Ep.171 How to Find and Identify Great Leaders with J.R. Sloan, CIO, State of Arizona (special rerelease)

Joe Toste [00:00:34]:
So today we have Jr Sloan, who's the CIO for the state of Arizona. Jr, welcome back to Techtables.

J.R. Sloan [00:00:39]:
Thanks for having me again.

Joe Toste [00:00:40]:
Yeah, I'm super excited to do this. Now, everyone in this room knows who you are, but this will get released on techtables, eventually become an episode, and I'm always shocked about how of people don't know. So can you just maybe give a brief intro for folks who don't know who you are?

J.R. Sloan [00:00:55]:
Sure. So I'm Jr Sloan. I'm the CIO for the state of Arizona. I've been in the role for, oh, what, now? About three years. This has been with the state for close to eight years. Started with some guys that actually worked for me. Former CIO for the state of Arizona had worked for me in the private sector and invited me to come and take on the digital government program, which needed transformation and to move from a kind of a black box, outsourced vendor contract to bring it in house and start moving down some of these cloud transitions that the state was looking to take on and get to some multivendor contracts that were better value for the state. And I was ready for a change in my career, and it really turned into a great match.

J.R. Sloan [00:01:37]:
Got to run that program. As the change in administration came about in 2014, 2015, I had the opportunity to step into the deputy CIO role, which we thought, I thought was going to be a short term thing. But as things go in life, it turned out to be like ten months before they found the next CIO. And that was Morgan Reed. Morgan was great to work with, and I offered to him shortly after he joined. I said, look, I'm happy to go back to do the thing I was doing before, or if you need to move in another direction, I understand. I'm good. He asked me to stay on as his deputy, and that was a great opportunity for me to step into new things that I hadn't been doing as much.

J.R. Sloan [00:02:14]:
And it really was a great fit, and I've got to enjoy the journey. Morgan had a great opportunity to move on in 2019, and at that point, I stepped in again as interim for the Seattle role and then received the role officially in March of 2020 of all times.

Joe Toste [00:02:30]:
That's a great time. And what happened in March 2020?

J.R. Sloan [00:02:33]:
Nothing.

Joe Toste [00:02:35]:
Yeah, nothing happened there. No, that's great. No, that's awesome. So we've shot an episode on State Ramp, we've shot an episode on hybrid work, and you get interviewed all the time, so there's a lot of content out there around. You care about your priorities. The premise for today's episode is identifying great leaders. Now, it came from when I was interviewing Gary Brantley. Now, he was like, episode 18, but I actually rereleased the episode.

Joe Toste [00:03:01]:
It's like Disney, disney, they always rerelease stuff. And then you listened to the episode, you were like, oh, it's an awesome episode. So great. I interviewed Gary, like, two years ago, and then the had this quote where he said, 90. He spends 90% of his time with people. And I think before we go a little further, I was curious, do you estimate how much time you spend with your people? Is it 90? Is that too high?

J.R. Sloan [00:03:22]:
Oh, gosh. I'll say if I pull up my calendar, you look at the calendar for the day, right? It's two to three meetings in parallel all day long.

Joe Toste [00:03:29]:
So 100%.

J.R. Sloan [00:03:30]:
It is rare that I'm not with either some of my own people in my own organization or working across the state with our partners at the agencies. And that's really how all the work gets done.

Joe Toste [00:03:39]:
Gary's underperforming. I'm going to tell him that 90% got it. Awesome. So I was reading this article. This is where I love to bring in kind of the private sector piece. There's this gal, she was the CEO of Popeyes. She sits on the board, actually met her maybe a month ago, and she sits on the board of Chick fil A and a few other kind of fast food companies. And she wrote a book called Dare to serve, which is really great, how to drive superior results by serving others.

Joe Toste [00:04:06]:
And the model was interesting because when she was a CEO, they had a bunch of, and even with chickfila, like franchisees, and it's a very similar model in the public sector where you're serving, I think there was 120 different agencies. Is that right? About 120 different agencies. So I really loved drawing the parallels of how do you serve the 120? That's a lot of agencies. So how do you get those leaders to buy in? And as I was thinking about that, I was kind of thinking about, okay, they're your customers. So I was curious around, how do you treat them as your most important customers for the state of Arizona? Wow.

J.R. Sloan [00:04:44]:
I read the article. You shared that with me, and I was reading out through it and thinking along the same lines of thinking that there are some good parallels. She talked in the article about how these franchisees are not just like employees. Right. Employees could leave you at any time. But these franchisees are really invested. Like, they put a tremendous amount of time money and are there because they're trying to build their life around this. I think you see the same thing.

J.R. Sloan [00:05:05]:
We have agencies that have missions that they're looking to fulfill and they've hired staff, and they're organized around that. Everyone's bought into. How do we fulfill this mission? And they're organized to do that. Now, Arizona, as you talk with a lot of different CIOs states, are all organized a lot of different ways. There's kind of some big bucket categories. Some are like fully centralized, and people might think, oh, that sounds, if you're not in that, it probably sounds great. Oh, you'd have all the authority. You can just tell everybody what they got to do and they got to do it.

J.R. Sloan [00:05:32]:
It's like, no, you still actually have to win their hearts and minds to bring them along the way. Arizona is a federated environment, and what that means is that our agencies have grown up completely independent, and they're constitutionally defined that way and statutorily defined that way and what that means. And that's good because it creates a healthy tension where they don't just have to take whatever my organization wants to dish out. I do have authority around some policies and standards, but when it comes to my services, I compete with the private sector. I have to compete to win their business. And so I have to make sure that I'm providing good value in that process. And so I think that's very healthy. And then I have to really treat them like customers in that I have to be concerned about the quality of what I'm delivering, the value of what I'm delivering, and how it supports them in meeting their mission and their business needs.

Joe Toste [00:06:23]:
How do you measure success within that? I think that's hard. Is it all qualitative? Do you have some quantitative metrics? I'm curious around how you actually measure that.

J.R. Sloan [00:06:31]:
So it's a blend, right? One of the key metrics that we do track are through our process. There's governance that rolls through our organization. What that means is that anyone that stands up a project for $25,000 or more has to basically do a business case that comes through our office. We do some things that seemed like common sense, things like, hey, how many quotes did you get for this project? Did you get three? Because if you didn't get three, we're going to make sure you get three, nothing else. We guarantee you're going to get a better deal. So we measure things like, how do we help save money in the process? How do we help avoid cost? Where do we create standards? Where are we getting leverage and scale. So we've gone together and we talk a lot about what we've done with cloud. Some of the key things we've done with cloud is to pull together the right contracts that reflect the purchasing volume that the state is doing with each of the cloud providers.

J.R. Sloan [00:07:22]:
And I don't get in the middle of the agency operating their cloud. I just make sure they get the best deal for getting to it.

Joe Toste [00:07:29]:
That's really great. Earlier you said win their hearts and minds, and I think that's how you get a team, even if you've got, everyone has their own team throughout the state. But that's, I think, really, as great leaders, you get the team to buy in to the vision. And I think hiring those folks and your calendar being stacked with meeting after meeting, I love what you said about that. And then the agencies have their own missions. And when you talk about being a federated state, you introduced me to Stephanie Dedman, who's the state CIO in Tennessee. And so they have a centralized model. Right.

Joe Toste [00:08:00]:
So this is fascinating to the conversation that I recently had with her. It's not out yet. It'll be out after Addie, her communications team, reviews it, but that won't be out on the centralized side. But I like the federated model. And then we will bring in Texas. They also have a federated model, too. How do you seem like kind of the guy, a guy that loves and is passionate about the work that you're in and connect and draw to people like that? How do you not lose sight of that? Like, how do you keep the human centric approach with your team, amongst all of the tech talk across Arizona and state ramp and everything that you have, how do you keep that human centric approach?

J.R. Sloan [00:08:39]:
I think it comes back to the start of the conversation where it's spending the time with people, right? Because I think that's what feeds us, what energizes us. And at the end of the day, I love living in Arizona. This is my home state, and I can connect every day the work that I do to benefiting what it means to live here, work here, innovate, do technology, do life, grow our families, and ultimately recreate. And if we do well enough, maybe we can retire here. And then talking with my agencies, right. When I talk about the stories of the successes that they have in delivering better services to their residents, the constituents that they serve, that also energizes me and to be able to see, hey, I'm helping steward the tax dollars that I'm paying and everyone else here in the state are paying to benefit what's going on here in the state. And I feel like we get to participate in being cost effective. I get to participate in the mission of protecting the data and providing better services across the board and wanting to say, okay, we all talk about we want to deliver the Amazon experience to our residents.

J.R. Sloan [00:09:42]:
Okay. That's an aspirational goal and it's a journey to get there. And I think especially in a federated environment, it has grown up completely independently and disconnected. And so now trying to start to bring those visions together without going and saying, hey, I'm ripping this away from you. Why? Because they know that business better than I will ever know the business. But I need to be bringing solutions to them that help them scale, that help them focus on what only they can do. And I have to be thinking about that in my own organization as well as how are we partnering with our providers and vendors and suppliers that the can do things better than we can do them? We broker those things to the agencies, we put the right contracts in place and better steward the resources that are available to us.

Joe Toste [00:10:24]:
Yeah, I took my son to the Legoland Discovery center two days ago. Ton of fun. And I know there's a lot of adults in this room, but learning to build with Legos, I don't know what it is. It's really great. And I walked in there and took out my iPhone and it was like, the Arizona driver's license. Hey, you're in Arizona. You want your driver's license digital? I'm like, oh, yes, I do. Except California doesn't have that.

Joe Toste [00:10:48]:
I did try. I was like, wonder if I can just cheat the system? And they didn't accept it, but I would love to have it on my iPhone. So anyways, going back to the digital experience, I love that. Right? When you live and you go around and you're like, I'm a citizen also. And so I want to have those digital experiences. And I think they call that empathy. And we got a great view out here. Speaking of, we've got chase field and then we've got.

Joe Toste [00:11:08]:
Just last night I was super bummed I didn't get to go, but the Suns played. Unfortunately, they lost.

J.R. Sloan [00:11:14]:
Unfortunately, they lost. We're glad that they played.

Joe Toste [00:11:16]:
Yeah, we're glad they played. Yeah, we're glad they played. Totally bummed that they lost. But, yeah, you start to experience, and that's like the part of empathy. You go throughout the city and the state and you figure out, hey, what do you like? And your job must be pretty cool, because I guess you want something like a digital driver's license. You can maybe nudge whoever on the digital side needs to go do that. Jr. Thank you for coming on tech tables.

Joe Toste [00:11:39]:
I really appreciate.

J.R. Sloan [00:11:40]:
Thanks. Great to be here, Joe.