Modernizing a City: Strategizing the Initial Steps Towards a Comprehensive IT Update

In a live-stream discussion, Megan and Abhijit Verekar (AV) discussed the importance of modernizing cities and the initial steps to take. They emphasized the need for automation and efficiency in city operations and the importance of envisioning a future where every citizen thrives, and the environment is cherished. They also highlighted the importance of setting a clear vision for modernization and the need for city leaders to work together to achieve this vision. They discussed potential funding sources for modernization projects, including internal sources, ARPA funds, grants, and state funds. They also highlighted potential roadblocks to modernization, including lack of initiative, piecemeal project selection, resistance to change, and lack of vision. They concluded by emphasizing the importance of efficient management and communication in ensuring business continuity during modernization.

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Transcript

Megan (00:25):

Hello everyone. Welcome to our live stream today where we will be talking about modernizing cities and what initial steps cities should take to modernize. So I am joined again today by Mr. Abhijit Verekar. Please call him AV for short. If you are joining us today, please let us know and let us know where you're joining from and ask any question that you want. If you cannot join us today, please know that all of these are recorded and posted to our YouTube channel, and then eventually we'll become podcasts in the very, very near future. So without further ado, I'm going to jump right in. Today. We're not just talking about strategizing infrastructure, technology or policies. We want to help you guys envision a future where every citizen thrives and where the environment is cherished. So with that being said, av, I want to start with setting the context. So why modernization? What are the main challenges and limitations a city may face when they're thinking about modernizing?
AV (01:37):

Yeah, and so we've called this a city, but this applies to any and all kinds of government agencies, counties, public housing authorities, transits, airports, school districts. It's really important to modernize, obviously, because you don't want to do business like you did 30 years ago, and many of our clients and prospects do that. We have a client, it's a large city that still does business on typewriters and carbon paper. So the obvious answer is you have to do it because it's 2023, but how you get there tends to be a struggle because of how far behind these organizations are and not knowing what the first step is to get there. So I think that's your our topic for today. How do you start untangling the Christmas lights so that you can actually get on a path to modernization? And why? Modernize again is because the biggest reason I think is you need automation.
(02:44)
We go into so many client sites that you can see people are doing repetitive manual tasks that can be automated for cheap if that's the thing they're looking for. You don't have to spend money on a full-time employee looking at backups as they happen because it's happening automatically for you. So there's a lot of redundancy, a lot of roadblocks in being efficient. So you need automation, you need transformation in terms of more efficiency, standardization, and all of that brings things like cybersecurity and enhanced processes to your organization if done right. So modernization isn't just buying a new computer or newer computers to give to your organization. There's a whole system that you need to change and upgrade at the same time, and that's not always easy, Megan (03:43):

And that looks different for every city, for every county, for every airport authority. So if you are leading those organizations, where do you start with the visioning and the prioritizing of what does modernization look like? AV (03:59):

Yeah, I think so typically we like starting with what we call visioning sessions. Really, where do you want to be, right? If you are a new mayor, new city manager, new to the profession or new to the organization or an executive director, you have thoughts and dreams about where you want to take this organization in the next three to five years. The kind of services you want to provide to your customers, to your citizens, and starting there really gives you the foundation of where you need to be as an organization. And we talk about this a lot. This isn't a tech problem, this isn't a technology implementation. Yes, there's a tech component to it, but technology is not going to work for you if you don't have the business to find, if you don't have your vision, if you don't have your business processes and a real good sense of where you want to take the organization in the next three to five years.
(04:54)
So starting there is critical, and that's what we recommend to all of our clients. In fact, that's what we seek out. We don't want to talk to the CIO first. We want to talk to the top managers of the organization. And many times CIOs are well-meaning they just don't have a good picture of how the business of government works. They're very good at cybersecurity hardware, putting in the right elements to make this sausage factory work, but really dealing with intricacies of finance, human resources, health and human services, public housing, and rightfully so, they can't be experts at this, right? Just because it has the word software, and it doesn't mean that it becomes automatically an IT project. So starting at the top where the vision is defined and the people that are going to either own the project for its failure or success are important to talk to and really get a sense of where they want to take this, Megan (05:58):

Right? And breaking down those silos, right, in every department. This vision, I mean, yes, it does come from the top, but it's department specific, right? So how would you encourage those department heads to work together for the common vision of the modernization project? AV (06:17):

Yeah, I think for the most part they do. So the important thing to do is to not just go out and purchase things that benefit your department only. There might be some real niche nuanced packages, software, hardware that you need for a specific department, but if you're not looking at this from a holistic perspective where you need the whole city to operate and pull in the same direction, what you need in the first place is a strategic plan, an IT strategic plan that tells you how to do this from a step-by-step basis. So silos are natural. If you worked in city government or county government that historically some of these departments were not even part of the county or city, they've then been brought into the fold as a government entity that works under the city manager's office or the county administrator's office. So working in silos is kind of natural to some of these agencies, but when you look at working together, you need to define what the interface points are between agencies, how does the school system interface with the central finance department? How do utilities interface with finance, how do utilities interface with public works? Having that definition and sort of a service level agreement on how we're going to support each other opens up to define the technical and technological requirements for breaking silos, so to speak. Megan (07:49):

AV, how do global trends in technology impact the need for modernization in a city? AV (07:57):

Slowly. I think the AI revolution is a good example of a quicker adoption of a newer trend. And it's not a trend, it's just something that, and we've talked about this. This is going to change the lives of many people. Traditionally, if there's a global trend, local governments in the US have been late to adopt it, and rightfully so. They're very change averse. Their job is to conserve things and not necessarily be on the bleeding edge. So it takes time in the it hardcore IT infrastructure field. They are quicker to adopt, but also they have the benefit of looking at private industry to see what has worked, what hasn't worked. So it really depends on what it is. Megan (08:54):

We do have a question in the comments from our very own Mackensie Archibald, thank you for joining us Mac. She says, can you suggest methods for assessing the current IT infrastructure strengths and weaknesses before initiating an IT modernization project? AV (09:14):

The way we do it is, again, once you have the vision defined, the first thing we'll do is go in and talk to each department because you need to differentiate between IT infrastructure modernization itself and IT application modernization to me interrelated, but different things. And you need to look at what the needs of each department are. What does finance need? What does HR need? What does procurement need? What do utilities need? Have that documented and compare that with what currently exists. A lot of times our clients don't even know that a certain automated process is available through a newer technology. So they're working on a homegrown as 400 or whatever 30 year old ERP they might be using. And it works poorly. You have to work for it instead of it working for you. So there's a lot of workaround. There's a lot of redundancy and duplication of work.
(10:18)
We were in a meeting the other day in Oklahoma and we were doing a requirements definition session. I was really happy to be in one of those after a long time. But one of the accounting clerks told me that their process of bank reconciliation was that she takes statements for each P-Card, attaches receipts to them, and then makes sure that each receipt corresponds with the line item. Now, these are things that were automated 10 years ago through the right systems, but they had no idea that that was possible. And it's a disservice from our friends in the software industry that don't necessarily teach our clients that what's possible. So it's our job to make sure that they know all of these things. So we assess all of that, compare that to what currently is, create a gap analysis, and those gaps then lead to strategies to fulfill those gaps so that they can achieve the vision that the chief executive is setting for 'em.
(11:19)
And along the way, we might assess, we will assess cybersecurity, we'll do a NIST assessment, we'll do some scans on your network infrastructure. And all of that data helps us understand where you are today, what the gaps might be in management, finances or technical gaps that might lead to some bad things happening in your infrastructure. So putting all of that together is the first step in taking on modernization. Otherwise, you don't know what you're modernizing, right? It's like going to a contractor is saying, Hey, build me a new house and without any specs. So first step is always to do a current state review and see where the organization stands, Megan (12:04):

Right? I want to set the vision for our viewers. What should a modern city look like or what does it look like? Are there any defining features? And are there any examples that you can think of that we should be molding our own organizations after? AV (12:24):

So there's a term called smart cities. I don't think we have a blog on our website, the smart city Myth, because it doesn't mean the same thing for all organizations, right? But a modern organization to me doesn't necessarily mean that they're at the highest echelons of being a smart city or an IOT enabled organization or whatnot, or using ai. How efficient are your operations? How automated are they? And how many workarounds do your workers have to take on to do their day-to-day jobs is the primary function or measure of how sophisticated you are. You could have the best software, you could have the best sensors, and you could have the best automated things in the world. But if Becky and accounting is still doing work through Excel sheets and sticky notes, you're not a smart city. So you have to look at it from a holistic perspective.
(13:24)
So from that standpoint, how easy is it to access services for your customers? That's the citizens. If I want to apply for a permit, are you making me come into city hall and fill out forms or is there a sophisticated workflow based maybe AI enabled these days? Workflow or a system on your website that allows me to do business with you? How do I report potholes or dead animals on my street? Do I have to pick up a call and ask someone to put me through to somebody that can help me? Or do you have a 3 1 1 system that automatically picks up certain types of calls? Do you have an app that allows me to do that? So there's a variety of different maturity levels of an efficient or a modern city government, and I think it starts at how well do your people have, what kind of tools do you have to make work working at the city the most efficient it can be?
(14:24)
And the second measure is how digital are you in terms of providing services and access to information to your citizens? And this can have various different levels. You can have a transit authority that is still taking cash on their buses while you go to London, and everything works on your phone in the underground. So different types of industries within local government will have different scales of modernization. And maybe we should come up with a maturity model that shows, and we do this as part of some of our IT strategic plans where we compare the client with other different cities that are doing these things. But it's also at a very granular level. Megan (15:12):

I wish we could put together a simulation, a simulation conference, this is a smart city, and break that down by organization and then by department, and then let people walk through it. Big dreams here, but I think that would be really, really neat to do. AV (15:33):

I'm sure that something like that's out there, but we can look. Megan (15:37):

Alright, we have another question in the chat. Does the technology, oh, she just commented. Yes. Does the technology work when it's supposed to? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And how you want it to, right? Is it working for you? And that's why defining these processes upfront is so important. So av, we've sort of set the vision, we've talked about why modernization. What is your opinion on key areas of focus? Are there bullet points that we should, areas of focus that we should think about when we're modernizing our organization? Yeah. AV (16:12):

So when we deliver these projects to our clients, we break 'em up into four different major elements, major buckets that need to look at. First is cybersecurity. Where do you stand in terms of generally accepted standard practices and best practices today? Second is enterprise systems. Do you have the right software systems to allow for automated work and more transparency within your workforce? Third, is your infrastructure resilient, right? It kind of relates to cybersecurity. Do you have the right kind of backups? Do you have the right kind of bandwidth? Do you have the right kind of equipment within the data center that keeps things running? And are you making data-based decisions, data-driven decisions? How are you using all of the data that your organization generates to make business decisions that allow you to do better by your citizens and your employees on an everyday basis? So those are the four or maybe five elements that we look at when we build a modernization plan for you. And of course, from then, within each of these buckets, you have 20 or 30 different recommendations and projects that you need to do to make this a useful document for you. Megan (17:37):

So Mackensie says, can you describe how to create a realistic timeline for a modernization project? That's a great question. Mackensie and I already know what he's going to say. And we're getting T-shirts made. AV (17:49):

It depends. Megan (17:50):

Yep, AV (17:52):

It really does. I mean, so many different factors. Size of agency, what kind of services do you offer? How bad is it today? How far behind are you? How much duct tape and bailing wire are you using to keep your infrastructure up? And based on that, it can take anywhere from one year to three to five years. I've seen it all. Maybe your core IT infrastructure elements are top-notch, but you have bad enterprise systems and therefore you can't make database decisions. So in the maturity scale, I think it's important to see where you stand and that will dictate how long and how much money you're going to have to spend to modernize. We recommend doing it in a piecemeal manner. Of course, when we make our recommendations, it builds up towards taking you to the most mature model you can have with the amount of time and the money you have available. But at the very basic level, you need to fix things for cybersecurity and network resiliency and go from there. Megan (19:06):

Is it safe to say that maybe the hardest part for these organizations is the prioritization of where to begin? I think they know what problems they have, but they don't know where to start. So could you just comment on that piece? AV (19:24):

Yeah. It's difficult, right? When you're too close to a problem, you don't know where to begin. It's like my garage, we've moved to a new house last year. It's still a mess because I don't know where to begin. And I think we have eventually we'll get it all done and clean and organized. I don't know where to begin, and that's where we come in. So we might have a garage consultant. I don't know.
(19:53)
Looking at the vision for what the end state needs to be is the most important thing. Where do you want that to sit? How do you want things to happen? And I think people that we deal with sometimes get caught up in analysis paralysis. There's so many variables that you can't nail 'em down all at one time, especially when you're trying to redesign your infrastructure. You can't nail it down unless you define what the end state needs to be and you go from there. You break it down into different project elements and take on one at a time, keeping in mind that you have dependencies and one thing needs to happen before the other or the other way around. And if you do this first, you're going to break something else in the existing environment. So all of that takes a lot of time and thinking of, but having that on paper is the first thing you should do.
(20:52)
And then you'll clearly see on all of the, it's not a list because I've seen two page lists that CIOs have presented to me saying, this is the project to plan. Not all things are projects. Some are just tasks and you can't mix the two. A modernization program is made up of several projects that are then made up of tasks. So organization of all of this is the first step. Set the vision, organize all of your projects, assign them to people, set a timeline, set money, resources if they need to be and go from there. Megan (21:28):

I want to talk about funding and partnerships next. What potential sources of funding are available for projects like this? AV (21:40):

So several, right? It depends on who you're talking to. It could be a county that has several million dollars in fund balance money. They've saved up. They have no other use for, they could pay down debt or use it to take care of technical debt. So funding can come from internal sources. They can apply for ARPA funds, they can get grants, you can use state funds, lots of funding options available. We also have it easier today because if you're looking to replace an ERP system or an HCM system, you don't have to go spend $10 million all at once, right? Because of the advent of hosted services and SaaS-based product, you can pay a subscription fee, which is smaller than a 10 million bill. Of course you'll pay that in perpetuity, but it's a small amount, smaller amount than it would be 10 years ago even. So lots of ways to find funds.
(22:49)
I've met some really creative mayors and finance officers that the problem to solve needs money, they'll find it. You need to make a good case for why that is, and that's a fallacy too. We've also run into situations where we go to a client that has asked us to an IT strategic plan, and they say that, well, it is in this state because we didn't get the funds council didn't approve it, commissioned, didn't approve it. And our question naturally is, well, did you ask and how did you ask? Because it's a big part of a CIO's job, especially in government, is sales. I think for every organization, they have to be the people that are constantly telling their leaders what's coming in the next four years? Because technology is not something you can just buy and forget about for five years. It needs constant upkeep, constant licenses, constant something going on that needs, again, a definitive plan so that leadership in finance can plan for their expenditure. And at the same time, to get to that point, the CIO or the IT director need to be savvy enough to think along these lines to organize the projects, to tell 'em how much it's going to cost and what might be requested. So it's a sales job too. Megan (24:18):

Absolutely. How can public private partnerships enhance the city's modernization efforts? I keep saying city organization. AV (24:29):

Yeah, well, let's stick a city for example. The latest example of public private partnerships is the broadband. Broadband initiatives that are going on across the country where private company comes in and says, we'll put in X amount of dollars for infrastructure. You give me a certain percentage and we'll share the revenue of when we finish this project. We've seen that in several public works across the country. Many great examples in the software field. I don't know if we are going to see it on the ERP side because what we propose or say is really go for product that is off the shelf. Don't customize. So you don't necessarily have to build something from scratch. So public private partnerships are important. On the infrastructure side, I think a great example is broadband initiatives. We've seen it elsewhere with utilities and major public works projects like in India, they're doing toll roads using public private partnerships, and that's worked really well. I think a lot of similar projects are happening in this country. Also. Megan (25:45):

I want to shift a little bit to potential roadblocks in solutions. So what internal or external factors could potentially hinder a project like modernization? AV (26:00):

I think the first one is lack of initiative to do it. We do a lot of, again, strategic plans that are 50 to 200 pages thick. And if that's all you wanted, you're not going to do much with it. If you wanted a book to say, okay, look, we have a consultant just did this for us, and that's it. There is no political or management will to actually take on these really difficult long-term projects. That's one. The second is not thinking everything through and picking piecemeal projects to do one at a time. If you're not thinking about it in holistic manner, this isn't going to work. So you have to again, go back to your long-term strategy, break it down into shorter term projects and initiatives and tactics and handle it that way. Leon, very, very true. Lack of vision is a huge impediment to modernization.
(27:07)
The first thing, if you don't have a vision, like I said, you need to start there and then break it down into smaller elements, resistance to change. We've talked about this many times. At the lowest level, the mayor's office and the executive officers and the ccio O may be all in for change and modernization, but the lowest levels of the organization that just want to do their job and go home, they're about to retire. They don't want to go through whatever project you're going to throw at them. How do you bring those people with you is a very important thing. And if done wrong, it can make or break. I mean, it can break a project if it's done wrong. Megan (27:52):

And that goes along with what Mackensie says or asks, how can organizations ensure business continuity? AV (28:00):

That's a tightrope. Are you trying to build an aircraft while you're flying it? Sometimes you have to. I'll give you a good example. One of our clients was using a homegrown as 400 base green screen ERP system for the longest time, 30 plus years. And the one person that knew how to operate this thing from a technical perspective, like from an IT software perspective, left the organization. There was no documentation, nothing. So when we came in, we saw that the IBM series machines they were using were out of compliance with licensing for maybe three or four years. Not only that, they hadn't been backed up, they weren't on the right hardware. It was literally about to fall apart. So how do you keep an organization like that running while talking about all of this pie in the sky modernization stuff? Because the thing that's in front of them is this system fails and we're all in trouble.
(29:08)
So what we did is we solved that problem by shifting that piece of equipment or software to the cloud. We just bubble wrapped it and kept it safe and it worked for two years without breaking. While we implemented a new ERP system on the more hardcore infrastructure projects, we have to actually have changed windows, right? You're doing a lot on the weekends, on holidays, after hours to make sure that you're disrupting business. So it's a tightrope. And if not done well, you run into situations where you're surprising your user base, right? You have a 3000 person employee county, and here you are at 10 in the morning on a Monday doing a switch upgrade or something on a really technical level that disrupts business. So all of this comes back to efficient management communication and making sure that you're not surprising people with changes. Megan (30:13):

I agree. As we wrap up today, I just wanted to remind everyone that all of our lives are recorded and they are on our YouTube channel along with some other video content. We're pretty much nerds about this thought leadership piece in the business that we do. Also, if you guys have any other questions or if you think of other questions after we stop our live video, please reach out to us. We're available on all social media platforms. And I did want to give a shameless plug. If you are thinking about modernizing and you don't know where to begin, please call AV or I. We're happy to get on a phone call with you all and help you vision, because that is the most important piece is to set a strategy to vision, to set goals, and to prioritize where you want to start. So thank you guys for joining us today. Thank you AV for your insight. I really appreciate you and I think this has been a fantastic conversation. AV (31:14):

Thanks, Megan. Look forward to Yeah. Megan (31:15):

Thank you guys. See you next week. Bye.