Join us as thought leaders from Ohio agencies and the business community discuss their high-level vision and day-to-day objectives in adopting new technologies to revolutionize government IT.
Tanium Podcast Finished
Corey Baumgartner 00:00
Welcome back to Carahcast the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Corey Baumgartner, your host from the Carahsoft production team. On behalf of Carahsoft and Tanium, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around technology innovation in government. Michael Farrar, CIO of the city of Westerville, Ohio, Jonathan Reich, CIO of the city of Dayton, Ohio. And Chris Cruz, CIO of public sector from Tanium will provide insight on how agencies can meet current and future needs using innovative technologies.
Jane 00:38
Great to be here in Columbus. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you all today and introduce you to our incredible panelists to talk about technology, which is probably my favorite topic in the entire world. You can't pick up a magazine or a newspaper, without seeing the story about at least right now AI, but technology is driving our future. And it's I had a colleague from my former employer, Accenture, say to me, you know, in the future, we'll all be technologists first and then specialists later, and I laughed at him at the time. But now, now that it seems to be coming true, I'm not laughing anymore. So thank you all for being here to share this incredible topic, all of these incredible topics. The technology revolution has reshaped consumer markets all over the world. And it's also working here in the state of Ohio and for state and local governments as well. As many of you know, the state of Ohio State, local and educational organizations are moving, moving quickly to integrate innovative technologies that can drive better decision making, while lowering the cost of ownership for IT systems, incorporating new technologies and creating opportunities to reimagine the future workforce for both the public and private sectors. Guiding Ohio's transformation is the Department of Administrative Services IT innovation technology strategic plan. It focuses on digital experience, data analytics, enterprise shared services, on premise or in public clouds and collaboration. The strategic plan identifies five priorities, cybersecurity, and risk management, digital services and digital government data management and analytics, identity and access management and the workforce to deliver on these priorities. The innovate Ohio platform provides integrated scalable capabilities that enable agencies to become more user centric, and data driven. And that's what our gentlemen that are here with me in the podium are going to talk about today and also our guests is going to join us virtually so we'll hear from them in just a second. innovation in technology is driving a more streamline citizens experience, as well as establishing data integration for better decision making, and lowering the cost of ownership of it for agencies in Ohio, where they're supporting more citizen web portals, refining emergency response, we're applying for licenses online agencies in Ohio are using innovation as a tool for change. So let me introduce our changemakers. Joining us is Michael Farrar, Chief Information Officer city of Westerville, Ohio. Thanks for joining us. John Reich is Chief Information Officer city of Dayton, Ohio, John and Chris Cruz. Can you hear me, Chris?
Chris Cruz 03:26
I can hear you. Thank you.
Jane 03:27
It's great. I can hear you, Chief Information Officer for public sector at Tanium. He'll be with us virtually, of course. So let's start with questions for you, Michael McCann, as the Chief Information Officer for the City of Westerville. Please talk about some of your recent use cases, incorporating innovative technologies to improve user experience for citizens in the workforce.
Michael McCann 03:50
Thank you, Jane, and fed insider, for helping set up this event. It's an actual, very much an honor and a privilege to be here to speak to you today. So how are we using innovation to in technology to bridge the gap between our citizens and our workforce, we like to try and engage with our citizens as much as possible and create transparency between the services that we deliver and making sure that our citizens can know that we're being heard. So one of the things that we like to do is, is provide them the tools to communicate with us. And one of the ways we're doing that, we use a solution called tell Westerville and go Westerville which are web pages and apps, where citizens can go ahead and actually put in work orders and report issues, maybe a miss trash collection or maybe there's a repair that needs to be made. They can do it from their phone and they can go ahead and they could take a picture pull exact GPS coordinates of where the location is. So they can go ahead and report directly to the people that matter getting this stuff taken care of. So that empowers our staff because As we use a solution called City works on the back end, which then logs on, report the ticket and reports everything out, and work orders can be set out to people in the field live. So while we have a group out work, and maybe sidewalk repairs, if we get a ticket that's raised by a resident, and they're in the area, they can quickly go and respond to that. So we're returning, we're shortening the time that we actually engage with the resident to get that, that that problem resolved, and giving them a higher quality of service in life. So it's been very popular with our citizens. And they, they love to engage with us on it, especially when they miss their trash. So that's, that's one example. Another thing we've noticed is cellular signal is degrading in the area. Because of everybody's moving to 5g. Everybody has a smart device that has a cell connection. And with a popular areas, our historic downtown, we call uptown Westerville. It can be sometimes hard to actually get connected, and us being technologists who doesn't want to be connected these days. So we are low, we are really lucky in the fact that we have our own data center as a utility called we connect, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But we actually provide public Wi Fi by we connect to our visitors, our residents and to city staff. So they're always connected, we don't have to worry about any kind of challenges with any cellular signals, we can go ahead and we can make sure that we're delivering the services and our staff are always being connected. So quicker response times for everyone. And the final thing I was going to touch on was, we were unique in the sense that we have our own electricity division, and also water division. And our electricity division uses a application called SCADA, which monitors the entirety of the electricity network. And we've been able to go ahead and add in reporting features to this, that when we see an outage or an issue, it automatically generates a ticket, it also generates an email, and we're a Google shop. So it also creates a Google Chat. It provides the location of the outage, the address and actual aerial image. And we start actually knowing about the outage and are able to start troubleshooting or even rolling trucks before the customer even calls us. So that response time to actual resolution time and getting the power back on for that resident is, is unprecedented. And it's one of the reasons why we have one of the highest ranked electricity groups in the region. So that's just a couple of things I could go on for hours, because I'm super excited about everything. But I want to give John and Chris the opportunity to have a few things as well. So thank you,
Jane 07:59
that's very impressive. I'm sure that you're getting good scores from your, from constituents on citizen engagement. Yes,
Michael McCann 08:06
yeah, we do get very, very high scores, we've, we're always surveying our public to ask how we can do better. And they've been rating us in our last public approval rating was in the 90 percentile range. So actually pretty good, better than some of the larger, more popular brands out there. And I won't shame anybody,
Jane 08:27
and probably a lot better than the federal government is receiving right now. And it's citizen services. So congrats to you. Thank you. All right. And John, want to hear from you, City of Dayton, little bit bigger city. But talk to us about how you're managing IT systems and solutions that are that support internal operations and customer services, like cloud services, cybersecurity applications.
John Reich 08:50
Well, I'm only half joking on this mostly hope and prayer, right? Because I don't think that it's ever been harder to be a leader of municipal it. We're in an environment of ever increasing demands for our services or in our technology. But we're also in an environment where our costs are going up. But our revenues are pretty flat. And so that creates quite a challenge for a lot of us and specifically in Ohio, because we're no different than Westerville in the fact that we rely on income tax for our general fund. And so if the income tax isn't coming in and work from home has had a tremendous impact on that, we've got to do more with less. And I'm sure that the theme that you all have heard for a very, very long time. But having said that, at City of Dayton, we have 17 unique departments that are very unique in their needs, and their business models, everything from a municipal airport, to a water utility that not only supplies water to the Dayton municipality, but also to Montgomery County as a whole. And so, you know, you've got to understand and spend some time with those businesses to understand their direction and their aspirations. But ultimately, I think it comes down to four things because there are themes here that are critically important. I think the first is communication both internally and externally. Right, because if I'm not spending the time with my business leaders hearing their pain hearing they're they're out aspirations. I'm unable to connect them technologically. I think the other thing, and it's a great reference to this event today, and thank you, Jane, for having me appreciate it is that you have to, you know, and I wouldn't use this analogy with my wife, but have one foot in one foot out, right? I mean by that is that, you know, I've got to be focused on operations. But I also have to get out in network and create relationships with people that are doing things that may be ahead of where I am. And, Mike, when I were talking prior to this session, Westerville has done some really, you know, I think our creative initiatives around conduit and conduit leasing, and that's a tremendous opportunity to generate revenue for your municipality. For us that would be innovative for them that standard operations, right. So I think as municipalities, sometimes we can't be insecure about where we are in, in our path in front of us. And so that's important. So communication internally and externally, collaboration is critically important. And it's not just inside the house anymore. How many of us are super dependent on vendors right now? Right. And that relationship with those vendors is critical for your success. And you don't have full control over those vendors. It's not like you're writing their performance plans at the end of the year. We talk a lot about integration, right? So as we manage some of the technology stack that we have at City of Dayton, when people are making proposals or or suggesting acquisitions, one of the things I'm always looking at, how does this impact our IT ecosystem as a whole, right? Because that business division may have an aspiration may have a need, may have a direction that they want to go down. But can we sustain it and support it? And one of the things I've been telling my staff is simplicity is the new complexity, right? Let's make this environment as simplistic as we possibly can, because then you can sustain that advancing growing. I think the last thing is optimization. How many people work in myopic environments where divisions don't think about other divisions, they procure technology without any thought about how that might play across the rest of the city. And so I look at myself almost like a traffic cop, so to speak, right? And so my job is to understand where each of the departments and the divisions are trying to go, and where might there be technology within our stack that they could utilize to get there, I'll give you a great example. As an IT shop, we recently procured an ITSM tool that's here based in Columbus called team dynamics. Well, team dynamics is predominantly used for ITSM. But it can do a lot of different service management. And so our city manager's office was tired of not having any complete records around citizen complaints. And so they had that need I was in, I happen to be in a meeting with our city leadership. And I said, Well, have you ever thought about using this tool, we already have it, it's functional, it's no code, it's easy to set up. And lo and behold, now they're using team dynamics to track citizen complaints. But I'm all those those things would would be meaningless without the most important thing. And that's all reason I get to sit here today. And that's because my, the team, the team, the team, right? So if you don't have a great team, you can execute, you can be great at communication, you can be good at collaboration, you can understand integration, you can understand optimization, but it won't matter. Right? So in the three, almost three years that I've been at the City of Dayton, my biggest focus, beyond keeping my leadership happy, obviously, is the team. How do you build a team and a municipal government that's really, really hard, right? Because you've got power structures, you've got culture, you've got resistance. And so as you bring in new ideas, you've got to manage that effectively. Because what those new ideas do for your your folks that have been there for a while, it makes them very uneasy, very nervous, right, because they're used to what they've always done. And so as you're introducing change through new employees and new ideas, you've got to be sensitive to that manage the culture as it grows with those new employees with the new direction of the department. And so those are the ways that I try to keep it in alignment, I'm not gonna lie it at times it goes out of line. Right? And that's why you have to have governance. And that's a whole nother topic that
Jane 13:48
we could spend all day on. But but that change management piece that you're talking about? Is that a formal? Is that something formal that you do within the department? Or is it something that's more informal, because you know, that has to happen in order to make an effective change?
John Reich 14:01
You know, I think if you spend enough time with your people, you don't have to formalize it, right? Because you know, where they are you spend enough time understanding where they sit today, where they want to be tomorrow, and how you help them get there. Because a lot of times people are willing to buy into something if they see the value for them. Right? If I'm just asking you to do stuff, and they don't see anything that's in it for them, they may do it because I they are beholden to a performance evaluation. But are they going to do the thing that my mom used to call in YOP? That really separates the good from the great, and that's that discretionary effort. And we see it all the time. You see it throughout your status, right? Yeah, some people are gonna do a little extra, you have some that won't. But I think those that do extra are the ones that are engaged and feel like there's something they're getting out of it. Right. And so that's a really important piece of it.
Jane 14:42
Thanks very much. These are great answers, really appreciate it. So let's go to Chris now Chris, Chief Information Officer public sector at Tanium. There are increasing expectations as you heard John just discuss no to provide services on par with the private sector, which we know they spent a lot more money Then the government does, given that resources are limited, how can state local education organizations that you work with balance the need for security and compliance with the demand for agility and speed?
Chris Cruz 15:12
First of all, Jane, thank you. It's an honor to be here and serve on the panel with Carahsoft. And thank you for facilitating this effort with both Michael and John. And I think they both hit the nail on the head in terms of comprehensive planning leads to success and what they're doing with their organizations. I understand that pretty well. I spent 31 years in public sector government, managing as a CIO with the County deputy state CIO or in California, and state CIO jobs and health care, transportation and public health. So understand the opportunities, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and where you need to go for what I call constituent engagement. I think what we're seeing is a real paradigm shift. And John mentioned this, the importance today of public private partnerships and government. I know when I was a CIO, I relied a lot on the vendor community to help me fulfill be a part of my team, so to speak, to help us address those particular efficiencies and effectiveness in government. So I agree with him wholeheartedly on that approach. When you talk when it comes to information security, I think the biggest opportunity we have to have is look at a common governance structure and framework for security. Today, in a lot of our state, county, and even at the local level, sometimes we have a central network with a lot of Federation on top of it. So it's very important that we have incident response plans in place coop cog plans, a security processes and procedures that are level, set it at an expectation level with governance led by the CIO, the CIO, and also your department heads as well buying into the plan. Because what I found Jane and government and what I see today in my role as CIO at Tanium is security is everybody's responsibility. And you need to be able to bake that into all your innovation, your transformational Capabilities and Competencies moving forward. So again, starting with good corporate governance, having a cybersecurity strategy in place, the lines, how you get to that growth level of maturity, is really important, setting those expectations with your staff and folks of that particular manner to make sure what gets managed gets measured, you know, having a single platform effort for efficiencies that connects automation of your other tools into that so you can get real time data reporting, and address risk within your organization. I think they're ever most important issue as well as the CIO and the Cisco need to be hooked at the hip. Now, in today's environment, they can't be off buying tools on their own recognizance, they need to pull their procurement processes together and centralize that strategy that I spoke to. I think that all that being said, too, is making sure that you have a Zero Trust framework in place. We've talked about identity and access management and how important that is. So having a way to authenticate users that are coming into these portals where we're driving innovation and complete competency is extremely important, ensuring that the attack vector that we have today, out of all of these endpoints where people are logging in from anywhere, anytime, anyplace, it's very important that those authentication methods align with the security structure and strategy that you have. And that's also communicated with your application and cloud folks as well. So building those structures, application infrastructure, places in place are extremely important, and rolling out success in today's particular environment. And last but not least, having, again, a standard strategy outside of security, but a technology strategy. So as you innovate, you bring in AI, you bring in other innovative and transformational applications, or Internet of Things that you have an application security layer baked into all of those applications. I know from experience, when I took my count, last county job before I retired, we had a an innovation and transformation team. And they were doing awesome work or developing portals and ways that our constituents can pay their property taxes and things of that nature online. But what we found is they didn't bake an application security layer component into those open source apps. And we weren't patching those on a regular basis. So those are the types of vulnerabilities that you want to manage up front. And I believe that the most comprehensive way to do things with tools and integration of tools, because there's not a one size fits all. It's do the planning upfront because I believe comprehensive planning leads to success when looking at a sec ops approach that we're talking about here to drive innovation and transformation, but also lay out and mitigate your risk as you move forward. And that's very important in today's attack vector that we have in the way that cyber hackers are looking at getting into any unlocked door into your particular systems. I would also advocate that the state the cities and counties work together the sounds like in Ohio, they have a common strategy on how you get there from here and following those particular dots and taking a very realistic approach on your roadmap before you roll out applications to ensure those security components are in place. So I know that's a lot to be said. But I think the security piece needs to be more upfront and applications that folks buy in to make sure that there's common standards upfront in those policies, that those are also baked into your procurements you know whether it's NIST 800 Dash 53 FedRAMP or state around compliance where applicable for pH i and PII data components, that all needs to Be upfront. So whatever purchase acquisition you make in terms of the cloud technology and application, make sure that that's baked in, and that you have the necessary security reviews within your organization. As you move forward.
Jane 20:11
I like that baked in, not bolted on. Thanks very much. And that's a very important piece of this. Our last panel, as you probably know, from looking at your agenda, we'll be addressing cybersecurity and security issues. So let's continue Michael, back to you. Tell us how Westerville is using data for Applied analytics and customizing citizen experiences using a feedback model. Just like you talked about, my trash has been picked up, I want to pick it up like yesterday, and then using data to improve services.
Michael McCann 20:44
So one thing that, you know, I really resonated with what John said was about, you know, taking complexity and making it more simple and making sure that your your systems are talking to one another. And they're communicating and providing data across functionally. So everything can work together more collaboratively, really resonated, because that's one of the things we've been trying to continuously improve on. And one way we've done that for our citizens is we've created a page called our transparency hub. So it is a page that you can go out. And you can take a look at finances and how the government's currently spending against the current budget. There's information about the utilities and how we're performing against what our constituents are also performing against, where we can also take a look at the police and see how we're faring for any of our any police stops or any kind of crime rate that's happening in the Westerville. So making information accessible to our residents to keep them informed is one of the key drivers that Westerville has been trying to deliver. And so when we deliver that information, they come to our city council meetings, and they tell us, hey, we have more concerns. And an example of this was parking in our uptown area. So uptown is a very historic area. And it's it's got some limited parking areas on the main streets, but it's very popular to come in for our fourth Friday events or other events that are happening in town. And they were saying we don't have enough parking, we can't get there. So we need to build a parking structure. And so we said, alright, well, let's take a look and see what we can what kind of data we can pull on this. So we partnered with a company called fiber that put parking centers and all the municipal parking areas in the Uptown area. And we started gathering the data monitoring it looking for peaks and also where there was congestion. And where there was there were any issues. And we found that there was a certain couple areas that were very, very popular, and other areas that were extremely underutilized, just right around the corner. So we went ahead, and we made a campaign to actually provide that information to the residents. And the argument or the up in arms to get a parking garage quickly went away because parking became readily available and everybody was happy. So that's a really great way that we've used utilize that transparency, health and data to, to engage with our citizens. Another way from a public safety perspective, we, we were a couple of years ago, there was a perception that Westerville wasn't a safe place. There, there was a lot of videos of people riding on quad bikes up and down loud music being disruptive, and it was all like seem to be in the Westerville area. So our citizens raised that to our city council and we started monitoring and being able to highlight where there was actually police matters that were taking place, how we were addressing them what was going on and what and we were able to ease their perception into actually we are much below what you know, our neighbors are at from a crime rate we are identifying these and taking care of them. And being able to mitigate this by using the data that we capture to say these are the problem areas, these are where people are congregating. And, and we're able to go ahead and disperse that. So it went back to the citizen saying that actually being in Westerville is a very safe community to live in. And through the efforts of our amazing police force. And you know, they they are amazing, and they keep doing great and awesome things, but hearing that the concerns of our citizens, that really, really helps us derive the messages that we provide. Can I
Jane 24:34
ask how that feedback loop happens? So once you get the information, and then obviously it's sent to other people in your organization, how do they communicate that to the citizens or how do they respond? Do they do they wait for a meeting or is their press release sent out? Or what's the communication between government and citizens? So
Michael McCann 24:52
we do it through multiple different methods. One obviously as a city council meeting, we actually have Westerville TV which is our own television channel, which we broadcast all of our city council meetings so people can watch from home. They can also we stream the meetings as well. So they can go to a specific agenda item, they can come and attend in person. The one one of the other things we do is we have a local publication. It's a magazine that we produce every twice a month about what's going on in Westerville. And we highlight initiatives that have been raised things that we've done findings, we also, we put things out on our website, and we do reach out through social media. And we highlight the findings of some of our studies as well. So we try and come up with any possible way to engage and get that feedback and make it as easy for anyone who's, you know, 18, with a mobile phone to who's in their 70s or 80s. And they want to come and sit and talk to a council member after a council meeting or raise the issue directly with counsel and open session. So we want to be as open and engaged as we possibly can. I love
Jane 26:02
it. I think it's great. More communication, the better as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. Thank you very much, John, let's turn to you. So in Dayton, you have some pretty impressive neighbors, people like the Air Force Research Lab, University of Dayton Research Institute, and technology first. So how do you work with them? Or foster a culture of innovation with with people who are already in the business of innovating?
John Reich 26:28
You know, Jay, when you sent that question over, I got stuck on it as a two part question, right? Because one of the things that I think is somewhat true is this perception of government and its reluctance to engage in innovation, right? Because I think inherently government is about risk mitigation. Right? And what is it? What is innovation? Inherently? It involves risk, right. And so I think that when I when I looked at that question, I sat and I pondered, how do we in government, whether it's state, federal, local, what have you how do we be more innovative with our approach, and obviously, collaborations are a big piece of that. But I was down in Cincinnati last weekend, and I heard a speaker and he recommended a book that I read very quickly. And it's called we the possibility and it's written by a guy named Mitchell Weiss. And Mitchell Weiss worked in Boston for a period of time, and now he's a professor at Harvard. But basically, this whole book is about how we in government need to flip the paradigm, right? Because we're all about probability thinking where we need to flip and be more about possibility thinking. And I think as we develop that culture, there's nobody that is more set up to be able to innovate and take chances than government, in my opinion, right. And so as we talk about collaborations and innovation within the Dayton region, there are opportunities everywhere. And so you had mentioned a few. And so I'll start with those. Wright Patterson, Air Force Base is a tremendous partner that drives the business economy of the Dayton region, you know that to see the largest single site employer in the state of Ohio, you've got 30,000 civilians going to work there every day. And that's nothing compared to all the affiliate contractors that surround the base and in this region. And so things that we're working on with the base are largely around new technologies. And one of those in the city of Dayton, our county recently moved our fairgrounds. And it's this really large, attractive parcel, right in the middle of downtown that premier health partners in the University of Dayton now co own, the first building that they're trying to put on that that property is a governor government digitization center that would be sponsored by right Pat, but have many, many community partners, right? Because you can't just have the government, you've got to have higher ed involved, you've got to have local municipalities, you have to have private industry. And so I've been a part of the group that's trying to figure out how do we bring this vision to fruition? And how might we sustain it as we move forward? So that's one area you mentioned, University of Dayton Research Institute, Michael was aware, or one of your colleagues was aware of a project we did about two decades ago, where we brought Wi Fi with a partner into the city, we're doing a lot of work with camera aggregation in conjunction with EDR AI, because what they want to do is commercialize technology. And we're a great guinea pig, you know, a very little risk for us. And there's very low cost, so we can take some of these chances with their technology. One of the coolest things that we're working on right now with them, you know, UDR, I is a specialist in sensor technology. And we all talk about Smart City technologies, but inherently by 50% of the smart city technologies require sensors of some sort, right, whether it's streetlights, what have you. And so what we're trying to do is work with the research institute to figure out how might we bring sensors into our environment, water treatment would be a great example, to be more efficient, more proactive, so that we don't have issues where basements are backing up because we didn't know there was maintenance required on a sewer pipe. Right. That's crappy, no pun intended. But anyway, there's a little levity for the room, but But you talked about other opportunities for collaboration. I know at two o'clock Peter Botha Berg will be here speaking. We've done a lot of projects with Robin, Ohio and so about a year years ago, we got funding to bring Wi Fi into all of our public recreation centers, you know, all cities are not equal, and we're not all alike. And so while some cities may be going after fibre to the home, for a large urban core, that's probably not the right model. And so what we're trying to figure out is okay, how do we start with what we can sustain the rec centers? And then how do we grow it from there, because the the access is one piece, but now we're trying to go after devices so that we can bring in a group like Ohio connectivity champions to do all the digital literacy training for our residents. And so we couldn't do that alone, I don't have the staff, I don't have the capacity. But when you partner with organizations, great organizations like broadband, Ohio, and Ohio community connectivity champions, that creates a possible path for us to be a player in raising the bar on digital equity. He mentioned technology first. And this is a selfish plug as a board member for technology first, none of the other things can exist if we don't create the right ecosystem for technological success. And so I'm very proud of the work that Melissa kucha and her team do. We've been reaching out to a lot of other regional groups like the circuit and Cincinnati to figure out how do we grow this network, because your network is really your value individually, but it's also your value collectively. And so in the Dayton region, if we want to make this a community of choice for people to come live, work and grow old? Well, part of that is about infrastructure. Part of that is about the ways in which we create opportunities within technology. And last thing I'll say is we were starting within technology first, to dive a lot deeper into our talent pools, and I'm talking about the high schools, you know, this idea that you can go grab a co op, good co ops are gone by the time they're a freshman. I'll just be honest, right? We work with Sochi, which is another partner, if you try to get a great Co Op, that's going into their junior year, good luck, they're gone. There's no way they're even gonna look at you. So you've got to go deeper and deeper and deeper. Now we're going to the freshman level of high school because seniors aren't even that's still not deep enough. So how do we create internships? How do we create opportunities at the City of Dayton for these young people with aptitude? Right, they may not be exactly where you want them to be. But they've got talent, right? So we're trying to find kids with talent, and you know what, we'll take a chance and go on for four years, because we know it's going to fail? Well, at
Jane 32:04
the very least they're going to learn what you need them to learn, and at best, they may come to work for you. That's the hope. But the whole career zactly this is this is great stuff. I love it. So Chris, back to security. Let's, let's talk a little bit about some of the some of the technological advances you've made at your company Tanium. And how agencies are achieving success using multiple endpoint management and security tools in a single platform. Do you want to talk to us about that a little bit?
Chris Cruz 32:36
Absolutely, Jane, but I will go back to something in that John said when I was in government is naturally government is risk adverse. And maybe I'll set this up for my dissertation here. And so when I saw CIO, jobs being advertised here in California state government, they wanted innovation and transformation. But oftentimes, they hired, you know, men and women that were risk adverse, and put them in the job and expected them to be transformative and innovative. So I agree completely, that was something an environment that I tried to change the culture on. And, you know, live up to that. And speaking of risk adverse, I think one of the areas that we're starting to see in government, both when I was in managing large organizations and government, my role here at Tanium, working directly with federal, state, county and local government is the need for visibility, management and control of your security devices, and also remediation. Again, as I talked about earlier, the attack vector has expanded now that we work in this, what I call hybrid work environment. People are authenticating from McDonald's from Starbucks wherever they can get free Wi Fi. And oftentimes, they're accessing critical applications within your network. So what we have to do and what Tanium does is we provide a single platform to look at and address that in real time data. I think the most important issue to that what I'm seeing within that real time data is understanding what assets that you have in your network, that is a huge risk for most of us. I know originally, again, when I was a CIO, I found out that there was when I had a federated network, I was the CIO for the centralized network in a very large county, that those programs were buying their own software tools that were plugging them into the network. They were authenticating without the approval of the CIO and the Cisco. And so when I was able to get asset management, discovery and management together, I was appalled at the number of devices that were plugged in the number of shadow IT applications that were plugged into the network, and what I needed to do as a CIO to remediate and manage that. And so what our organization does is give that real time visibility to organizations allow them to see all the assets are managed and tracked, whether it be in your centralized IT network or your federated IT network, be able to encapsulate all those endpoints where there's an IP address that people authenticate into. So you have that level of visibility. And that's really important today, because all it takes is again, one unlocked door to get in and understand that so managing your assets, having incident response in place having a consolidated security approach a single platform with real data to manage and address risk. So the CIO and Cisco win the war. Word of supervisors in my tenure, the governor's asked me office asked me, Chris, what is the risk threshold for the county. When I first got there, I would say, Well, it depends on point in time data, because I would have to take data, cobble it together with many solutions that I had. And I manually intensive way to give them a snapshot of what I thought the profile was. And so with our organization, we take all that data up from the real time endpoints, consolidate that into a benchmarking dashboard capability based on NIST and other benchmarking capabilities to give you that type of score, and I found that as a CIO to be invaluable. And today, I work with other CIOs and CISOs, and government to do those types of things to make sure that all the doors are locked, that we have visibility management control, we have the ability through our threat response and detection capabilities to do sniper patching. So if there is an issue, or a ransomware attack, or something that comes in through an IP address, we have the ability to remediate and manage that and do it in real time. And real time is so important these days, because a lot of times these criminals, you know, plant seeds, so to speak, in your network weeks or months in advance, without you even knowing about it. And they're extracting data before you finally catch up with something through a nuance. And that's where I get back to proactive planning and having tools that are managing your network and keeping your IT hygiene up to what I call a very high level through automation. And API's, not manual intensive processes will mitigate your risk up front. And I think the dialogue is changing with CIOs and CISOs today in government, that they're more interested in tools and platforms like Tanium that integrate with other tools, because there's not a one size fits all approach. But a comprehensive scenario in which Tanium is able to feed in that and provide real time data. And I think that's where the I would say where the rubber hits the road is having the ability to make informed decisions in a proactive way, whether than being reactive. And I will tell you in government in 30 years that I spent there, the people that I saw lose their jobs were over incidents and breaches. And not only that, I see CIOs lose their jobs and CISOs, but also the executives running those organizations. So again, having that proactive planning up front and managing that rather than reactive and being in a crisis level management approach is the best way to forge within this particular scenario. And that's where Tanium comes in to work with, you know, it's Department of Defense, or some of the largest or medium or local organizations today in government to effectuate those types of changes and impacts. Because what we're seeing today, especially here in California, cities are getting hit, and they're getting hit once or twice a month. Now, we're before that wasn't a part of the attack scenario. Now. So no one is really immune to these types of attacks, whether that be our educational institutions, cities, counties, or other localities. And so that's where we come in to drive that particular plan and help the CIO and Cisco get a framework together that helps them manage and execute within those particular controls and integrate with the other tools that you have to feed those tools, real time data.
Jane 37:53
So Chris, is the move to manage services happening more rapidly because of these issues that you just talked about?
Chris Cruz 38:00
I believe so I think it all depends too on the maturity of the organization. And that's been challenging quite frequently, as you know, most organizations don't have the level of expertise. And so what we're trying to do is come in with a managed service approach, where we automate a lot of that functionality and configuration that was previously done manually by people that I managed and, and others obviously, in the room to expedite that type of impact. And the more automation that you have around your patching your vulnerability assessment and asset control, and the reports that you have, that helps you make those kinds of decisions without having to have How can I say there's a plethora of IT resources kind of cobbling those things together. And that that's where I saw the the it hygiene and levels of maturity, to excel within my organizations, and some of the organizations I'm working at today, as a Tanium. CIO, I'm seeing that same type of experience. Michael,
Jane 38:49
back to you, you have one of the only if not the only, you haven't given me a direct answer about which one, it is the only me only municipally Oh, municipally. Can I say that right? Your own data center in the United States? How did you manage that? And how do you do manage the technology transformation of the city status, data center and the fiber network.
Michael McCann 39:14
So this is extremely exciting to become coming in and coming into Westerville learning about technology and as the CIO and be trying to be innovative, and they say, Oh, by the way, we have our own data center that you get to play with and work with and do all these awesome, amazing things. It's mind blowing. So we connect our data center is was established back in March of 2012. And it's got about 17,000 square feet of data center. Colocation space that we can expand and grow. And one of the things that the city had as a challenge was is we're building fiber, we're building conduit we're built we're creating these services. We need to have a place to stick all this Do we want to go ahead and have to pay somebody else to do it? How do we want to operate it, we've also had the challenge of Municipality shouldn't be in the data center game, like I'm sure other people have heard about with fibre to the home, or you shouldn't be doing this or doing that. And Westerville took a chance they took they said, we're going to we're going to give this a go. And they build out this this data center. And it's been nothing but amazing since its conception. So we now have a place that we can own operate, terminate, and use our own municipally owned fiber, or innovative pieces are in government for all of our government operations, supporting our police services, our fire services, running our utility network, we can run the traffic network, we can do all the great wonderful innovation things at the flip of a switch, we don't have to ask for any help or support, because we own and operate it. So that's been a huge success from that standpoint. But also, we've been able to diversify this from a jet revenue generation piece by easy for economic development. So having a data center in Westerville, is a actually has helped us attract very large headquartered companies and healthcare, finance technology. And it also logistics to the Westerville area, because now they have a data center that's local that provides them all the connectivity across fiber that they need. They have all the carriers in there, they we offer cloud solutions, we offer Co Co Location solutions. So we're diversifying the business of government, and we're finding new innovative ways to generate revenue. And it's just every day we get opportunities thrown at us. And I think the big thing comes down to is to we have to prioritize those, we have to make sure we have the right staff. So we don't get burnt out on all the great things. But it is it's an amazing challenge to have. It is it's
Jane 42:05
an incredible solution that you've managed to put together. So congratulations to you into the sea. Thank you. John, I'm going to ask you some of the current initiatives or things, maybe you thinking about doing that to enhance the digital experience and engagement of Dayton residents and visitors?
John Reich 42:21
Yeah. And you know, I'll start to just piggyback off of Michael's answer. You know, his predecessor was a guy named Todd Jackson and Todd and Westerville had been so far out in front of this municipal fiber thing, it's not even funny. And, you know, one of the things that that I got from a conversation with with with Todd was the value of conduit, right? And how valuable the lease is on conduit maybe. And so, you know, as a piggy back to his point and going back to collaboration, then one of the things that we found out through some of our public works employees was that we have a very large, old steam infrastructure asset underneath the city of Dayton. And right now, everybody's trying to put in 5g And what do they not want to do? They don't want to dig up concrete, right. And so what we're trying to do is use a little bit of innovation to say, all right, all right, there might be some risks there, but is the risk we're taking, knowing that it could be monetized and really create a nice revenue stream for the city? So that's a piece of it. But going back to your question, you know, all cities, I think, have a preponderance of technical debt, right? We all sometimes I wouldn't say fall asleep at the wheels, but we're very spread thin, we have limited budgets. And so some stuff just waits, right. And then it waits longer, and then it waits longer. Well, at the City of Dayton, we have waited too long, right. And so we're now at a point where we have to take action, because we're going to lose our relevancy if we don't. Because that I think, is the byproduct of inaction. And so we're sitting on literally the biggest digital transformation that the city has ever gone through. And so over the next 36 months, we're going to modernize and move to the cloud, our police information system, we're going to upgrade Cronos and take it to the cloud, we're going to take a sell it to the cloud and bring in electronic document review, we're going to take our revtrax software to the cloud, we're going to take faster, which is our fleet management software to the cloud. That's a lot of work. And to be quite honest with you, I took two and a half years to even go down that road because they didn't have the staff to execute. But now I think I've got the players on the bench that can can come into this battle this game and win it for the city. And so we're staying on that. But there's two, two things that we're doing right now that I think are really cool. Police at the City of Dayton are very progressive, you know, they're always looking at ways that they can use technology to be more efficient. And I think for a lot of our safety forces, what we're faced with is dwindling numbers. Because you know whether right or wrong, that industry has been beat up, right. And people are choosing to retire. I told our police chief, I said, Chief I'm gonna have to unfollow you on LinkedIn, because every week it's two or three more retirements. And I don't see you congratulating new people coming in. Right. And so our numbers are way down. And that has a dramatic impact on crime. So you've got to use technology to be able to bridge that gap. And so one of the cool things we're working on right now, is this integration between three separate systems. And that would be our license plate readers are ShotSpotter cameras in our fuses camera aggregation system, because how cool would it be if somebody shoots a gun and ShotSpotter alerts on that, and then all of a sudden, all of your camera feeds that are coming in through fuses turned on. Right. And we had a so we're under a trial right now with the state attorneys general, with USUS, which is the camera aggregation system. And we've already solved a murder with that system. We had a murder in downtown Dayton about three weeks ago, there were no witnesses happened late at night. Well, lo and behold, we started turning on the few speeds. And we had that, that suspect in less than 24 hours. And so it's already proving dividends. But that integration of those technologies is where we see great value. The other one I would mention is this this great partnership that we recently created. The city of Dayton has this thing called drita. And it's the Dayton, regional Israel trade Alliance. And as many of you probably know, some of the greatest technology in the world right now is coming out of Israel, specifically, what is Israel do really, really well, they treat water, and they have to, and so we're learning from a lot of the cool stuff that they're doing. So we just signed this deal with a company called IO site. And basically what IO site is going to allow us to do is do not only visualization of our data as it relates to the treatment distribution of water, but predictive analytics, right, because we don't want to be caught flat footed, we want to be ahead of the game. And new software, new technologies allow you to do that. And so that's one that I'm pretty excited about, there is one other that we got pulled into. And so secession planning in municipalities is becoming an issue, you have a lot of people getting older and retiring. And we were challenged with that. And we didn't really understand where the risks would lie within our organization, you might know it at a departmental level, but you certainly don't know it at the city manager level. And that's where we need the data to reside. And so we used ArcGIS, which is a tool we had that does really cool visualizations, data ingestion, and we created a portal so that we can now allow departments, you start filling out your there's a predefined list of questions, but allows us to do some automated identification of continuity or secession risk. Because the thing that we know is this is that not every position brings the same level of risk as it relates to somebody leaving the organization. But you've got to score that you got to understand it. And to be quite honest, I love this because the other thing I'm getting visibility into as the the group that built it, where are there really great candidates and other departments that I may go after? Because I have certain skills for certain jobs that I'm looking for. And so can you project manage, you know, can you supervise, can you lead, because let's be honest, the technology piece of our job is probably the easiest part to learn. And I'm there, that's no disrespect to the technologists in the room. But I think the relationship piece, the the ability to connect with people is much harder. And so I'm always about let's find people with all those soft skills, and then we can send me to training, you know, if they have an aptitude, if they have a little bit of an appetite to grow their career, those we have found our best candidates,
Jane 48:03
right? This is fascinating. I have a question from the audience comes in as anonymous. But can both of you maybe address it just for a moment? And talk about how you determine which issues get studied treatment, in the volume of concerns that are raised either by your constituents or by other people in government? How do you decide
John Reich 48:25
I'm gonna go back to governance, what I've been blessed with as a city is really great leadership that is in the loop. And a lot of cities, you'll have a city manager, deputy city managers that aren't plugged into technology. I don't have that issue. And I think that's the blessing that we have, we have a pretty good governance model. And so I never get too far out of alignment with our leadership, right. And I typically try to go back to them when new things because we know, government's really good at planning, right? Because it's all based on the budget for the next year. And they don't want that to ever changed. Right. And so things do change. And so what we've tried to do to do at the city is introduce a governance model that allows for flexes flexibility and pivots. Right? Because sometimes things do come up that have to be done that have to that thesis project would be a great example. We had a limited trial through the state attorney general's office. That wasn't all my work plan for this year. Right. But it was so important for our community, that became a priority. But I didn't make that decision, because I don't like being that guy. Right? That makes you very unpopular with all your other business leaders that just got told their stuff has to wait. And so I love our city leadership. They're they're great at stepping up and being that face for me, so I don't have to take the brunt of priority changing. But I think the governance is really critical in that regard.
Jane 49:38
And you agree with that?
Michael McCann 49:40
No, I agree. 100%. Do go ahead and continue on what John was saying there is, is really that collaboration and there's open lines of communication with your leadership. One of the things that I've always struggled with throughout my career is making sure you have that seat at the table and You can be not necessarily being you know, the one making the decision but being informed hearing the direction hearing where the important parts are where the priorities lie. And that way you can act and respond and communicate accordingly off of those. And one nice thing that with my city manager I get to have is, we have a no surprises rule. So we keep each other in the loop, we drop each other messages, and keep, you know, we meet on a regular basis. But we're also being engaged on what we're talking about where we're going, what we're doing, and always keeping in sight the main goal of our strategic initiatives and objectives. So by keeping that those lines of communication open, and good, strong governance as well, it really is a game changer. And I think that's what that's really how you can support that. Well,
Jane 50:49
it's really exciting to hear about all these new initiatives that both of you are working on. Chris, I'm gonna ask you that there have to be things that you're excited about what trends are emerging technologies, you talked about autonomous systems, maybe using some AI in order to, you know, make sure things are secure. Cybersecurity is in place, what are you excited about?
Chris Cruz 51:10
Yeah, Jan, I think AI and machine learning is a really a game changer in the area of SEC ops and allowing folks to go in and have some level of automation, to go through your network to sniff out imperfections or issues or incidents that may arise, I think the more automation that we have, the better. But I will say before, we look into that a lot of research and development needs to be done about access, user role based access and other areas that impact a network and there needs to be a level of maturity within government to be able to manage those tools. So that being said, I, I would adopt the wrong crawl Walk Run theory, when looking at AI and machine learning and government knowing that sometimes government is three to five years behind, if not longer, in some instances of how we adapt that. So I would take an incremental, a phased approach to AI and machine learning and how you introduce it into your respective environment, and ensure that the right kind of comprehensive training is in place for government employees to do that. Um, that being said, I think one of the areas that Tanium is really focused on is we're also looking at AI and machine learning within our research and development team. We're constantly making our product better. And we rely a lot on our government industry and folks to have a seat at the table to say what works now, what doesn't, and what can we do to enhance our products in the future to make your life more efficient, effective, I will say Internet of Things is a big area that we focused a lot in on Tanium, the ability to patch out to your cloud solution provider, whether that's Azure, Amazon, IBM, what have you the ability to patch in the cloud, the ability, as I mentioned earlier in the program that I used to manage, with digital innovation of the Internet of Things, have those open source apps to go in and manage close those doors, make sure there's security baked in that you're patching effectively and efficiently within those respective applications. So when people hit those on the outside, there's a low regard that there's going to be some kind of mitigation will issue a risk that should come up that you can manage appropriately. So things of that nature, I think are really important. It goes back to basic blocking fundamentally and tackling as I like to say, using a football analogy, it's really important how you manage your environment. And that's specifically a Tanium. What we do in terms of focusing and managing and working together in a collaborative partnership with our business and government customers. They say it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to run a successful information technology organization. With six security operations baked in a Tanium, we try to understand that story, and identify with our platform ways that we can align it with the needs of the business and be what I call a safeguarded, personal partner to the business and to our customers that we serve. So having that constant constant evolution of change, adapting looking at new technologies, and being able to integrate that within our Tanium platform, I think puts us in a nice position to help further success our clients business opportunities, but reducing their risk thresholds at the same time. So I'm very excited about what lies ahead with these newer technologies. But I will say that we want to make sure that we're managing risk up front. And that every decision that gets mad about all the great things that we're doing at the local level or city level government level, again, that we take security into consideration on how we manage that and look at a centralized profile overall. And I think we'll be in a much better position to continue to look at citizen engagement from an implementation perspective that makes our lives constituents that much easier, and the ability to serve as our constituent and a factor that mitigates and has a lower risk threshold apply to it. And so
Jane 54:41
Sorry, continue.
Chris Cruz 54:43
So I was just saying I think that that's very important today, and that, you know, what we tried to do is bring our IT organization and security organizations together. So there's a partner at the table and then also to getting the CIOs or CEOs or respective organizations or city managers to partner with They're CIOs and CISOs to understand the nature and degree of security and how important it is to have security invested and baked into all your solutions.
Jane 55:09
Yep, I love it. I think the future is so exciting and what you've talked about here today, it's just been fascinating, really, it's wonderful to see how you're moving the ball forward. So we have about 30 seconds each, I want to give you a chance to wrap up and just throw this out there. What's your vision for the future state of technology, either for your municipality, your city, or for the state of Ohio? Or for the country in general? Where do you see it going? Mike, we'll start with you.
Michael McCann 55:37
There, there's, I think there's two main things one, the whole Intel meta AWS data centers, these small companies that have come in have really challenged Ohio to think we're not thinking big enough, we really need to think bigger, and we need to work to actually grow the region to be able to help support these large initiatives. And I see it through two ways. And I know John mentioned it, it was about about education, and finding that talent pool to pipeline, the right people into these roles, we have to start early, we have to engage and start training them for the jobs of the future now to retain the talent here, before they get picked up and moved away. But we have the opportunity to really help grow and support the what we currently are looking at now and what's going to come in the future. And the second piece is around data as a whole data is the new oil. I know somebody important said that. And I can't can't cite them specifically. So I apologize. But we have to break down some of the barriers I think that we have in the region or even in the state. We see success stories, and I've talked about them, Chris and John mentioned around public private partnerships, how those are successful partnerships with universities, how great things come out of those initiatives, when we partner together, and we share initiatives and resources and data. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could go ahead and break down the barriers, so private entities, public entities, municipalities, universities all share the same data and be able to use datasets to be able to hit and use these are for future proofing and, and looking at making sure we have the right resources, and we're developing infrastructure in the right areas. That's where I see the future really laying is in that collaboration piece. And, and breaking down those barriers.
Jane 57:29
I love it, John. Yeah, it's
John Reich 57:31
a tough one. You know, I've lived in Ohio my entire life. And one of the things that I've seen recently that I really love are these these shirts that Ohio ex I think puts out. It has Ohio, the Silicon Valley of the Midwest, right? So when you talk about a vision, right, that's, that's the pride that I have in this state and what we can and shouldn't be right, Ohio is the birthplace of innovation. I think it's it's the birthplace of flight as well. We do a lot of cool things here. And how do we take the momentum? And you had mentioned a few, right, this area specifically is on fire right now. And how do we take that momentum that Columbus in the Columbus region has generated and spread it throughout the state. But ultimately, you know, my job is to ensure that the citizens of Dayton are well taken care of. And so we've got big problems. Right now we have significant issues with digital inequity that we need to address and be a player and in bringing better solutions to the table. But ultimately, you know, what I want is for our city to be looked at as the preeminent place within Ohio to live. And I know that's a little selfish. But the city of Dayton is a great place to live. And technology has to be a piece of that. And we're perfectly set up to exploit those opportunities. But ultimately, I'm a big believer in this state and what we're doing. And so I think that if you asked me about the vision, it's heading in that direction, where Pete When people think of technology, they're not thinking about San Jose or Silicon Valley anymore. They're thinking about Ohio. All right. I like that.
Jane 58:53
Chris, any final thoughts? 30 seconds.
Chris Cruz 58:56
Yeah, a couple things. You know, I will leave you with a couple items. And first, I want to thank the two panelists. I think they were very comprehensive and innovative in terms of articulating a plan for you guys should be welcoming to that. And thank you, I will leave you with a couple of lines. I think as I always say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And when it comes to information security, as we innovate and continue to modernize our application, look at technology to drive innovation, reduce ROIs, you got to ensure that there's a security component baked into that, and that your security people have a seat at the table. So before you put something in production, make sure you'll have a comprehensive test plan and the right types of security tools to mitigate risks, both within your organization out of the attack vector. So great to be here. And thank you.
Jane 59:40
Thank you, Chris. And thank you both. All three of you please for for being part of this conversation. Wonderful information. Thank you all please give our guests around the block.
Corey Baumgartner 59:50
Thanks for listening and thank you to our guests, Michael Farrar, Jonathan Reich and Chris Cruz. Don't forget to like comment, and subscribe to Kara cast Then be sure to listen to our other discussions if you'd like more information on how Carahsoft can assist your organization please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at SLG marketing@carahsoft.com Thanks again for listening and have a great day