April 7, 2021 • 40 mins
Working in the government sector comes with its own set of unique challenges, but much of the work translates to all industries, public or private. How do you identify which technologies have the most promise to deliver value? How do you get buy-in from various stakeholders? How do you juggle ongoing projects while also looking toward the future? These challenges are universal and we’re going to hear how one of the most forward- thinking minds from one of the most forward-thinking, and world’s biggest cities, Los Angeles, looks to harness technologies like 5G to turn the City of Angels, into a Smart City of ultimate speed. Join Jonathan as he sits with Ted Ross, CIO, City of Los Angeles, on this episode of The Restless Ones.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
The idea that five GS wireless. I mean, once you
get your connectivity to the access point, it's effectively a
wireless solution, which means that we can deploy and you know,
we can expand and contract rapidly using things that are
completely wireless. We've had Emmy premiers and other things in
which five G was the backbone for listeners tuning in
(00:23):
for the first time. Welcome to the restless Ones. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, and if you joined us for season one,
then welcome back. I couldn't be more excited to kick
off another great season. I've spent more than a decade
really learning about technology, what makes it tick, and then
describing and explaining that to my audience. But it's the
(00:45):
conversations with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the leaders at
the intersection of technology and business, that fascinate me the most.
In partnership with T Mobile for Business, I explore further
the unique set of challenges that CEE, I O S,
and c T O space in setting their organizations up
for success. From advancements in cloud and edge computing, software
(01:08):
as a service, Internet of things, and of course five G.
We are often left wondering how the leading minds in
business continue to thrive in a world of complex organizations
and ever changing technology, and what are they looking forward
to tackling next. Let's find out. Our guest today is
(01:30):
Ted Ross, the Chief Information Officer of the City of
Los Angeles, California. Ted's early career was in the private sector,
but since then he has dedicated his attention and efforts
working at the city government level. That means he oversees
projects that serve not only the more than forty city departments,
but also the businesses and residents of Los Angeles itself.
(01:53):
Working in the government sector comes with its own set
of unique challenges, but much of Ted's work translates to
all industries, public or private. How do you identify which
technologies have the most promised to deliver value? How do
you get buy in from various stakeholders? How do you
juggle ongoing projects while also looking toward the future. These
(02:15):
challenges are universal, and Ted's approach is one I find compelling.
I'll leave it to him to elaborate. Ted, I want
to thank you so much for joining us today. I
greatly appreciate your time. Welcome to the restless ones, excellent.
Thank you so much. Great to be here. And before
we dive into your leadership philosophy and how you tackle
(02:38):
problems in your role as ce IO of the City
of Los Angeles, I thought we'd take some time to
learn a little more about you. So can you talk
at first about what drew you to the world of
technology in general. My dad was an aerospace engineer and
he worked for Aerospace Corporation. So I remember us having
(02:58):
a time ex. Sinclair Ty one thousand at the house.
You type in a game, you couldn't save it because
I had no internal storage. Then once the TV was
turned off, you'd have to turn it back on and
type the programs back in. Then fast forward to a commodore,
fast forward to Apple two plus and two e and
to C and move your way to an IBM two
eighty six, where v GA graphics were fantastic. So I've
(03:19):
always been around technology. So what was your first job.
I was a telemarketer for a political office. Telemarketing is
a tough job, and trying to sell people super tough.
It's a little bit easier if you're trying to sell
a candidate, but it was a Michael wu for Secretary
of state campaign, and I remember it helped to improve
my speaking ability, but it was grueling. In just a
(03:42):
three or four hour shift, you'd always walk away with
a huge headache. I imagine that those communications skills are
are one of those cornerstone skill sets you have in
your role as c i O. At the time, I
couldn't have appreciated it, But now, all these years later,
I'm very glad that I was always put through a
trial by fire, whether it was giving system training classes
(04:05):
or whether it was just cold calling people and try
to get them to either vote for a candidate or
donate to the campaign. It really does improve your ability
to get a point across, especially something as complicated as technology.
So what led you to become part of the team
at the City of Los Angeles? How did you join
that group? I believe in mission driven work, and I
(04:27):
made a decision after nine and levene to work for government,
and I ended up at the City of Los Angeles.
I really I'm born and raised in l A. I'm
a Homer, I'm a Lakers fan, I'm a Dodgers fan.
I fall right down the obvious, you know, stereotypes, but
the realities I really do like the idea that when
I come to work um for all of its challenges,
I'm trying to improve technology for the people of Los Angeles.
(04:48):
I do find that motivating. What was your career path then,
what what was your sort of entry level position with
the city, and and how did it lead to the
point where you are today. My very first job was
actually working out of the Department of Airports, so working
at l a X, which was super cool because my
dad worked at Aerospace Corporation for twenty five years and
they're both effectively in El Segundo, so it's nice to
(05:10):
kind of spend time work in a place that my
dad has been all his years. But my entry level
job was actually accountant, and so I end up working
with their financial system group and very quickly ended up
supporting and running teams that run the SAP system at
the airport. Cool, and I assume there were several stuffs
between that and cee I. Oh. I don't imagine the
career path goes straight from there to CEE I O
(05:32):
of the city. No it does not. If it did,
I think the city made a terrible mistake. I made
a career move to move downtown. I joined the team
at the Controller's Office for the implementation of their RP system,
and you can see the trend here a lot of
the r P early on UM, which means that if
you when you think of your stereotypically RP, you understand
(05:52):
business process as well. You're a big fan of business
management as well as technology. After spending some time in
the Controllers off, I joined the I T Agency, which
was honestly a department in crisis at the time. It
wasn't the fault of the people working there, it was
just a lot of staff were putting a really bad
positions and the piece of the puzzle just weren't working
together at all. And then with a departure the CEO,
(06:14):
I became c I. Oh, so I jumped around across
multiple departments UM, mainly coming in from my my systems
implementation experience. I imagine at the city level, you can't
do the move fast and break things kind of approach
that you typically hear about at Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's
really interesting. You know, I spent seven eight nine years
(06:34):
in private sector before joining government, so I very clearly
remember that world. But then at the same time, I've
been in government for about twenty years, and so h
and I spent a lot of time trying to kind
of bridge the two wherever possible. In fact, honestly, if
you had asked me and say, well, said, you know,
who do you see? Who do you look to when
it comes to innovation or good strategy, I don't say
(06:56):
other governments. You know, generally speaking, other governments are are
in a in a terrible state. They are very slow
to implement new technologies. When they implement technologies, they're often
using what's existing on contracts, which is the worst possible
reason why you choose a vendor or they know a
guy or they know a girl, and so these aren't
the right ways to implement it. So you're entirely right.
(07:17):
There's a lot of bad press regarding governments in technology,
and it's not always coming down to individuals. Like I
mentioned before, I was always surprised how experienced and how
capable a lot of the individuals were. But the systems
that they operate within sometimes are really not just antiquated,
but they could be dysfunctional at times. And so really
(07:38):
one of the benefits of when you're the boss is
that you can't control everything, but you can certainly try
to influence a whole lot of things, and so as
c I O, I have spent considerable time just in
the last couple of years and things like employee hiring
and procurement and a variety different topics that really aren't
my student be my core competency, but they make, I think,
a really big difference. So, you know, there's a lot
(08:00):
to be said about how you innovate in government, and honestly,
there is no better place where innovation impacts more people. Um,
if I worked for a private sector company, quite often
I'm I'm innovating to sell a product, and that's cool.
But when you're innovating in government, you're innovating to save
someone's life, you're innovating to empower people. You're you're innovating
to bring someone onto the Internet who hasn't been on
(08:22):
it before. So there's a lot of like super cool
in my opinion, you know, reasons why innovating in government
is as important to use case as any No, sure, yeah,
the impact is enormous and it spreads across millions of
people who depend upon those services. I'm fully on board
with that, and uh, you kind of touched on this already,
(08:43):
but if someone were to ask you to describe your job,
how do you typically do that when you're talking to
someone who may not really have a grasp on what
it is that that you do. Yeah, some of the
worst questions me is what do you do or what
are your priorities at work? Because when you kind of
get underneath the surface, you realize it's a complicated question.
(09:05):
So you try to give us simple and straightforward answer,
and and people deserve one. At a high level, I
help manage technology at the City of Los Angeles. That's
the high level. And so what does that mean? Some
of it's very traditional. You know, we run a data center,
We run the network so that city employees can connect
to the Internet. We run enterprise applications and websites and
social media. I run a TV station of all things.
(09:27):
In my group, you could see behind me, we have
an Emmy over there. Um, So there's all these different
kinds of broad responsibilities of what we do. But it
also means that not just supporting and maintaining these systems,
but innovating and building on them. So the ability to
roll out, you know, a web nominated website, so that
actually allows residents to enter their address and see all
(09:48):
the resources and what's happening in their neighborhood, or having
teams that build out in Alexas Skill or Google Home
Skill so that people could actually talk to their Amazon
Echo and ask what the city is doing this in
the this upcoming weekend, or building chatbots. So there's a
lot of really cool beneath the surface items what as
well as of course all the frustration we have to
manage budgets. I've got a team of four hundred and
(10:10):
sixty five people. There's just a lot of stuff that
we end up doing that covers so many different customers,
and so this is never a dull moment. It's very interesting,
but it could also be a certainly a challenging role
at times. And you know, COVID certainly tested our metal
ah and we're going to touch more on that in
a little bit. And you you mentioned that you have
a team of four hundred sixty five people. It also
(10:30):
I think benefits listeners to know the size of your
customer base, not just within the city itself and the
other departments that rely upon your leadership as far as
managing technological resources. But then you're also talking about citizens
of Los Angeles, as well as the people who visit.
Can you kind of give us an idea of the scope. Yeah,
(10:51):
it's terrifying at times. I'd say that jokingly. Um, so
four sixty people as a whole lot of folks, But
we spread them across nineteen different divisions and like said,
a TV station, a three on one call center, network,
data center, apps, enterprise apps, websites, public safety communications. So
all those handheld radios at a firefighter or a police
officer carries, those come through my staff. So the customer
(11:14):
base is quite large when it comes to servicing other
city departments. That's forty three city departments we service, who
have a total of forty thousand employees. Then when we
think about the fact that we don't just service city
employees and city departments, we have a lot of very
public facing services. We serve four million Angelinos, We serve
over five hundred thousand businesses who call Los Angeles home,
(11:35):
and then pre COVID, at least we had forty eight
million annual visitors. And so we have the deliver innovation
and technology across all these customers. And you know, it's
a it's a fascinating challenge as to how you do
that and where you prioritize. But the reality is, I
can't just say, well, I'm only focused on employees and
I don't care about businesses. And I can't say we
(11:56):
only care about businesses and who cares about residents? The
realities I really need them of the needle every year
in all these different areas. And not only does it
mean that I'm gauging different customer bases, I'm also engaging
different business partners in the city. So I'm working with
the Department of you know, Recreation in parks when it
comes to children trying to sign up for you know,
park park classes, or I'm working with libraries, or I'm
(12:20):
you know, we're on digital inclusion, or I'm working with
public works when it comes to fixing potholes and receiving
request or three one one mobile app. So there's a
whole lot to do. Uh. And then never never a
dull moment, never never time to sit and rest on
Laurels well. And and you've given talks about Los Angeles
and it's incorporation of different smart city technologies and solutions.
(12:44):
And one of the presentations I saw you do was
tackling something that I think a lot of people associate
with Los Angeles, which is traffic, and just you look
at what would the situation be without the technological solutions
that are in place, and you realize, wow, this is
a very complicated problem and something that you don't necessarily
see when you're in the middle of it. There's a
(13:05):
couple of themes in my career. When I work for
the Controller's Office, the Control's Office associate with money. So
every time I work with someone, they said, well, has
to do with money, so that's your job, And I said, no, no,
everything has to do with money. Can't be my job.
That's too big a job. And then when I work
as a c I, oh, they say, well has to
do with technology, therefore it's your job, and you go,
I can't be responsible for every possible technology and every
(13:26):
you know, certain aspect because it's just so ubiquitous. And
I think that's the reality of it is when it
comes to something like traffic, it's not entirely my job.
We have an entire department of transportation, but we do
work very closely with them, and technology plays a huge
role and how ELI manages traffic. We're a huge city,
a lot of people move in here, traffic is always
difficult to manage simply because just the volume of people
(13:48):
and everyone wants to have their own car. But with
that being said, we have something called at SACK, the
Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System, which believed or not,
has its foundation in the Olympics when they started to
digitize and automate, which was first in the nation at
the time to do it at that scale. But then
you know, fast forward thirty years and now you've got
(14:10):
technology which we've got thirty loop detectors that know when
a car is waiting for a traffic light to turn.
We have got two thousand five intersections that you can
control if you want to with the laptop. We don't,
but we run all these various algorithms. So if a
president is visiting, if there's traffic on Wilshore, we can
try to go ahead and change the lights on Olympic.
(14:31):
So there's all these things that we do which do
tremendously improve traffic in Los Angeles. But we are always
fighting against the idea that there's a lot of folks
with a lot of cars who live in the west
side and work on the east side of vice versa,
and so we're always working to manage that. Hopefully, in
the post COVID world, we can leverage better, you know,
multimodal transportation and even just people working from home to
(14:53):
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dot com. It was clear to me that Ted had
(16:22):
a unique set of challenges as the CEO of one
of the world's largest cities, with fifty eight counties, four
two municipalities, and hundreds of employees serving the needs of
all Californians, and with all that responsibility and weight on
his shoulders, I was curious to understand his leadership style
and how he tackled the challenges of the job. How
(16:45):
much of your job goes into just balancing priorities. I
would imagine that you are looking at so many different factors.
Whenever you're considering an implementation of new technology, it has
to be pretty overwhelming. I've learned a lot, and you're
(17:05):
now hearing experienced two thousand and twenty one Ted and
not Ted from five years ago. But one thing I've
certainly learned is first of all, to have a north star,
and and for us, our north star is going to
be the residents, the businesses, and the visitors. So that
is just you know, full stop. Those are our top priorities,
and so when it comes to a customer focus, those
(17:25):
are the most important customers. So even when we're servicing
other departments and other city employees, it's always in light
of adding value to that north Star. Secondly, we have
to juggle a lot of lists. So the Mayor's office
has lists. They come in the form of executive directives
or Mayor's Office requests, and then there's a list of
items that we as a department, no we should be
doing that no one has asked us to do, and
(17:47):
I think quite often governments ignore that. They just quote
unquote do what they are asked. So what we do
in my department is we have something called the list
of lists. So we take all these lists, we emerge
them alltogether, and we're frequently going through them using metrics
to see for initiatives that we're working on. We're doing
project management. There's all these different kinds of things we do.
Is that we can help prioritize, focus and deliver. At
(18:09):
any given point, we're juggling a hundred ninety to two
different projects as a department, and we're closing a lot
of them out and we're getting a lot of new ones,
and so it is. It is always a challenge, and
I think one of the ways we focus it is
we try not to prefer one stakeholder over another, but
we try to keep the needle moving among all stakeholders.
That definitely sounds like there is a lot on your plate.
(18:32):
So then I'm curious what sort of challenges do you
typically encounter when you want to do an integration of
new technologies. I assume you have to get buy in
from multiple different parties in order for that to happen.
Can you talk about what that is like for you
or is there just no universal approach that you can
(18:55):
touch on the reality is you've got to bring coalitions together,
and you've ought to have teams of people. You've got
to have allegiances among elected officials and finance people and
HR folks, etcetera. Which does mean that quite often you're
making multiple extra passes to try to put the ball
in the hoop. But that really is the nature of
working in government, and it's not I I love the
(19:17):
old quote and it says it's not about great ideas,
but it's about making great ideas happen. That is, execution
becomes an extremely important part. So quite often what I
find is, let's say i'm building stakeholders among other departments,
I'm really looking into their mission and their purpose. When
you have forty three different departments, they all have different missions,
and almost none of them their mission is to create
an integrated user experience for somebody. So they may appreciate
(19:40):
the concept, but when push comes to shove, they're going
to be focused on their constituency and they're very specific mission.
So you're often selling mission and trying to kind of
get buying into their mission as a part of a
technology experience. When it comes to employees, it's a completely
different thing. Sometimes you have people who are married to
a certain proprietary ecosystem. You know, they've and trained in
Cisco and they don't want to touch a p or
(20:02):
they've been trained in Fordnite, they don't want to touch Cisco.
And so sometimes you have just these very fundamental things
when you're impacting so much job and you want to
go ahead and help make improvements on something, and you
often gave them to buy into that. But what do
you quite often find is if you work with a
group of professionals, if you could start to create the
sense of urgency for change, if you really show how
the status quo is really failing an important group of people,
(20:24):
and you can show a clear path as to where
we need to go, often people will start to buy in.
And then it requires oversight. It requires actually making sure
that people haven't dropped the ball. And so, yeah, being
a c I O in many organizations involves execution, especially
in government, and I imagine that is complicated by the
fact that we live in a democracy. The leaders can
(20:47):
change frequently over a period of like a decade or
twelve years. And so does that make it more challenging
to make further long term plans not really knowing who's
going to be in charge perhaps another four years down
the road. It does, It really does. And so take
for example where I stand today. You know, I serve
(21:07):
under Mayor Eric Carcetti, and I'm confirmed by city council,
and I've got a city attorney that I pay attention
to in a city controller. So that's eighteen different elected officials,
very intelligent people, men and women who see the world
in a very different way and have their own perspectives
our mayor uh he ends his second term next year,
and so it affects the way I think the mayor's
(21:28):
office operates. It doesn't mean I should change and maybe
slack off. It's nothing like that. It just means that
they're doing things to close up their term, and I
need to pay attention and keep in mind of not
just what they're doing, but also making sure that there's
a good transition. One of the benefits is i may
be a political appointment, but I worked in civil service
for fifteen plus years, so I'm very experienced and very
(21:49):
aware of kind of the transition. I served under multiple
controllers and multiple mayors, etcetera. You know, where there's a
transition of power that needs to be a smart transition
of good technology. And that's why when we discussed our
list of lists. There's priorities that the Mayor's office provides,
there's priorities that council provides. But then there's also list
of priorities that what we know as tech professionals. And
(22:10):
so no one asked me to implement droople, we did it,
and no one asked me to implement service Now for
ticketing and service management. We did it. These aren't things
that we asked anyone either permission for or their advice on.
Because we knew that this would improve our ability to
be able to roll things out and ask permission for
the cloud. We just started taking hardware refresh and started
reallocating it so that we could start moving workloads up
(22:32):
into the cloud. We have two plus workloads already, a
lot of sas systems and others, and so we're making
that migration. So there are there's a balance of doing
what you're told and doing what you're asked, as well
as trying to do what you know is right and
hopefully you get it right, and if you get it wrong,
you feel fast, you learn, and you migrate to something else.
And so it really is a challenge when it comes
(22:52):
to the long term. So we often are thinking in
the world of one year plans to year plans, three
year plans. We're not really in the world of ten
year plan ends. Smart cities is a bit of a
of a difference. Ce I o s all over the
world have the tough job of trying to explain sometimes
very complicated technologies to different stakeholders in order to get
(23:14):
buy in. Do you have your own approach to this
because you start talking about things and we'll mention more
about in a minute. But like blockchain, for example, that's
one of those topics that if you're not really technologically savvy,
it seems like it's magic. So how do you go
about that. I knew you were going to blockchain with
(23:36):
that one first and foremost. I'm full of analogies, and
I never intend walking into the room to use the analogy,
But next thing you know, it pops off. And I'd
say most of the time it's a pretty good analogy.
Sometimes it's a terrible one. But I was recently in
the budget discussion in which we were discussing, you know,
because of the economy, where we should make cuts, and
the analogy used as I said, listen, if we were
(23:57):
the kind of organization that always bought a new car,
then maybe we can kind of float maintenance for a
while because the car is new and we know it
will last. But if we're an organization, let's say on
server infrastructure, network infrastructure, where we know we have a
lot of old stuff, you can't cut on the money
that you need to keep those things going. And so
I said, so if you have a used car, and
it's been around for seven eight nine years. You don't
(24:18):
eliminate funding that's need to repair that car, because repairs
are going to come up. That's the cost of having
an older car. And so it's just a classic analogy
that a lot of people can identify with because they
know the idea of owning a new car versus owning
a use car and what it means. I just don't
think most folks related to let's say, network infrastructure, and
that's that's the analogy that we used in that one,
(24:39):
and honestly, it just came out spur of the moment.
But I'm full of analogies. When it comes to something
like blockchain. Boy, that's a difficult one because it is
a level of auto magical, you know, solution when it's
all said and done, and so all you're trying to
do is break things. Its classic systems. Now it's break
it into its pieces. You know, how you keep a
record here on this database instead of keeping a record
on this data base that we own. There's a different database,
(25:02):
and it uses a complex algorithm to make it work.
You've seen it with bitcoin. People aren't stealing bitcoin all
the time, So that's how blockchain and effectively work. So
you're taking it, you're really boiling it down. But the
reality is is once you've boiled it down, they'll kind
of understand it. They'll often fact check you a little
bit quite often when it comes to technology. Your reputation
(25:22):
is extremely important, and so they look at you and say, well,
I trusted you on smartphones, and I trusted you on
early early earthquake warning. I'll trust you on this one.
So having a reputation and building a level of trust
with your stakeholders is important because things go wrong. You know,
there's data breaches, there's you know, server failures, there's network outages.
(25:42):
They need to know that you're upstanding, you work hard,
and you're capable before those things happen, so they can
trust you as you're resolving them. There are a couple
of things I really want to talk about. One of
them is how impressed I am at the city's ability
to pivot in the ache of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
being able to go from a more centralized approach where
(26:06):
people are coming to specific buildings in order to do
work to working from home. From my understanding, it sounded
like it was a pretty rapid deployment to go from
one to the other. Can you talk a little bit
about that process? Yes, it was, and I can't help
but smile both out a sense of a great appreciation
for my teams and what was accomplished, and also kind
(26:27):
of a smile of let's not think about how traumatic
the whole experience was, right, but I'll never forget. It
was the end of February two thousand and twenty when
the CDC was saying it's not a matter of if.
But when then we all started to realize it was
going to be a global pandemic. At first, there was
the question of, well, do we take people who are
maybe you know, over sixty five and they tell the
(26:48):
work little do we realize how fast it would become
everybody teleworking for a long time. Um, So what we
did was I sat down with the team. This is
early March, and I said, Okay, we're gonna have to
telework fifteen thousand people. How would we do it. Everyone's
eyes roll and everyone's oscillates, because up until that point,
we really had about thirty five teleworkers in a city
of forty thousand employees. And the initially answer was what
(27:12):
we can take our existing solution and try to scale
it out. But it didn't take but five minutes to
realize that that was a terrible idea. Everyone's gonna unanimously
hate it. I'll never forget. One of our managers says, well, Ted,
they can't expect us to deliver all the functionality they
have at work at home, and I said, oh no,
they expect it. Let let you know, don't don't get
it twisted. The idea of them being sent home and
flailing is not an acceptable answer. So what we did
(27:33):
We worked with cybersecurity network apps folks UH and some others,
and we very quickly were able to stand up a
solution in which we had a very robust remote desktop protocol.
We started to implement strong cybersecurity with two factor and
other things, because we had to stand up identity management,
you know, remote access, a long list of things to
(27:54):
make sure that everyone could access as many apps as
possible from day one. And then lo and behold, March
nine teeth Safer from Home order everyone is sent home.
Within seventy two hours, we had ten thousand people teleworking,
and then about two weeks later we had eighteen thousand
plus people teleworking and there were so many lessons learned
(28:14):
in it. It was so dramatic, so fast, all the
stuff you learned with agile software development, all the stuff
you learned with user center design. We had to do
it and do it very quickly, and most governments don't
do it very quickly, and I think, you know, is
one of our our The fact that we had so
few issues is one of our proudest achievements that will
never forget. Now, having a deeper understanding of Ted's leadership
(28:41):
style and philosophy, I really wanted to dive into what
he thought about emerging and maturing technologies and how the
City of Los Angeles is implementing solutions relying on those technologies.
I'm curious what the City of Los Angeles is doing
(29:01):
along the lines of incorporating absence services in the five
G infrastructure world. Are you exploring that. Yes, absolutely are
huge fans of five G for a number of reasons.
First of all, as a government, our role is to help,
you know, facilitate the deployment to five G and that's
(29:22):
one of those things that directly a city government like
IRIS can implement. So we've already had over two thousand,
five hundred five G access points. We were one of
the first large cities who had five G and we're
in the process of implementing and I say implementing, it's
allowing and facilitating the implementation of five G of of
another three thousand access points in the next three years.
(29:43):
So our ability to fast track permitting to come up
with standardization to keep costs low so that companies can
can implement five G in our urban environment allows it
to be accessible for business as residents and others. So
that's like first and foremost one of the greatest things
government can do is to facilitate the implement notation of it.
But when it comes to our use case of it,
(30:03):
like there's so many great options for it. So you know,
quite often when you have an old city like ours.
Technically our city was found in sevente so you can
imagine we have old street sold sewers, we have a
lot of old infrastructure that just comes with a large,
old urban environment. The idea that five GS wireless, I mean,
once you get your connectivity to the access point, it's
effectively a wireless solution, which means that we can deploy
(30:27):
and you know, we can expand and contract rapidly using
things that are completely wireless. We've had Emmy's and Star
Wars premiers and other things in which five G was
the backbone. You didn't have to go and roll a
bunch of wires out. You already had ubiquitous five G
connectivity up to gigabit speeds, and they could run an
entire venue, rollout VR wirelessly, rollout communications, you know, do
(30:48):
all these huge multimedia aspects that take up a lot
of bandwidth and do so completely wirelessly. But as a
city and as an organization, there's all sorts of use
cases and I honestly I liken it to early Internet.
But when I think about early Internet, I think about
all these all this upside and people not really knowing
what to do with it. But then introduce e commerce,
(31:10):
introduced social media, introduced these use cases that take this
technology that had these you know blue background, yellow text,
you know HTML, you know websites that someone goes, what's
the benefit of this the to then now have these
you know, rocking and rolling organizations completely built on it.
So I think a five D that way, And for
the city of l A, you know, great example comes
(31:31):
down to things like you know, sanitation, trucks. We have
sanitation trucks in which we've added cameras, and those cameras
can actually pan. So if you imagine a sanitation truck
drives the entire city every week, there's a sanitation truck
driven picking up people's trash cans, covering probably eighty to
nine of the city. So instead of me waiting for
a resident to tell me that there's graffiti on the wall,
(31:52):
what if the sanitation truck camera could identify it for me? Right, So,
instead of this poll approach, what about a push approach
to city services that's transformational. And you know it's not
just transformational, it has tremendous effect on equity. So we
often know that like disadvantage, neighborhoods are less likely to
tell the government that they have graffiti or they have
a pothole, etcetera. Well, why wait for them? Why why
(32:14):
always benefit the you know, the wealthier communities who are
very aggressive and very you know, I love to advocate
for the neighborhood. Why to identify the pothole, identify the
graffiti using computer vision? Office sanitation truck you know, connected
to the cloud through five G where I'm moving mass
amounts of data, but I'm leveraging machine learning and AI
(32:34):
to be able to do the type of computer vision
required to make sure that that is truly graffiti and
not something else, and do so in a secure way
where I'm not violating people's privacy. Those are the kinds
of things that five G starts to enable. And that's
a look up part of the expression. That's a badass
concept for a city to be able to actually unilaterally
understand where its issues are and be able to start
(32:56):
to assign those resources without a resident ever having to
complain or tell you about it. Oh, absolutely, you don't. Again,
you don't think of city government as necessarily being proactive
in those cases, it's usually reactive. So having technology enable
the ability to be proactive, to start to address problems
before perhaps anyone even has the opportunity to report that
there is a problem that is transformational. And previously you
(33:20):
you mentioned the Olympics and how that had a big
role in the the early implementation of technologies that changed
how traffic management is done in the city of Los Angeles.
I imagine that means that we're going to see a
lot more technological innovation than how high band frequency five
G can deliver such incredible experiences and to me, the
(33:45):
Olympics would be the one of the perfect places to
really showcase what that technology can do. Is that something
that the city has been looking at as well? Absolutely?
Um Now, I'll put in a disclaimer. Every Summer Olympics
says that we are the most technologically advanced Summer Olympics
to date. And of course because every four years technology moves,
(34:07):
so yes, they set it back, you know, in ninety six,
they'll say it in two thousand and twenty eight. But
with that being said, if you think about the year
two thousand and twenty eight, you're thinking about a time
frame in which autonomous vehicles will have much more traction,
five G will be ubiquitous, augmented reality, virtual reality, you know, AI,
machine learning, all these technologies will have had not just
(34:29):
been introduced, but have much more maturity. So I really
do expect the two thousand Olympics to be something completely
next level. And so what do you see it. We
see it in two areas. One area is actually running
the Olympics itself, is creating this fantastic experience for the
people who fly in. Let's say you fly into l
a X, you are have a concier service that helps
(34:50):
you get to your hotel. It helps you get two restaurants.
You're being pushed coupons if you're so interested, so they
could help incentivize going to one restaurant over another. You're,
you know, doing your tourism. You've got this complete digital
experience to help you navigate a large city of four
and sixty nine square miles as well as get you
two and from your venues, contactless payment, single payment methods
(35:11):
that whether using Uber or a city bus, you can
use the same app to be able to make those
things happen. So there's a long list of these tremendous
benefits that helped the event itself. But I have to
hand it to Mayor Eric Garcetti, and he said, listen,
it's not just about the event itself, because that comes
over the matter of a few short for weeks. It's
really about the legacy that's left after the Olympics. After
(35:33):
the Olympics, most folks don't know that the Amateur Athletic
Foundation created this this grant in which something like almost
a million youth have had free youth sports because of
the money that was invested in and came out of
the Olympics. And so you know, eight hundred thousand plus people,
including many of which young girls who are traditionally often
(35:53):
aren't incorporated into youth sports, have had these tremendous opportunities.
So when we look at the Olympics, we're not just
folks on the Olympics themselves, but what is the legacy
that we leave. What is the infrastructure, the fiber optic infrastructure,
the five G infrastructure, the applications, the digital concierge, these
things that we can use for the Olympics, But unlike
some other countries, we don't just abandon it right after
(36:16):
the Olympics are over, but we continue to parlay that.
That's a great answer to that question. I live in Atlanta,
so I look at the Olympics and how that helped
transform the city I live in, and I think about
the technology we have today and how that could have
been such an enormous boon to the city both during
(36:39):
the Olympics and beyond, and it just makes me wish
that we had been further along. But now we live
in a different world where we do we just we
get those constant notifications that we can act on and
we can implement and have that make an impact in
our lives. So I find this truly exciting, and I
love the fact that you're talking about infrastructure does have
(37:00):
utility beyond a truly phenomenal event. I don't want to
downplay the Olympics, but something that has utility beyond just
those couple of weeks in a summer, So that's very exciting. Yeah,
I'd say it's good to deliver good technology for the event,
but it's great to deliver technology that service the event
(37:20):
and services over four million people or over forty eight
million visitors thereafter. And when you work in government, I'm
a taxpayer. I don't want to spend money on something
that's throw away. That's not how government needs to operate.
I need to be able to incorporate things that really
will provide utility and value because people are paying their
taxes for it. We all know that in the world
(37:42):
of tech, there's always one more thing. So here's the
one more thing. I wanted to ask ted Ross, what's
the best piece of advice you would share to your peers.
I would say, you know, understand your government, nderstand your organization,
and then understand what private sector is doing with technology
(38:04):
and then make that that crosswalk. There's so many great
things that private sector companies are doing with technology, and
it's not because they have a bunch of money. It's
because they understand, they get it, they have a philosophy,
they understand what technology means and what and what it
means to be digital. So cross apply that into government
and you don't have to bring their budgets with you.
You can leverage a lot of things they do that
are actually pretty low cost. So that would be my
(38:25):
advice to my colleagues. Ted, thank you so much for
your time and your expertise. I greatly appreciate my pleasure,
thank you for having me, and I hope that folks
listening to it find these kinds of topics interesting. One
thing I have come to appreciate as I've had the
(38:46):
chance to speak with tech leaders in business is how
valuable communication skills are when it comes to doing your
job effectively. Yes, you need a good eye for technology.
You need to be able to envision new approaches to
old problems. You need to be able to pivot quickly
when issues arise. But you also have to do all
(39:06):
of this while maintaining delicate connections between different departments, divisions, executives,
and customers. Those are lessons that apply across the board,
no matter what sort of organization we're looking at. Thank
you for tuning into the restless ones. Be sure to
subscribe to the show, as we will be having conversations
(39:28):
with forward thinking leaders throughout the year, learning what makes
them tick and what it's like to lead in a
world that is in a constant state of change and evolution.
I've been your host, Jonathan Strickland. These days, new ways
(39:48):
of working have become the norm, and the status quo
no longer cuts it when it comes to helping businesses
evolve and grow. That's why Team Mobile for Business uses
unconventional thinking to help businesses see ease innovation only. T
Mobile offers America's largest and fastest five gene network, which
makes their new WFX solutions possible, letting businesses stay connected
(40:10):
and productive where work happens. See what T Mobile for
Business can do for you at t mobile dot com.
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Some users may require certain Planner feature see t mobile
dot com
The idea that five GS wireless. I mean, once you
get your connectivity to the access point, it's effectively a
wireless solution, which means that we can deploy and you know,
we can expand and contract rapidly using things that are
completely wireless. We've had Emmy premiers and other things in
which five G was the backbone for listeners tuning in
(00:23):
for the first time. Welcome to the restless Ones. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, and if you joined us for season one,
then welcome back. I couldn't be more excited to kick
off another great season. I've spent more than a decade
really learning about technology, what makes it tick, and then
describing and explaining that to my audience. But it's the
(00:45):
conversations with the world's most unconventional thinkers, the leaders at
the intersection of technology and business, that fascinate me the most.
In partnership with T Mobile for Business, I explore further
the unique set of challenges that CEE, I O S,
and c T O space in setting their organizations up
for success. From advancements in cloud and edge computing, software
(01:08):
as a service, Internet of things, and of course five G.
We are often left wondering how the leading minds in
business continue to thrive in a world of complex organizations
and ever changing technology, and what are they looking forward
to tackling next. Let's find out. Our guest today is
(01:30):
Ted Ross, the Chief Information Officer of the City of
Los Angeles, California. Ted's early career was in the private sector,
but since then he has dedicated his attention and efforts
working at the city government level. That means he oversees
projects that serve not only the more than forty city departments,
but also the businesses and residents of Los Angeles itself.
(01:53):
Working in the government sector comes with its own set
of unique challenges, but much of Ted's work translates to
all industries, public or private. How do you identify which
technologies have the most promised to deliver value? How do
you get buy in from various stakeholders? How do you
juggle ongoing projects while also looking toward the future. These
(02:15):
challenges are universal, and Ted's approach is one I find compelling.
I'll leave it to him to elaborate. Ted, I want
to thank you so much for joining us today. I
greatly appreciate your time. Welcome to the restless ones, excellent.
Thank you so much. Great to be here. And before
we dive into your leadership philosophy and how you tackle
(02:38):
problems in your role as ce IO of the City
of Los Angeles, I thought we'd take some time to
learn a little more about you. So can you talk
at first about what drew you to the world of
technology in general. My dad was an aerospace engineer and
he worked for Aerospace Corporation. So I remember us having
(02:58):
a time ex. Sinclair Ty one thousand at the house.
You type in a game, you couldn't save it because
I had no internal storage. Then once the TV was
turned off, you'd have to turn it back on and
type the programs back in. Then fast forward to a commodore,
fast forward to Apple two plus and two e and
to C and move your way to an IBM two
eighty six, where v GA graphics were fantastic. So I've
(03:19):
always been around technology. So what was your first job.
I was a telemarketer for a political office. Telemarketing is
a tough job, and trying to sell people super tough.
It's a little bit easier if you're trying to sell
a candidate, but it was a Michael wu for Secretary
of state campaign, and I remember it helped to improve
my speaking ability, but it was grueling. In just a
(03:42):
three or four hour shift, you'd always walk away with
a huge headache. I imagine that those communications skills are
are one of those cornerstone skill sets you have in
your role as c i O. At the time, I
couldn't have appreciated it, But now, all these years later,
I'm very glad that I was always put through a
trial by fire, whether it was giving system training classes
(04:05):
or whether it was just cold calling people and try
to get them to either vote for a candidate or
donate to the campaign. It really does improve your ability
to get a point across, especially something as complicated as technology.
So what led you to become part of the team
at the City of Los Angeles? How did you join
that group? I believe in mission driven work, and I
(04:27):
made a decision after nine and levene to work for government,
and I ended up at the City of Los Angeles.
I really I'm born and raised in l A. I'm
a Homer, I'm a Lakers fan, I'm a Dodgers fan.
I fall right down the obvious, you know, stereotypes, but
the realities I really do like the idea that when
I come to work um for all of its challenges,
I'm trying to improve technology for the people of Los Angeles.
(04:48):
I do find that motivating. What was your career path then,
what what was your sort of entry level position with
the city, and and how did it lead to the
point where you are today. My very first job was
actually working out of the Department of Airports, so working
at l a X, which was super cool because my
dad worked at Aerospace Corporation for twenty five years and
they're both effectively in El Segundo, so it's nice to
(05:10):
kind of spend time work in a place that my
dad has been all his years. But my entry level
job was actually accountant, and so I end up working
with their financial system group and very quickly ended up
supporting and running teams that run the SAP system at
the airport. Cool, and I assume there were several stuffs
between that and cee I. Oh. I don't imagine the
career path goes straight from there to CEE I O
(05:32):
of the city. No it does not. If it did,
I think the city made a terrible mistake. I made
a career move to move downtown. I joined the team
at the Controller's Office for the implementation of their RP system,
and you can see the trend here a lot of
the r P early on UM, which means that if
you when you think of your stereotypically RP, you understand
(05:52):
business process as well. You're a big fan of business
management as well as technology. After spending some time in
the Controllers off, I joined the I T Agency, which
was honestly a department in crisis at the time. It
wasn't the fault of the people working there, it was
just a lot of staff were putting a really bad
positions and the piece of the puzzle just weren't working
together at all. And then with a departure the CEO,
(06:14):
I became c I. Oh, so I jumped around across
multiple departments UM, mainly coming in from my my systems
implementation experience. I imagine at the city level, you can't
do the move fast and break things kind of approach
that you typically hear about at Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's
really interesting. You know, I spent seven eight nine years
(06:34):
in private sector before joining government, so I very clearly
remember that world. But then at the same time, I've
been in government for about twenty years, and so h
and I spent a lot of time trying to kind
of bridge the two wherever possible. In fact, honestly, if
you had asked me and say, well, said, you know,
who do you see? Who do you look to when
it comes to innovation or good strategy, I don't say
(06:56):
other governments. You know, generally speaking, other governments are are
in a in a terrible state. They are very slow
to implement new technologies. When they implement technologies, they're often
using what's existing on contracts, which is the worst possible
reason why you choose a vendor or they know a
guy or they know a girl, and so these aren't
the right ways to implement it. So you're entirely right.
(07:17):
There's a lot of bad press regarding governments in technology,
and it's not always coming down to individuals. Like I
mentioned before, I was always surprised how experienced and how
capable a lot of the individuals were. But the systems
that they operate within sometimes are really not just antiquated,
but they could be dysfunctional at times. And so really
(07:38):
one of the benefits of when you're the boss is
that you can't control everything, but you can certainly try
to influence a whole lot of things, and so as
c I O, I have spent considerable time just in
the last couple of years and things like employee hiring
and procurement and a variety different topics that really aren't
my student be my core competency, but they make, I think,
a really big difference. So, you know, there's a lot
(08:00):
to be said about how you innovate in government, and honestly,
there is no better place where innovation impacts more people. Um,
if I worked for a private sector company, quite often
I'm I'm innovating to sell a product, and that's cool.
But when you're innovating in government, you're innovating to save
someone's life, you're innovating to empower people. You're you're innovating
to bring someone onto the Internet who hasn't been on
(08:22):
it before. So there's a lot of like super cool
in my opinion, you know, reasons why innovating in government
is as important to use case as any No, sure, yeah,
the impact is enormous and it spreads across millions of
people who depend upon those services. I'm fully on board
with that, and uh, you kind of touched on this already,
(08:43):
but if someone were to ask you to describe your job,
how do you typically do that when you're talking to
someone who may not really have a grasp on what
it is that that you do. Yeah, some of the
worst questions me is what do you do or what
are your priorities at work? Because when you kind of
get underneath the surface, you realize it's a complicated question.
(09:05):
So you try to give us simple and straightforward answer,
and and people deserve one. At a high level, I
help manage technology at the City of Los Angeles. That's
the high level. And so what does that mean? Some
of it's very traditional. You know, we run a data center,
We run the network so that city employees can connect
to the Internet. We run enterprise applications and websites and
social media. I run a TV station of all things.
(09:27):
In my group, you could see behind me, we have
an Emmy over there. Um, So there's all these different
kinds of broad responsibilities of what we do. But it
also means that not just supporting and maintaining these systems,
but innovating and building on them. So the ability to
roll out, you know, a web nominated website, so that
actually allows residents to enter their address and see all
(09:48):
the resources and what's happening in their neighborhood, or having
teams that build out in Alexas Skill or Google Home
Skill so that people could actually talk to their Amazon
Echo and ask what the city is doing this in
the this upcoming weekend, or building chatbots. So there's a
lot of really cool beneath the surface items what as
well as of course all the frustration we have to
manage budgets. I've got a team of four hundred and
(10:10):
sixty five people. There's just a lot of stuff that
we end up doing that covers so many different customers,
and so this is never a dull moment. It's very interesting,
but it could also be a certainly a challenging role
at times. And you know, COVID certainly tested our metal
ah and we're going to touch more on that in
a little bit. And you you mentioned that you have
a team of four hundred sixty five people. It also
(10:30):
I think benefits listeners to know the size of your
customer base, not just within the city itself and the
other departments that rely upon your leadership as far as
managing technological resources. But then you're also talking about citizens
of Los Angeles, as well as the people who visit.
Can you kind of give us an idea of the scope. Yeah,
(10:51):
it's terrifying at times. I'd say that jokingly. Um, so
four sixty people as a whole lot of folks, But
we spread them across nineteen different divisions and like said,
a TV station, a three on one call center, network,
data center, apps, enterprise apps, websites, public safety communications. So
all those handheld radios at a firefighter or a police
officer carries, those come through my staff. So the customer
(11:14):
base is quite large when it comes to servicing other
city departments. That's forty three city departments we service, who
have a total of forty thousand employees. Then when we
think about the fact that we don't just service city
employees and city departments, we have a lot of very
public facing services. We serve four million Angelinos, We serve
over five hundred thousand businesses who call Los Angeles home,
(11:35):
and then pre COVID, at least we had forty eight
million annual visitors. And so we have the deliver innovation
and technology across all these customers. And you know, it's
a it's a fascinating challenge as to how you do
that and where you prioritize. But the reality is, I
can't just say, well, I'm only focused on employees and
I don't care about businesses. And I can't say we
(11:56):
only care about businesses and who cares about residents? The
realities I really need them of the needle every year
in all these different areas. And not only does it
mean that I'm gauging different customer bases, I'm also engaging
different business partners in the city. So I'm working with
the Department of you know, Recreation in parks when it
comes to children trying to sign up for you know,
park park classes, or I'm working with libraries, or I'm
(12:20):
you know, we're on digital inclusion, or I'm working with
public works when it comes to fixing potholes and receiving
request or three one one mobile app. So there's a
whole lot to do. Uh. And then never never a
dull moment, never never time to sit and rest on
Laurels well. And and you've given talks about Los Angeles
and it's incorporation of different smart city technologies and solutions.
(12:44):
And one of the presentations I saw you do was
tackling something that I think a lot of people associate
with Los Angeles, which is traffic, and just you look
at what would the situation be without the technological solutions
that are in place, and you realize, wow, this is
a very complicated problem and something that you don't necessarily
see when you're in the middle of it. There's a
(13:05):
couple of themes in my career. When I work for
the Controller's Office, the Control's Office associate with money. So
every time I work with someone, they said, well, has
to do with money, so that's your job, And I said, no, no,
everything has to do with money. Can't be my job.
That's too big a job. And then when I work
as a c I, oh, they say, well has to
do with technology, therefore it's your job, and you go,
I can't be responsible for every possible technology and every
(13:26):
you know, certain aspect because it's just so ubiquitous. And
I think that's the reality of it is when it
comes to something like traffic, it's not entirely my job.
We have an entire department of transportation, but we do
work very closely with them, and technology plays a huge
role and how ELI manages traffic. We're a huge city,
a lot of people move in here, traffic is always
difficult to manage simply because just the volume of people
(13:48):
and everyone wants to have their own car. But with
that being said, we have something called at SACK, the
Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System, which believed or not,
has its foundation in the Olympics when they started to
digitize and automate, which was first in the nation at
the time to do it at that scale. But then
you know, fast forward thirty years and now you've got
(14:10):
technology which we've got thirty loop detectors that know when
a car is waiting for a traffic light to turn.
We have got two thousand five intersections that you can
control if you want to with the laptop. We don't,
but we run all these various algorithms. So if a
president is visiting, if there's traffic on Wilshore, we can
try to go ahead and change the lights on Olympic.
(14:31):
So there's all these things that we do which do
tremendously improve traffic in Los Angeles. But we are always
fighting against the idea that there's a lot of folks
with a lot of cars who live in the west
side and work on the east side of vice versa,
and so we're always working to manage that. Hopefully, in
the post COVID world, we can leverage better, you know,
multimodal transportation and even just people working from home to
(14:53):
try to help improve that. If there's one thing most
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dot com. It was clear to me that Ted had
(16:22):
a unique set of challenges as the CEO of one
of the world's largest cities, with fifty eight counties, four
two municipalities, and hundreds of employees serving the needs of
all Californians, and with all that responsibility and weight on
his shoulders, I was curious to understand his leadership style
and how he tackled the challenges of the job. How
(16:45):
much of your job goes into just balancing priorities. I
would imagine that you are looking at so many different factors.
Whenever you're considering an implementation of new technology, it has
to be pretty overwhelming. I've learned a lot, and you're
(17:05):
now hearing experienced two thousand and twenty one Ted and
not Ted from five years ago. But one thing I've
certainly learned is first of all, to have a north star,
and and for us, our north star is going to
be the residents, the businesses, and the visitors. So that
is just you know, full stop. Those are our top priorities,
and so when it comes to a customer focus, those
(17:25):
are the most important customers. So even when we're servicing
other departments and other city employees, it's always in light
of adding value to that north Star. Secondly, we have
to juggle a lot of lists. So the Mayor's office
has lists. They come in the form of executive directives
or Mayor's Office requests, and then there's a list of
items that we as a department, no we should be
doing that no one has asked us to do, and
(17:47):
I think quite often governments ignore that. They just quote
unquote do what they are asked. So what we do
in my department is we have something called the list
of lists. So we take all these lists, we emerge
them alltogether, and we're frequently going through them using metrics
to see for initiatives that we're working on. We're doing
project management. There's all these different kinds of things we do.
Is that we can help prioritize, focus and deliver. At
(18:09):
any given point, we're juggling a hundred ninety to two
different projects as a department, and we're closing a lot
of them out and we're getting a lot of new ones,
and so it is. It is always a challenge, and
I think one of the ways we focus it is
we try not to prefer one stakeholder over another, but
we try to keep the needle moving among all stakeholders.
That definitely sounds like there is a lot on your plate.
(18:32):
So then I'm curious what sort of challenges do you
typically encounter when you want to do an integration of
new technologies. I assume you have to get buy in
from multiple different parties in order for that to happen.
Can you talk about what that is like for you
or is there just no universal approach that you can
(18:55):
touch on the reality is you've got to bring coalitions together,
and you've ought to have teams of people. You've got
to have allegiances among elected officials and finance people and
HR folks, etcetera. Which does mean that quite often you're
making multiple extra passes to try to put the ball
in the hoop. But that really is the nature of
working in government, and it's not I I love the
(19:17):
old quote and it says it's not about great ideas,
but it's about making great ideas happen. That is, execution
becomes an extremely important part. So quite often what I
find is, let's say i'm building stakeholders among other departments,
I'm really looking into their mission and their purpose. When
you have forty three different departments, they all have different missions,
and almost none of them their mission is to create
an integrated user experience for somebody. So they may appreciate
(19:40):
the concept, but when push comes to shove, they're going
to be focused on their constituency and they're very specific mission.
So you're often selling mission and trying to kind of
get buying into their mission as a part of a
technology experience. When it comes to employees, it's a completely
different thing. Sometimes you have people who are married to
a certain proprietary ecosystem. You know, they've and trained in
Cisco and they don't want to touch a p or
(20:02):
they've been trained in Fordnite, they don't want to touch Cisco.
And so sometimes you have just these very fundamental things
when you're impacting so much job and you want to
go ahead and help make improvements on something, and you
often gave them to buy into that. But what do
you quite often find is if you work with a
group of professionals, if you could start to create the
sense of urgency for change, if you really show how
the status quo is really failing an important group of people,
(20:24):
and you can show a clear path as to where
we need to go, often people will start to buy in.
And then it requires oversight. It requires actually making sure
that people haven't dropped the ball. And so, yeah, being
a c I O in many organizations involves execution, especially
in government, and I imagine that is complicated by the
fact that we live in a democracy. The leaders can
(20:47):
change frequently over a period of like a decade or
twelve years. And so does that make it more challenging
to make further long term plans not really knowing who's
going to be in charge perhaps another four years down
the road. It does, It really does. And so take
for example where I stand today. You know, I serve
(21:07):
under Mayor Eric Carcetti, and I'm confirmed by city council,
and I've got a city attorney that I pay attention
to in a city controller. So that's eighteen different elected officials,
very intelligent people, men and women who see the world
in a very different way and have their own perspectives
our mayor uh he ends his second term next year,
and so it affects the way I think the mayor's
(21:28):
office operates. It doesn't mean I should change and maybe
slack off. It's nothing like that. It just means that
they're doing things to close up their term, and I
need to pay attention and keep in mind of not
just what they're doing, but also making sure that there's
a good transition. One of the benefits is i may
be a political appointment, but I worked in civil service
for fifteen plus years, so I'm very experienced and very
(21:49):
aware of kind of the transition. I served under multiple
controllers and multiple mayors, etcetera. You know, where there's a
transition of power that needs to be a smart transition
of good technology. And that's why when we discussed our
list of lists. There's priorities that the Mayor's office provides,
there's priorities that council provides. But then there's also list
of priorities that what we know as tech professionals. And
(22:10):
so no one asked me to implement droople, we did it,
and no one asked me to implement service Now for
ticketing and service management. We did it. These aren't things
that we asked anyone either permission for or their advice on.
Because we knew that this would improve our ability to
be able to roll things out and ask permission for
the cloud. We just started taking hardware refresh and started
reallocating it so that we could start moving workloads up
(22:32):
into the cloud. We have two plus workloads already, a
lot of sas systems and others, and so we're making
that migration. So there are there's a balance of doing
what you're told and doing what you're asked, as well
as trying to do what you know is right and
hopefully you get it right, and if you get it wrong,
you feel fast, you learn, and you migrate to something else.
And so it really is a challenge when it comes
(22:52):
to the long term. So we often are thinking in
the world of one year plans to year plans, three
year plans. We're not really in the world of ten
year plan ends. Smart cities is a bit of a
of a difference. Ce I o s all over the
world have the tough job of trying to explain sometimes
very complicated technologies to different stakeholders in order to get
(23:14):
buy in. Do you have your own approach to this
because you start talking about things and we'll mention more
about in a minute. But like blockchain, for example, that's
one of those topics that if you're not really technologically savvy,
it seems like it's magic. So how do you go
about that. I knew you were going to blockchain with
(23:36):
that one first and foremost. I'm full of analogies, and
I never intend walking into the room to use the analogy,
But next thing you know, it pops off. And I'd
say most of the time it's a pretty good analogy.
Sometimes it's a terrible one. But I was recently in
the budget discussion in which we were discussing, you know,
because of the economy, where we should make cuts, and
the analogy used as I said, listen, if we were
(23:57):
the kind of organization that always bought a new car,
then maybe we can kind of float maintenance for a
while because the car is new and we know it
will last. But if we're an organization, let's say on
server infrastructure, network infrastructure, where we know we have a
lot of old stuff, you can't cut on the money
that you need to keep those things going. And so
I said, so if you have a used car, and
it's been around for seven eight nine years. You don't
(24:18):
eliminate funding that's need to repair that car, because repairs
are going to come up. That's the cost of having
an older car. And so it's just a classic analogy
that a lot of people can identify with because they
know the idea of owning a new car versus owning
a use car and what it means. I just don't
think most folks related to let's say, network infrastructure, and
that's that's the analogy that we used in that one,
(24:39):
and honestly, it just came out spur of the moment.
But I'm full of analogies. When it comes to something
like blockchain. Boy, that's a difficult one because it is
a level of auto magical, you know, solution when it's
all said and done, and so all you're trying to
do is break things. Its classic systems. Now it's break
it into its pieces. You know, how you keep a
record here on this database instead of keeping a record
on this data base that we own. There's a different database,
(25:02):
and it uses a complex algorithm to make it work.
You've seen it with bitcoin. People aren't stealing bitcoin all
the time, So that's how blockchain and effectively work. So
you're taking it, you're really boiling it down. But the
reality is is once you've boiled it down, they'll kind
of understand it. They'll often fact check you a little
bit quite often when it comes to technology. Your reputation
(25:22):
is extremely important, and so they look at you and say, well,
I trusted you on smartphones, and I trusted you on
early early earthquake warning. I'll trust you on this one.
So having a reputation and building a level of trust
with your stakeholders is important because things go wrong. You know,
there's data breaches, there's you know, server failures, there's network outages.
(25:42):
They need to know that you're upstanding, you work hard,
and you're capable before those things happen, so they can
trust you as you're resolving them. There are a couple
of things I really want to talk about. One of
them is how impressed I am at the city's ability
to pivot in the ache of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
being able to go from a more centralized approach where
(26:06):
people are coming to specific buildings in order to do
work to working from home. From my understanding, it sounded
like it was a pretty rapid deployment to go from
one to the other. Can you talk a little bit
about that process? Yes, it was, and I can't help
but smile both out a sense of a great appreciation
for my teams and what was accomplished, and also kind
(26:27):
of a smile of let's not think about how traumatic
the whole experience was, right, but I'll never forget. It
was the end of February two thousand and twenty when
the CDC was saying it's not a matter of if.
But when then we all started to realize it was
going to be a global pandemic. At first, there was
the question of, well, do we take people who are
maybe you know, over sixty five and they tell the
(26:48):
work little do we realize how fast it would become
everybody teleworking for a long time. Um, So what we
did was I sat down with the team. This is
early March, and I said, Okay, we're gonna have to
telework fifteen thousand people. How would we do it. Everyone's
eyes roll and everyone's oscillates, because up until that point,
we really had about thirty five teleworkers in a city
of forty thousand employees. And the initially answer was what
(27:12):
we can take our existing solution and try to scale
it out. But it didn't take but five minutes to
realize that that was a terrible idea. Everyone's gonna unanimously
hate it. I'll never forget. One of our managers says, well, Ted,
they can't expect us to deliver all the functionality they
have at work at home, and I said, oh no,
they expect it. Let let you know, don't don't get
it twisted. The idea of them being sent home and
flailing is not an acceptable answer. So what we did
(27:33):
We worked with cybersecurity network apps folks UH and some others,
and we very quickly were able to stand up a
solution in which we had a very robust remote desktop protocol.
We started to implement strong cybersecurity with two factor and
other things, because we had to stand up identity management,
you know, remote access, a long list of things to
(27:54):
make sure that everyone could access as many apps as
possible from day one. And then lo and behold, March
nine teeth Safer from Home order everyone is sent home.
Within seventy two hours, we had ten thousand people teleworking,
and then about two weeks later we had eighteen thousand
plus people teleworking and there were so many lessons learned
(28:14):
in it. It was so dramatic, so fast, all the
stuff you learned with agile software development, all the stuff
you learned with user center design. We had to do
it and do it very quickly, and most governments don't
do it very quickly, and I think, you know, is
one of our our The fact that we had so
few issues is one of our proudest achievements that will
never forget. Now, having a deeper understanding of Ted's leadership
(28:41):
style and philosophy, I really wanted to dive into what
he thought about emerging and maturing technologies and how the
City of Los Angeles is implementing solutions relying on those technologies.
I'm curious what the City of Los Angeles is doing
(29:01):
along the lines of incorporating absence services in the five
G infrastructure world. Are you exploring that. Yes, absolutely are
huge fans of five G for a number of reasons.
First of all, as a government, our role is to help,
you know, facilitate the deployment to five G and that's
(29:22):
one of those things that directly a city government like
IRIS can implement. So we've already had over two thousand,
five hundred five G access points. We were one of
the first large cities who had five G and we're
in the process of implementing and I say implementing, it's
allowing and facilitating the implementation of five G of of
another three thousand access points in the next three years.
(29:43):
So our ability to fast track permitting to come up
with standardization to keep costs low so that companies can
can implement five G in our urban environment allows it
to be accessible for business as residents and others. So
that's like first and foremost one of the greatest things
government can do is to facilitate the implement notation of it.
But when it comes to our use case of it,
(30:03):
like there's so many great options for it. So you know,
quite often when you have an old city like ours.
Technically our city was found in sevente so you can
imagine we have old street sold sewers, we have a
lot of old infrastructure that just comes with a large,
old urban environment. The idea that five GS wireless, I mean,
once you get your connectivity to the access point, it's
effectively a wireless solution, which means that we can deploy
(30:27):
and you know, we can expand and contract rapidly using
things that are completely wireless. We've had Emmy's and Star
Wars premiers and other things in which five G was
the backbone. You didn't have to go and roll a
bunch of wires out. You already had ubiquitous five G
connectivity up to gigabit speeds, and they could run an
entire venue, rollout VR wirelessly, rollout communications, you know, do
(30:48):
all these huge multimedia aspects that take up a lot
of bandwidth and do so completely wirelessly. But as a
city and as an organization, there's all sorts of use
cases and I honestly I liken it to early Internet.
But when I think about early Internet, I think about
all these all this upside and people not really knowing
what to do with it. But then introduce e commerce,
(31:10):
introduced social media, introduced these use cases that take this
technology that had these you know blue background, yellow text,
you know HTML, you know websites that someone goes, what's
the benefit of this the to then now have these
you know, rocking and rolling organizations completely built on it.
So I think a five D that way, And for
the city of l A, you know, great example comes
(31:31):
down to things like you know, sanitation, trucks. We have
sanitation trucks in which we've added cameras, and those cameras
can actually pan. So if you imagine a sanitation truck
drives the entire city every week, there's a sanitation truck
driven picking up people's trash cans, covering probably eighty to
nine of the city. So instead of me waiting for
a resident to tell me that there's graffiti on the wall,
(31:52):
what if the sanitation truck camera could identify it for me? Right, So,
instead of this poll approach, what about a push approach
to city services that's transformational. And you know it's not
just transformational, it has tremendous effect on equity. So we
often know that like disadvantage, neighborhoods are less likely to
tell the government that they have graffiti or they have
a pothole, etcetera. Well, why wait for them? Why why
(32:14):
always benefit the you know, the wealthier communities who are
very aggressive and very you know, I love to advocate
for the neighborhood. Why to identify the pothole, identify the
graffiti using computer vision? Office sanitation truck you know, connected
to the cloud through five G where I'm moving mass
amounts of data, but I'm leveraging machine learning and AI
(32:34):
to be able to do the type of computer vision
required to make sure that that is truly graffiti and
not something else, and do so in a secure way
where I'm not violating people's privacy. Those are the kinds
of things that five G starts to enable. And that's
a look up part of the expression. That's a badass
concept for a city to be able to actually unilaterally
understand where its issues are and be able to start
(32:56):
to assign those resources without a resident ever having to
complain or tell you about it. Oh, absolutely, you don't. Again,
you don't think of city government as necessarily being proactive
in those cases, it's usually reactive. So having technology enable
the ability to be proactive, to start to address problems
before perhaps anyone even has the opportunity to report that
there is a problem that is transformational. And previously you
(33:20):
you mentioned the Olympics and how that had a big
role in the the early implementation of technologies that changed
how traffic management is done in the city of Los Angeles.
I imagine that means that we're going to see a
lot more technological innovation than how high band frequency five
G can deliver such incredible experiences and to me, the
(33:45):
Olympics would be the one of the perfect places to
really showcase what that technology can do. Is that something
that the city has been looking at as well? Absolutely?
Um Now, I'll put in a disclaimer. Every Summer Olympics
says that we are the most technologically advanced Summer Olympics
to date. And of course because every four years technology moves,
(34:07):
so yes, they set it back, you know, in ninety six,
they'll say it in two thousand and twenty eight. But
with that being said, if you think about the year
two thousand and twenty eight, you're thinking about a time
frame in which autonomous vehicles will have much more traction,
five G will be ubiquitous, augmented reality, virtual reality, you know, AI,
machine learning, all these technologies will have had not just
(34:29):
been introduced, but have much more maturity. So I really
do expect the two thousand Olympics to be something completely
next level. And so what do you see it. We
see it in two areas. One area is actually running
the Olympics itself, is creating this fantastic experience for the
people who fly in. Let's say you fly into l
a X, you are have a concier service that helps
(34:50):
you get to your hotel. It helps you get two restaurants.
You're being pushed coupons if you're so interested, so they
could help incentivize going to one restaurant over another. You're,
you know, doing your tourism. You've got this complete digital
experience to help you navigate a large city of four
and sixty nine square miles as well as get you
two and from your venues, contactless payment, single payment methods
(35:11):
that whether using Uber or a city bus, you can
use the same app to be able to make those
things happen. So there's a long list of these tremendous
benefits that helped the event itself. But I have to
hand it to Mayor Eric Garcetti, and he said, listen,
it's not just about the event itself, because that comes
over the matter of a few short for weeks. It's
really about the legacy that's left after the Olympics. After
(35:33):
the Olympics, most folks don't know that the Amateur Athletic
Foundation created this this grant in which something like almost
a million youth have had free youth sports because of
the money that was invested in and came out of
the Olympics. And so you know, eight hundred thousand plus people,
including many of which young girls who are traditionally often
(35:53):
aren't incorporated into youth sports, have had these tremendous opportunities.
So when we look at the Olympics, we're not just
folks on the Olympics themselves, but what is the legacy
that we leave. What is the infrastructure, the fiber optic infrastructure,
the five G infrastructure, the applications, the digital concierge, these
things that we can use for the Olympics, But unlike
some other countries, we don't just abandon it right after
(36:16):
the Olympics are over, but we continue to parlay that.
That's a great answer to that question. I live in Atlanta,
so I look at the Olympics and how that helped
transform the city I live in, and I think about
the technology we have today and how that could have
been such an enormous boon to the city both during
(36:39):
the Olympics and beyond, and it just makes me wish
that we had been further along. But now we live
in a different world where we do we just we
get those constant notifications that we can act on and
we can implement and have that make an impact in
our lives. So I find this truly exciting, and I
love the fact that you're talking about infrastructure does have
(37:00):
utility beyond a truly phenomenal event. I don't want to
downplay the Olympics, but something that has utility beyond just
those couple of weeks in a summer, So that's very exciting. Yeah,
I'd say it's good to deliver good technology for the event,
but it's great to deliver technology that service the event
(37:20):
and services over four million people or over forty eight
million visitors thereafter. And when you work in government, I'm
a taxpayer. I don't want to spend money on something
that's throw away. That's not how government needs to operate.
I need to be able to incorporate things that really
will provide utility and value because people are paying their
taxes for it. We all know that in the world
(37:42):
of tech, there's always one more thing. So here's the
one more thing. I wanted to ask ted Ross, what's
the best piece of advice you would share to your peers.
I would say, you know, understand your government, nderstand your organization,
and then understand what private sector is doing with technology
(38:04):
and then make that that crosswalk. There's so many great
things that private sector companies are doing with technology, and
it's not because they have a bunch of money. It's
because they understand, they get it, they have a philosophy,
they understand what technology means and what and what it
means to be digital. So cross apply that into government
and you don't have to bring their budgets with you.
You can leverage a lot of things they do that
are actually pretty low cost. So that would be my
(38:25):
advice to my colleagues. Ted, thank you so much for
your time and your expertise. I greatly appreciate my pleasure,
thank you for having me, and I hope that folks
listening to it find these kinds of topics interesting. One
thing I have come to appreciate as I've had the
(38:46):
chance to speak with tech leaders in business is how
valuable communication skills are when it comes to doing your
job effectively. Yes, you need a good eye for technology.
You need to be able to envision new approaches to
old problems. You need to be able to pivot quickly
when issues arise. But you also have to do all
(39:06):
of this while maintaining delicate connections between different departments, divisions, executives,
and customers. Those are lessons that apply across the board,
no matter what sort of organization we're looking at. Thank
you for tuning into the restless ones. Be sure to
subscribe to the show, as we will be having conversations
(39:28):
with forward thinking leaders throughout the year, learning what makes
them tick and what it's like to lead in a
world that is in a constant state of change and evolution.
I've been your host, Jonathan Strickland. These days, new ways
(39:48):
of working have become the norm, and the status quo
no longer cuts it when it comes to helping businesses
evolve and grow. That's why Team Mobile for Business uses
unconventional thinking to help businesses see ease innovation only. T
Mobile offers America's largest and fastest five gene network, which
makes their new WFX solutions possible, letting businesses stay connected
(40:10):
and productive where work happens. See what T Mobile for
Business can do for you at t mobile dot com.
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Report January. Capable device required converts on available in some areas,
Some users may require certain Planner feature see t mobile
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