem, especially around Covid. We had about a year where we couldn't hire in the city, so that it just compounded. So we were losing people we couldn't hire. It just gets worse and worse. So you put interim people in place, and for a lot of things, that's a great opportunity. You get staff who can move into a role that they might not even be ready for or qualify for, and they can gain this experience.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:19:00]:
And it's really wonderful. But you can't do that for two years. You can't have somebody sitting in an intern role. And we did. We had people who were just stagnant in their role. Not, they weren't stagnant, but they were there and they became a de facto. And it really was a morale killer for folks because it seemed obvious, oh, that person's going to get the job. And even for the people in it, they're just interim forever.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:19:19]:
Am I ever going to get this job? Are you ever going to post this job? So we really focused on managers. When we were able to hire, we wanted to make sure we were aligned, the best people. We want to make sure that I got the executive team together. And every week we actually wrote down which ones of all of our listings, and I think we had about 60 at one point vacancies. We actually put them on papers. What are our top ten HR? Here's the top ten you can focus on. And we tell all of our managers, this is what we're hiring first. And we brought in really great managers.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:19:48]:
And everywhere I've been, I've come. One of my mottos is, I want to be the place everyone wants to come to. I want to be the department in the city everybody wants to come work for, not just it. If you're an HR, I want you to be in my HR. If you're finance, can be in our finance, but of course, in the city. And we always hear about Big Tech. And Austin is like Silicon Valley, where we have a lot of big tech, but it's all the big companies. We have a lot of companies headquartered in Austin.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:20:10]:
I don't just lose people to big tech, I lose people to big companies all over the place. It's just really hard to compete there. And in a lot of ways, we can't compete. As Rob was saying, we really try to focus on, do you want to come and work for someplace where service means a lot? Do you want your work to have value more so than maybe if you feel like you're just selling a product, which is great, people need these products, or do you want to provide a service like electricity, water, help people get access to digital services, agreement services, and help people find homes and pay their rent? These are things that don't happen except in the public space. So that mission driven thing is really great. We're a little hampered in our systems of hiring, so in the formal systems, I can't do a whole lot, but in informal settings, I absolutely can. These networks, reaching out to peers and putting yourself out there for these hires, that's what I do a lot is, hey, are you this kind of person? Come apply for this job and let me tell you a little bit about it and how great it is. And matter of fact, you're going to work for a great boss.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:21:12]:
All these things you can't get on a pretty bland, generic job posting. We really try our best to reach out, and I make sure my leadership team's looking at that and I make sure, hey, I posted this. Why don't you guys go take a look at that and help me get this out there? And we've been really successful at getting the word out just through our networks and using things like this group here and these find people to help me find good people.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:21:33]:
If I could add on to that, Joe, just to connect the dots from that regionality, none of the problems we're facing, housing, insecurity and homelessness, public safety, justice reform, inequities, biases, if you talk about any of the problem sets that we're facing, transportation and transit, none of them are one department, none of them are one city, none of them now are even one region. They're really mega problems. But the, that's something when we hire and when we retain, we say, what are the problem sets that you want your career to be defined by, in terms of you making an impact? And some people are really driven and attracted. And I think that's where you see the line, is the people who come into government and stay and do a great job, they are mission driven people, and that's our sweet spot.

Joe Toste [00:22:19]:
I heard mission driven, and I think I didn't verbally hear it, but it's the undertone of this. Workforce challenges opportunities, because I know Ashantra loves opportunities, but I want to go a little bit more on this because every organization is facing this. Every leader is trying to recruit people, build a talent pipeline. I love what you mentioned about. There's the vanilla playing job posting and you're trying to also augment. Right? And I won't start with Rob. Mark, thank you. Yeah.

Joe Toste [00:22:51]:
How are you thinking about this in Raleigh? You inherited a great team, but you're still, probably still hiring and still trying to augment the team and grow it. What else are you doing out there to get the word out besides going to this podcast. Oh wait, perfect.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:23:05]:
It's exactly what we were talking about, which is just getting the word out. So one of the things we just started is looking at our external website because right now our external website, if you look at the it portion, it's lacking. Actually, I did look at it when I applied at Raleigh and it was lacking. It's like this does not create any kind of excitement to come to Raleigh. We are actually looking at our external website and looking at it from a perspective of this is our marketing and also it's a place for us to show all the innovative things that we're doing, the awards that we've won, and to really show that we're a cohesive staff and that we are really focused at that value for not only the employees but also to the community and trying to create that connection. That's probably one of the biggest things that hasn't been mentioned yet is really to look at show do we get that message out? And so people do want to come work for us that they're like, okay, this is an area where it's a great city. I can see all the good things that they're doing. I can see all this.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:24:13]:
And then I just want to echo the job descriptions is we've just got to get away from job descriptions that read like an old tech manual is, okay, this is what you need. And we need to create job descriptions and just job announcements that tell more of a story of what you'll be doing and show you're going to make an impact. And instead of here are the skills we want. And I also think that's an equity thing because people may not apply for jobs if they're looking and saying, okay, I don't have all these requirements. Instead it's no, this is how I can make an impact and I really see how I can fit here and this is a good team.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:24:55]:
Can I add on to that? I think on the equity front, that's a good ad. You do have to manage your process so that you see what you're doing. Are you hiring men and women? Are you hiring communities of color that are qualified? And even the questions that we ask in interviews when we see we're like this question women tend to do better on. And I'll give you one example. Tell us about a failure you've had in your career and what you learned from it and what you took to the next problem set. We had a period where a lot of guys were going, I've never failed we said, they're done.

Joe Toste [00:25:24]:
Come on, guys. Come on, guys.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:25:26]:
And then the female applicants were really good at saying, here's what I did. Here's the impact, here's what I took from it. I'll never do this. I'll do more of that. And they would score more. So we would try to regulate the scoring and the questions to try to be more equitable and say otherwise, we're going to ask the questions that we're comfortable with. And then our hiring panels also have to look like our community and our customers and our whole organization. And then the people you hire tend to represent them better, communicate with them better, and then change the culture of your team, in my experience, to the maximum positive.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:25:59]:
Good ad, Joe. I think it's important, too, that our role as marketers, you're not just an it person anymore. You're a CIO, you're the chief, you're the top. It's your job to make sure people understand, like you're saying, what is it that we do? So we start an annual report for our department, and that gets word out to the city. Here's all the things we did this year, though. You may have seen one thing. Here's the ten others we did. We support 40 plus departments and 16,000 people.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:26:24]:
We do a lot of work. So it's important for the city to see that, but it's important for the community to see it. And I think there might be some thoughts. It's government technology. It's not as cool as some other places you can go and do some amazing, innovative things. That's just not true. I hear innovative things from so many government CIOs and employees and sysadmins and DBAs about all the wonderful things they're doing. But you have to make sure people know that you have to get out there.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:26:48]:
So that's part of our job, too, is to make sure you're out there, make sure you're showing the community what your teams are doing, bragging about them a little, what they're doing. Put it on social media, put it on whatever you've got going on for your website or whatever. We work with our corporate pio, our public information office, and whenever we have something that's quite large, we want them to do a report on it and actually put it out to the entire community at large. So I think it's really important to understand our role that you're a leader. You may be a technology leader, but you got to get out there.

Joe Toste [00:27:17]:
Yeah. Something I've thought about a lot is like brand in the public sector. I think this is like a huge gap that not a lot of people are thinking about. And so I've got some sector and some of them just graduated, and they're like, hey, coach, we want to come on the podcast. And I'm like, okay, this can go one of two ways. But I thought about it, and I was talking with Jamie toste about this, and she was like, do you think they know about public sector? And I'm like, I don't think they do. And so I was like, hey, you guys, come over here. I'm thinking specifically, I'm thinking like, matthew Marshall, these kids I have in mind, do you know what a CIO is? They're like, a CIO what? And I'm like, I wonder if I can rent out the theater at DP and throw a live event and get some folks there to just reframe what these kids can do once the graduate.

Joe Toste [00:28:09]:
Because the default answer is I'm going to go to SBCC or I'm going to go work at Blenders, which is just they're not thinking beyond that. And I think partly is because it's tough. No one person is going to solve it. But going back to, going to the schools, like opening that possibility up of, you could be a CIO, and they're like, I have no idea what that is. Where's John? We were talking about that earlier today, right? Five years from now. Hey, you could be a Ciso, right? Yeah, we were talking about that. I love that. If any of you decide, hey, I'm going to do a roadshow and I don't want to do everything, but if you do it at high school, I would love to come.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:28:41]:
We actually have a couple with Christo Ray High school underprivileged kids. But we also go out into the community and speak, go to the technical high schools. Trades is a space where we really need young people to come in with an open mind for we can't get our construction done because we don't have enough building and code inspectors, high paying jobs, good long term prospects, and for some reason people don't see it, and so they don't think it's a possibility. Same with tech in Silicon Valley. That's actually not our problem. Every kid's, I can go into tech, or I don't want to go into tech because the most recent story on a company, on social media or something like that. But what community children see as possibilities, the entertain and go towards and love what you're saying. If I'm in if there's a space and a place, because that's the possibility.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:29:31]:
I lived in public housing. We were homeless for a period, living in a car. And my teachers and folks, they were just investors. As an adult now, you always want to do right on your investors. And I just remember how they wanted to put a set of possibilities in front of me. Absolutely.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:29:45]:
One of the things when I first got to Raleigh is we hosted a gis day, and it was a regional collective. And so it was several cities. We had the state, the department of transportation. But the coolest part of it is we had a local high school and their GIS club show up to the event and to watch those kids walking around and talking with the GIS professionals. And then what they were doing with the transportation network and the digital divide and sustainability, you could just see them, the light bulb go off of. This is how I can make that connection. And so it's one of those things that I saw that and looked at it and said, okay, we can expand this. And so next year we're going to be.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:30:28]:
Or this year, actually, we're going to be expanding that out and going to the different high schools to try to encourage them to come out to these events. A lot of times we host these things, but we don't invite the high schools. We may talk about having college interns, but really start them young. And they're just as curious and they're just as willing to learn and they're just as willing to make those connections.

Joe Toste [00:30:53]:
Yeah. And I want to give a big shout out to Menon. We in Houston, if you knew we brought out the future information technology professionals kids club. Like, it's kids, they're all seniors. And it was awesome. From the University of Houston. And one of the things that I said, because I love to have fun and I don't take myself too seriously sometimes, I guess when I'm deep focused, but in quotes, like, I'm a shame. Everyone, I got the kids up on stage.

Joe Toste [00:31:20]:
For those of you who were in Houston, you saw, I brought the kids up on stage and then I told every CIO, I don't care if you're scared, pull out a business card. These kids are looking for jobs. And it was awesome. They were counting business cards like it was cash in the back at the end. And sometimes it's just what it takes. Right? Pokemon without a Pokemon. Yeah. It was a jigglypuff card that they got, but it was something they might not normally do.

Joe Toste [00:31:40]:
But then it was cool to see the conversations after the next podcast where Dr. Chris Mitchell is meeting with them and Sindhu and Lisa and Summer. And sometimes it just takes a little push. But I love just getting that exposure because I was talking to them before. Specifically, I'm thinking about Jessica. I'm like, where do you want to go? She's like, google. I'm like, it's not public sector.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:32:03]:
There is google.org. So if you're an exceptional professional, you can go into stints and task force jobs. We worked with them on reinventing 911311, so there is a public sector angle from Google.

Joe Toste [00:32:15]:
Love it. Fantastic. Okay, I know the pizza is here. I know you guys are hungry. But I want to take some questions because this is rare to have three. We're all across the US right here. I think we got it pinned. This is perfect.

Joe Toste [00:32:27]:
Anyone wants to come up, you can ask a question. Name where you're from and what the question is.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:32:33]:
Hi, Brent Burns. I'm with extra hop networks and live in the Grand Canyon state. So, Rob, you mentioned hybrid work requires better managers. How do the three of you leaders build better managers? All right, since it was my question, I'll go first. A couple things. So one of the things, when we build managers, we've put in knowledge areas and process areas where we want them to be proficient. We also want them to use that to make decisions where they want to take their career. For example, you start your career usually doing tasks right, and then you get into operations, and then sometimes projects, multiple projects, programs.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:33:07]:
And then you say, let's also teach you the personnel pieces. Let's also teach you the budgeting pieces. Let's teach you the communications pieces and so on and so forth. And the proficiency with which you have that are going to open some doors for you. And we're going to coach you through them. And we're also going to give you those opportunities, those interim opportunities when we can, so that you can actually get a flavor of it. To know that this is something I want to do or this is something I don't want to do. I do think there's a metric on CIOs is if our deputies and assistants and managers are doing well, that should be a metric we're measured on.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:33:39]:
So in my performance evaluations, for example, I could not do better than my deputies and our senior managers, if they, as a group did not do well, I wasn't going to get a high score either. And so that gives me a lot of incentive. But then also trying to encourage, and I've had mixed results on this is the senior management group to form its own coalition of here's how we're doing as a group because there's a lot of one on one coaching we can do. Your team really shines when the managers work well with each other, and I have not mastered that yet. One day, maybe when I fully grow up, I will. But sometimes you just get great people who know how to interact and integrate their services and trust each other, ask each other questions, push each other, healthy tensions. And sometimes they don't. Sometimes it's even personal between I don't like the way you work.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:34:27]:
I don't like the way you work. Well, we're going to work together nonetheless. And that kind of stuff, that stuff comes up in large organizations, but we have to teach them that full repertoire, otherwise they're incomplete. So they might be effective, but they have some holes. And then we do want them to have opportunities. Can you be successful without some of those skill sets and experiences less. And so they know we're investing in them. The know we care, they know the bar is high and our ask is high because the community deserves it.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:34:55]:
But that's how we try to balance the equation. We want great things from you and we want to help you get to great things as well.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:35:00]:
I think for me, obviously, hire well. Hire really well, put a lot of time and attention into your process. Make sure it's equitable, make sure it's fair. It's amazing just doing those. You'll end up with really great people. So that's one thing that we make sure we do, is we focus on from the very beginning, making sure we hire well, support them. Some of the things that we all do, you want to give the a lot of ability to take ownership. One of the things I did is make sure that we had a really strong strategic plan that came from the employees.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:35:29]:
That helps the managers know the vision. They know a direction to go in so they're not always asking questions. So I feel like that empowers whenever they know the direction that the entire organization is going, that really helps them so they can lead their teams. They're not waiting for their bosses to tell them. For me, it was really focusing on that hire, making sure you got the good people, you're going to ment tour, you're going to do all those things that we all do, but making sure you get the right people and then giving them what they need. For us, it's that vision. They were telling me, we just don't know the direction all the time, so we make sure they know the direction they can run with it.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:36:03]:
One of the things we just recently went through is a strategic planning workshop with the entire leadership team. Because, like, Chris came in, we had a couple of interim active ads that had been there for a while, been in place. Once I had the it leadership team in place, we gathered for a week long workshop, which sounds like a lot of time, and it is actually a lot of time to carve out. But it was incredible. It was in person, and we had it facilitated. But just watching the team from Monday to Friday go from a team where they were, I wouldn't say siloed, but definitely not a cohesive team, to Friday, having developed a direction, developed a strategic plan, and they were laughing, they were joking with each other, they were poking at each other. You could just see that they become friends. So that was just huge.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:36:55]:
And then the second one is, it's the people skills. I just can't emphasize enough the soft skills. And even for the CIO, it's just a transformational thing as far as the management is. You have to engage those remote workers, and so you have to look at ways to create that team, to create family, to create the engagement. You can't just walk down the hall now. You have to be purposeful about it.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:37:24]:
Actually, let me throw something on that. Mark and I were with our feet in the river, just talking about this.

Joe Toste [00:37:29]:
A little earlier, like, literally for those time out, that's not literally in the river, in Big sky. You missed out on the Big sky live podcast tour. Okay, plug over. Sharing a rock, by the way.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:37:38]:
Sharing a rock, too.

Joe Toste [00:37:39]:
Sharing a rock.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:37:39]:
But we were talking about how if you really reduce it, there's just three things we have to teach our people. One is you have to be smart and capable. You have a knowledge area, an expertise area you've got to be good at. Number two is you have to have ambition and work ethic. But three, the one that separates and creates the opportunities and almost the luck, is the relationship piece. If you're good at relationships, creating friendships, creating camaraderie, creating team environments, those people just accelerate like rockets. And a lot of people come in and tech space, people are very proficiency based. I'm good at this.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:38:13]:
I'm an expert at the relationship is the one where you say you need to connect with that and the, you can get to the effective executive level. Did I capture it right?

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:38:23]:
You definitely captured it right. And it was a nice rock.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:38:26]:
It was a beautiful rock. It looked gorgeous and great company and cold.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:38:30]:
Do I have a goback? One of the things specifically that I did is I had quite a large team at City of Austin. It's a large environment. At the CI level, it's very difficult. You meet with your direct reports. You have one on ones. Who doesn't do that if you don't, definitely you should be doing that. But it wasn't enough. What I was hearing from supervisors and staff was they still don't always feel heard, and they don't feel like it's as direct enough.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:38:52]:
They're not sure they're hearing what I'm saying. By the time it gets them four layers down, they're not sure I'm hearing what they're saying. By the time it gets to me, I was able to work it out where twice a year I could meet with every single supervisor at all levels. So we have junior supervisors, managers at all levels. If you have a leadership role, I'd meet with you twice a year. And I kept notes and that was really powerful. It was great for me because I learned a lot of things that I was able to resolve problems in a day that I didn't know were happening, because it was coming straight from the people who are experiencing the problems, but especially junior supervisors, people who are just brand new at being a supervisor or being a lead. And they're really just trying to learn how to do this.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:39:29]:
They felt really empowered. They thought it was amazing. They're like, hey, I'm talking directly to the CIO. Everything I say is word for word. He's going to hear it. Everything I say, they're hearing word for word. So that was really powerful. It was just a couple of half hour meetings a week.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:39:43]:
It's tough to squeeze in more meetings, but it was something that was definitely valuable, that really helped me get my leaders on board, up and down the chain.

Joe Toste [00:39:52]:
That's great. Let's take one more question from the audience. Yep, take it. Name where you're from. Question.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:40:01]:
Hi, Brad Booth with Sentinel one. My question is along the thread of CIO being a marketer for your city, for yourself, for it in general, public sector in general, what's one of the coolest things between music festivals, presidential elections, sporting events, something that people might not know that you get to work on, that you went home and said, hey, guess what I got to do or see today? What's something cool about what you guys have done?

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:40:22]:
Cool?

Joe Toste [00:40:23]:
Come on, you live in Austin. What?

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:40:25]:
There's plenty of cool stuff. It's actually not as cool. So in Austin, we tend to be a center for disasters. In Texas. We're in central Texas, we have a lot of disasters, a lot of weather events where people will come inland. And Austin tends to be a hub for that. Even like Hurricane Katrina, we got a lot of folks, so we were actually set up for that. And one of the things that we got to do in it is we tended to be the shelter administrators for the most part.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:40:50]:
We come in first, set everything up, stay, making sure we're helping people. So in lots of ways, I've been able to be a part of all of those events, helping. And in this case, it's not your citizenry, it's not your residence, it's people coming here for the first time who are having disasters, making sure they have cell phones and chargers and a bed to sleep in, making sure there's Wi Fi set up. Not cool, but something that you wouldn't think maybe that in these kinds of roles, you're so connected to communities, even sometimes when they're not yours.

Joe Toste [00:41:18]:
And Austin Eastsiders, you've been there.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:41:20]:
Absolutely, dude.

Joe Toste [00:41:22]:
It's pretty cool.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:41:23]:
It's pretty cool.

Joe Toste [00:41:23]:
Yeah.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:41:24]:
Started in Raleigh, Hurricane ian hits and a chance meeting. I actually met the stormwater director, which, first of all, from Arizona, the fact that there's a whole division devoted to stormwater was, like, crazy, because I think we had one guy in Arizona that was, apparently there's rain and stuff like that, but he's, hey, I'll show you the dashboard that your team put together is what dashboard? The sensors using video analytics, they have this whole dashboard that has the city layout and all the road infrastructures, the bridges, the use all that information to figure out, like, how much water do we need to release from the lakes based upon the information that we're getting upstream, so that we don't create flooding downstream and that we don't create flooding in our area. And I'm going to brag on my team now, just watching what they had put together and how that information was used to be able to protect the community and to be able to understand this particular road is about to flood. And so not only do we need to close the road, but we now need to inform our citizens, we need to inform the community, and then we now need to find an alternate route. Was just incredible to watch, just the coordination, and it was all held together by gis and being in the Emergency operations center and just seeing how that technology was really used in real life, real time, in a real moment, was just incredible. And then the second one I'll say is we have Dreamville, which is a big music festival. And so we're in the process now because we had rolled several cell towers out, or cows, cells on wheels, in order to be able to provide the cell service. So everybody could get their selfies, everybody could do their TikToks, right? But it just isn't enough.

Mark Wittenburg, CIO, City of Raleigh [00:43:11]:
And so being able to partner with the big telecommunications companies, to be able to build the infrastructure in the park, so at future events, we have that marketing, we have people that are just marketing the city for us, and then being able to be there at that event is just super cool.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:43:28]:
And I'm going to tweak your question on you, because CIOs, we always get too much of the credit and too much of the blame. So this is a chance to do exactly what Mark did and just say, we're going to brag on our teams. So our teams, one day you're doing the NCAA championship game at Levi's stadium and the NHL all star game, all in the same two and a half months. Another day you're working on that disaster response. We had. I'm not sure if people saw it. We had a couple months of rain to start the year, and we vacated, folks, the technology, the coordination, we vacated hundreds of people, kept them safe, made sure that they had what they needed. But that's meaningful work.

Rob Lloyd, Deputy City Manager, City of San Jose [00:44:04]:
We did geoware, vehicle preemption. Not sure when police get to a light or fire, flash their lights, it clears green, then they can go. We changed that and said for about $900,000 less, we're going to put geo aware units on our fire trucks and preclear a path for them in advance. Takes off 24 seconds per route, saves lives, reduces injury. So all these things where you look at your team, you go, do you realize the good that we do? That's the story we get to tell in public. And we just get to be. Sometimes we say lenses to see the community differently and better. And we also get to be mirrors that were reflecting the best of our organizations.

Joe Toste [00:44:42]:
Awesome. I'm sure everyone is starving for pizza, so thank you for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Chris Stewart, fmr. CIO, City of Austin [00:44:47]:
Thank you.

Joe Toste [00:44:48]:
Hey, what's up, everybody? This is Joe Toffee from Techtables.com and you're listening to the public sector show by techtables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector, CIOs, CISOs and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events. We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today. And to make sure you never miss an episode, head over to Spotify and Apple podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think this show deserves.