Tanya Hannah – CIO – King County, WA
Video Transcript
Ryan James:
Hello and welcome to The 3rd Question, a video interview series with public sector thought-leaders from around the country. Today, I am excited to be joined by Tanya Hannah. Hannah Hannah. I want to make sure I get it right.
Tanya Hannah:
Oh, it's Hannah. Just like...
Ryan James:
Hannah. Okay. So Tanya Hannah, the CIO of King County, Washington. And Tanya, thank you so much for joining me for a few questions today.
Tanya Hannah:
Oh, thank you so much, Ryan. Excited to be here.
Ryan James:
Awesome. Well, before we get into our three questions, why don't you give the audience just a quick introduction of who you are, your role there at the county, and also a little bit about the county itself.
Tanya Hannah:
King County, Washington is actually the 12th largest county in the United States. Seattle is the center and we have about 2.3 million residents here. It's an area that is headquartered for 10 of some of the most recognizable brands in the world, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Starbucks.
Ryan James:
Awesome. And how long have you been at the county?
Tanya Hannah:
I've been at the county now going on five years.
Ryan James:
Okay. Have you always done public sector? Have you done private sector?
Tanya Hannah:
No. My background is actually private sector. This is my first role in public sector.
Ryan James:
All right. Well, I love that because I'm sure you have some really good insights into the ying and yang that is public and private sectors. Some very big differences there. All right, let's get into our questions. My first question probably will speak to these two different worlds. Innovation and the public sector they don't always go hand in hand, or thought of as going hand in hand, but I would say that probably from my conversations that I've had with, I'm sure a lot of your peers, the past 18 months due to COVID has seen a lot of major changes, kind of be forced around digital transformation. Sometimes I've heard they very welcomed that those changes were forced as well. Let me ask you this. How would you describe some of the areas that King County we're able to make quick and needed changes due to COVID? And then I guess, secondarily, how excited are you looking to the future of maybe innovative ideas around your organization itself?
Tanya Hannah:
It's funny. The pandemic really has been the best chief innovation officer for public sector, as well as private sector and non-profit organizations. What has been great particularly for government is really this emergence of the, any time, anywhere, any device, #connectedgovernment, which really is focused on meeting residents, businesses, and even our employees where they're at. During the pandemic with office locations closed and employees, many of whom were working remotely that, didn't stop government services from really having to be delivered, right. Individuals we're still looking for information and assistance and I think that's where technology played such an important role in keeping government open for business. Here in the county, there were three areas that really accelerated with the pandemic. One area was just around our omni-channel engagement, really using artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing across, phone, web, video, SMS text messaging, digital assistance, and other areas to really ensure that the information individuals were looking for or the services that they needed access to, that could still happen.
Tanya Hannah:
Another area that I think really grew was in business resiliency, whether it's our use in public private clouds, with express routes, thinking about the cloud productivity and collaboration capabilities, with video conferencing, to really connect employees and employees to those services that they were delivering. Because whether you're trying to help courts continue to operate or people looking for permits or just public health information, cloud helped. Expand that.
Tanya Hannah:
Then the other area that I think was also very big was really around automation, whether it was the digitizing of paper processes, using robotic process automation to really help improve services and combining things with automation, with collaborative and productivity tools to really change the experience for individuals, I think has been really, really exciting to see. I also think it's important to highlight that the strategic partnerships that we have with vendors, I mean the vendor community has been fantastic in the way that they stepped up to help governments, mine and others, really innovate. What's exciting about public sector is I think there's a lot of sharing of knowledge, of best practices, of information and even technology being used and how it's implemented so that you're helping across the board, whether it's smaller organizations or even larger. I think that is exciting to see.
Ryan James:
That's part of the reason we do this is to share some of the ideas and things that are going on with one organization that might help another. I have seen that collaboration, but I want to ask a followup to something you said. You talked about the public and private cloud. And I know that probably over the last 10 years, you've seen a quicker adoption to the public cloud by public sector.
Tanya Hannah:
Yes.
Ryan James:
There was a hesitancy of that for quite a while. They had their IT centers and their servers, and they'd invested a lot of money in doing things in-house. Where do you see that going? As you know, you look at your county, but you talk to your peers around that public cloud adoption and what do you see are the biggest benefits around that?
Tanya Hannah:
Well, I think there are several with our endpoints all over the place, this 24x7 connection to government, not only services but information, you will continue to see the rapid adoption of cloud and we're moving away from a CAPEX model to more of this OPEX model. I think the ability to iterate faster and deliver faster occurs with cloud, but I want to caution that I don't think cloud will eliminate all private cloud data center types.
Ryan James:
Yup.
Tanya Hannah:
It's a tool in our toolkit that we will deploy based upon the solutions that we need to deliver on behalf of our business partners.
Ryan James:
Yep. That makes perfect sense and I agree with you. I have seen an adoption when appropriate is for different areas for that quick iteration of improvement for a lot of areas. Alright. My second question comes around some of the challenges that public sector IT have in general. Obviously, it doesn't matter if we're in a good economy, a bad economy, whatever, budget allocation is always a challenge, no matter what. Taxpayer dollars and how they're being used. But I increasingly hear, especially when it comes to IT, around the talent challenge as well. You said it yourself in your backyard, you've got some of the most recognizable IT groups in the world like Microsoft and Amazon. Would you add anything else maybe to some of those challenges between budget and talent? And can you talk to me maybe a little bit about the ways you've tried to address some of those issues as an organization?
Tanya Hannah:
Funding is always a challenge and attracting and retaining talent is another. You that we don't talk about often enough is around procurements and how we acquire solutions, whether what types of contract vehicles may be available to organizations particularly smaller governments, nonprofits, and things like that, and how you can get access to great technology to help because the procurement process for government can take months to years. One of the barriers that got removed during the pandemic was we got the ability to procure faster. I think our business partners within our organizations really benefit when we can streamline their procurement process to acquire solutions that help further whatever goals or priorities we're all working on. I think what we're going to see in the future around just budgets.
Tanya Hannah:
The good side of the pandemic, it's highlighted how important technology is and technology doesn't have to be expensive. It can be on the cheaper end. What we're going to see is people expanding their toolkits and the vendors that they work with to try to help fill in gaps in areas where service delivery may be weaker. It's also highlighted our cyber challenges. As we've seen recently with the attacks on critical infrastructure, it certainly highlights the privacy risk we all face because we have a lot of sensitive data that people find attractive.
Tanya Hannah:
It also means how we have to up skill our teams and how we think about our solutions and really focusing end to end around the data and how do we protect and secure systems. How do we assess risk? Not only our own internal risk from our employees and our teams, but also from our vendors in how we address that. I think risk management is going to go higher on the list when we're assessing what to buy, what to implement and how do we train, up skill our teams to be, I want to say, utilize standard work processes to make sure we're not accidentally exposing information, how quickly we apply patches or not...
Ryan James:
Right. Right.
Tanya Hannah:
If it's in your supply chain. So I think it's an exciting time, and these are so many opportunities for our teams to do just great work. I'm excited about the work my team is doing in all of these areas. And I think we're going to see more of it.
Ryan James:
Yeah. The long-term impacts of some of these changes are going to be huge in a positive way, hopefully.
Tanya Hannah:
Yes.
Ryan James:
Depending on some of those you're right, that risk management needs to be maybe prioritized a little higher than it has been in the past, but I want to ask about prioritization. One of the things that I always hear is, or have the question around is how do you prioritize the budget? Because budget is finite. And I think COVID forced budget spend because you just had to make sure everyone was connected at home. But when you're doing an investment in a new priority or goal, how do you as a IT group, but I guess probably there's a big team as well, depending on what department you're helping support, how are those prioritizations made? Is it always ROI? Is it need? Is it a mix? I'm always curious to hear that.
Tanya Hannah:
You know what, it's a mixture. Because we work for elected officials, that certainly have their priorities that we need to align to. It's also about our business partners, whether it's public health, transportation, those working in environment, or just general government, they have priorities that you need to align to. And then there's the tech, the whole infrastructure that's supporting it also needs to be in alignment. In the county, we utilize all of those factors to really work on where should we make investments. How do you close the gap, your technical debt. Because a lot of times it's probably easier to do new, retire older systems, then to do a retrofit. Every organization is different, but I think the underlying basics remain the same where you're trying it's a balance.
Ryan James:
Yeah.
Tanya Hannah:
As newer technology comes out, it allows you to rethink your business processes. It allows you to rethink the way that you may have implemented a solution three years ago. It may change. You're constantly having to evaluate, and if you can make the business case that this supports all of the areas, hopefully in harmony, like it helps tech. It helps elected officials. It helps the businesses do what they need to do on an operational level. I think you have much more success and really attracting funding. Nobody wants to pay for technology for technology's sake. If no one thinks it's going to benefit them and help further the mission, improve service delivery, people will tend to walk away. But I also think it's an opportunity to be able to share what are you doing and what are easier ways? Because those with money probably have a much larger ability to do things that some smaller organizations don't, but by sharing and talking about it, you can actually get ideas that maybe your team hasn't thought of yet.
Ryan James:
Right. We're at the third question and this we're kind of in a good segue, cause we're talking about budgets and money and all that good stuff. I have a blank check for King County. Well, it's an infinity number, so it's not quite blank. It's infinity dollars. As nice as that would be in a perfect world or in an ideal world where I was able to hand you a blank check that could be used to make changes, improvements. It might eliminate certain deficits. It might be investing in certain technology and people, teams, et cetera. If I handed that to you, Tanya, what would you do it for and why?
Tanya Hannah:
There's two things I would do. One is swag bags for my amazing team. They have worked so hard over the past 18 months. Their efforts to keep county operations going has been phenomenal, and it would probably be filled up with some great latest iPhones We have a lot of gamers. Got to add some gaming in there, music and just...
Ryan James:
It'd be some Oscar like swag.
Tanya Hannah:
Absolutely. High level swag, because they are just amazing and food since we would love to have parties there. Then the other thing that I think is still an issue and as we talk about moving to digital, we can't forget that not everybody has access to digital, even for government. There are hard to reach communities and things like that, and I believe investment in digital literacy and broadband services and in devices would help large communities, rural communities. Because to build that back haul infrastructure is expensive. The pandemic accelerated digital, and that's something that we cannot forget. And then if somebody money left over, I guess we could always take a ride to space.
Ryan James:
Well, they're, they're starting to try and do that right now if you watch the news recently.
Tanya Hannah:
Yes.
Ryan James:
Awesome. Well, listen, that was the three questions and I appreciate the short amount of time that we can spend with you today. It's always exciting to talk to thought leaders, especially on the technology side, because that's been my life for over a decade now. And just to hear the transformation that's going on in the public sector space, it's exciting. It is exciting to see those things really starting to percolate and happen. So thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. I wish you guys the best in this. You just started a new fiscal year. I'm sure. So thank you. And I hope you have a great day.
Tanya Hannah:
Oh Ryan. This has been a such a blast.
