San Francisco CIO: Chris Vein

Dan Farber: Chris thanks for joining me.

Chris Vein: It's my pleasure.

Dan Farber: How did you end up in this role as CIO of San Francisco? Did you have a background in being a CIO?

Chris Vein: Very accidentally, is how I came into my role.

Dan Farber: So you are the accidental CIO?

Chris Vein: I am the accidental CIO. That's a good phrase. I have the usual degrees in public affairs and those types of things. I found myself in Washington D.C. and happened to be at the right place at the right time, working in the White House non-political, in a non-political position. So I served the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations.

Dan Farber: Is having a somewhat political background useful to being in San Francisco where there are a lot of politics involved in the city?

Chris Vein: I think so. I think it really helps you understand what is really going on, and to understand that sometimes you just need to let the noise happen and do your job and the noise will subside. Then you move through it.

Dan Farber: San Francisco is well known at this point for having a municipal wireless strategy working with Google and EarthLink. I know that you are behind a lot of that strategy and formulating the plan and making the deal. And there seems to be some controversy over the city right now, whether that deal should go through and whether it should be a private sector that the city uses or whether the city does it itself. Can you give us some light into that controversy?

Chris Vein: Yes, I think it is a fundamental difference of opinion or philosophy between those who feel that government should run and do everything and those that feel that we should use our private sector partners to help us do the things that we are not necessarily so good at. And that is really what is happening here. You have a core set supervisors in our board of supervisors, who strongly, strongly feel in municipal ownership and control. And you have other people, such as the mayor, who believes that it is in the best interest of the city to try to find other people who can enhance what the city does. So the controversy really is a fundamental, philosophical issue around government.

Dan Farber: Now, let's move on to some of the other areas that you have to deal with. One of those areas I assume is all of the IT infrastructure, dealing with financial systems, dealing with the e-government initiative to reach out to the citizens. What is going on in terms of your IT infrastructure? Are there a lot of things that you are working on to bring up to date?

Chris Vein: Well, in addition to being the accidental CIO, I am also the first CIO of the city and county of San Francisco. The city has about a 150 year history of having individual departments. Those individual departments do not necessarily work well together, not unlike corporations with business units and departments. So, in these departments some of them are the poorest of poor departments when it comes to technology. They do not have technology; they are still using 486 computers. Then you have other departments that are wealthier departments. They may be earning income in other ways outside of the tax base. And so those departments have big IT shops. What I am trying to do is take 60 different departments within the city, and varying degrees of technology, varying degrees of control, and varying degrees of money and trying to come up with a common plan for the city and then based on that plan, come up with a rational way of identifying what we should be spending our money on and how we are going to spend it.

Dan Farber: So as I understand it currently you have about 330 people and a budget of about 95 million dollars, but that is just a fraction of what the city spends overall on technology.

Chris Vein: Correct. The overall budget for the city and county of San Francisco is about five point seven billion dollars. And so my hundred million dollars roughly is pretty small. The challenge that I have and that the city has is that it's not clear where all the pockets of money are in the city and it's not clear where all of those different departments are going. So my biggest challenge first of all is just identifying what we have got and where everybody is going.

Dan Farber: Then you have the political challenge of convincing all those other departments to go along with the plan.

Chris Vein: Yes. The phrase is "herding cats" and it gets used over and over and over again, but it really is true. How `do you go out and get all of these people who really do not want or need or feel they need me in order to move the city forward, achieve economies of scale, and really make better use of the resources that we have.

Dan Farber: How much does innovation play a role in what you're trying to do and how do you build a culture of innovation to make sure you can lead but people will follow?

Chris Vein: Innovation is core to what I am about as a CIO and what I'm trying to do as CIO in the city and county of San Francisco. When I came to the organization, the department of telecommunications and information services, it was a traditional technology organization within government, always waiting for somebody to ask us to do something. What I'm about is creating a consultative approach where rather than waiting we go out to our departments and we ask "What do you need?" "How can we help you?" "How can we innovate to make your job easier, help you meet your mission faster, better?"

Dan Farber: In terms of IT systems what are some of the projects you are working on now?

Chris Vein: We have a GIS upgrade that we are trying to do. Again, centralize and really enhance our mapping capabilities. Within our department of building inspection we are trying to redo our permitting system so that it's much more efficient and effective and using web technologies so that people can move in and understand exactly where there permit is in each step of the way.

Dan Farber: And when you say web technologies, are you talking about this notion of Web 2.0 or collective intelligence of all the citizens of San Francisco making decisions for the city, or...?

Chris Vein: I don't think we're there yet, but that certainly is a possibility. San Franciscans also have a fairly healthy sense of - I don't know what the - distrust I should say, of big business...

Dan Farber: Skepticism.

Chris Vein: Skepticism, that's a good one, and so often times they are not very interested in having a big brother approach, or too integrated of an approach, which technology can provide.

Dan Farber: Yes, I know. That was one of the issues that was brought up around Municipal WiFi, with Google and EarthLink, where some organizations were saying there were privacy concerns around having those companies involved.

Chris Vein: Yes, and I think it's true, and we should all be cognizant of the fact that when we are on the web, we are using applications on the web, that we need to be concerned about our security. However, on the WiFi project, the organizations such as the ACLU are really doing a good job of focusing this conversation across the country. But they're focusing it in a way, and developing a gold standard that no internet service provider, or even communication provider meets. So, our conversations with ACLU and other organizations are to discuss privacy, but to be realistic about those privacy issues.

Dan Farber: And how big of an issue is this notion of digital divide, and what you're doing, not just with municipal WiFi, but across all the services that you provide.

Chris Vein: A digital divide in San Francisco is alive and well, unfortunately. We estimate about 200,000 people who don't have access to the Internet or access to the computers. And so, that's why in 2004, Mayor Newsom in his first state of the city address talked about the need to bridge the digital divide, and he made his now famous statement "We will not stop until all San Franciscans have free access to the Internet and a computer." Trying to accomplish that goal is quite another matter. I happened to be sitting in the audience the day that he made that statement, and I wasn't in my current job, and I remember thinking, "Oh, the poor person who's going to have to make that vision a reality" and then the next month it turned out to be me. So, I've spent the last two years really studying digital divide, digital inclusion issues, talking to many cities, and reaching out to four or five hundred groups within the city and county of San Francisco to really understand this issue, and come up with a meaningful solution. And we've come up with a solution called Tech Connect and Tech Connect really has four pieces. It is about getting access to the Internet free or affordably. It's about focusing on giving the tools to the people, whether it be a laptop, a desktop, a Game Boy, a PDA, whatever it is, in order to access the computer. But then once you have access to the Internet, focusing content for those who may not be used to surfing the web, or searching for a specific item - how do we really help those who have never done that before? Search for a babysitter - you know, how do you search for a babysitter in a big city like San Francisco?

Dan Farber: Now is that the role of the city to provide tools for people to search better, or is that more of a private sector activity?

Chris Vein: Excellent question. And what we do, and what Mayor Newsom's philosophy is: let's not do another government program. Let's reach out into the community, find the people in need, find the people who are organizations who are meeting that need, and the government act as facilitator to bring those two together, and somehow use its role to enhance the services that are already being provided to meet the needs of the citizens.

Dan Farber: Being the CIO of San Francisco, I'm sure that green technology comes up quite often, and what are you doing in that area?

Chris Vein: A range of things. It varies from something as simple as going to every computer or every printer, and make sure that any printing is done dual-sided to cut down on paper. So there's that kind of easy step on one side, and then on the other side, is really changing your purchasing rules and regulations, so you are buying only biodegradable products, or computers that are made in a green fashion, and we're looking at the full range.

Dan Farber: Is it difficult to go out and buy computers that are made in a green fashion or is that more like a nice statement to make, or is it something that's more a reality?

Chris Vein: It is possible. It is certainly not to the extent that we would like it to be or our own department of environment in the city and county of San Francisco. But if you know anything about city and county of San Francisco, we're not shy of creating social policies and implementing them, and using our contracting or our purchasing power to get the rest of the city, the rest of the state, or indeed the country to follow through. And our own efforts around domestic partners, and ensuring anybody doing business has to provide same sex partner benefits, as well as opposite sex partner benefits, has set us apart and really moved us in a new direction, and I have a feeling we'll be moving in this direction around green technology as well.

Dan Farber: Well, let's move on to a little more mundane topic, which is the Data Center and could you give us an idea of what's going on in your Data Center, and how it's configured, and what your IT infrastructure is all about?

Chris Vein: It's another excellent question because it's about to change, and we don't know exactly where we're going with it, but we do know that we have a vision for it.

Dan Farber: Where's it at now, so we have a baseline?

Chris Vein: [laughs] We have a data center that provides basic mainframe services to the city and county of San Francisco. But as you know, government organizations, indeed businesses, are moving away from a mainframe-centric organization, to more of a distributed server-based organization. And so, we are trying to figure out how to move our major applications that are on those servers to something less big, less old, and move them into the 21st Century. And we're doing that at the same time of doing a network operating center consolidation, help desk consolidation, server desk consolidation, and really trying to rethink the entire strategy of how we provide infrastructure operations and services.

Dan Farber: Now with a budget of almost six billion dollars, how do you manage that budget? Does it kind of run on modern financial software?

Chris Vein: Unfortunately the financial package or financial suite is probably 10 years old, and it does need to be upgraded. The difficulty is that with the city and county of San Francisco, the size, the complexity - we have about 27,000 employees; we have about 45 union agreements. And you can imagine all the rules and regulations, policies and procedures, that have been developed over time and have been implemented in the system, and therefore to change that will require an incredible change in how the city does business, and could therefore be fairly expensive and will be kind of the next step in our ERP solution.

Dan Farber: In terms of communications infrastructure, you're developing municipal WiFi plans but are you also working on internally, things like convergent networks with voice over IP for the organization.

Chris Vein: Oh again, we've got the full range of things going on. We are doing a lot with fiber. Trying to lay fiber and really providing our own services rather than having to lease services from an AT&T or other providers. So that's one thing we are trying to do.

Dan Farber: Now that's a very costly proposition, laying your own fiber. Is that funded out of tax payer dollars?

Chris Vein: It is. It was funded originally out of a bond and we were able to lay a ring, a very small ring, but an effective ring, in the center part of the city. We have become a little more entrepreneurial and through responding to an RFP that City College did within the city and county of San Francisco, we were able to work with them and lay a concurrent ring with the existing ring and thereby getting an agreement with them to use part of their fiber ring for city purposes. We recently completed a study where we discussed fiber to the home, bringing fiber to all city residents and businesses. And we're now in a discussion of how that would happen, when it could happen, and if it could happen. The price tag, as you could about imagine for something like that, was about half a billion dollars, depending on the business model, to about 800 million dollars. So it's not going to happen any time soon. But it does lay the foundation for future telecommunications, future IT needs, and as you said, the convergence of voice, video and data and applications such as voice over IP.

Dan Farber: Now in San Francisco, which could be considered part of Silicon Valley, kind of at the upper end of Silicon Valley...

Chris Vein: The northern end.

Dan Farber: ...We have a lot of technology people, it's a very tech savvy town. We have a lot of tech moguls who live in San Francisco and I was wondering how much influence the community has in terms of directing how San Francisco should spend its money on technology?

Chris Vein: Both not enough and too much. Not enough, in that you are right, we are close to Silicon Valley. We have a lot of corporations, businesses, housed in San Francisco. I don't think we do enough to really take advantage of that collective knowledge, that collective will. And something that I would like to do now as CIO and chairing the governance body for technology in the city and county of San Francisco, is really reaching out to the folks that you're mentioning and really asking the best and the brightest minds how we should be improving our operations, new ideas. City and county of San Francisco, as all governments are, is not really good at being nimble, at moving quickly. And so the biggest challenge I have, is how you take an incredible need and the resources that you've got and then add the mix that you're talking about, which is all of the really smart people and how you can bring that together to solve problems in a way that works with the policies and procedures of the city.

Dan Farber: As you're looking out into the future, I would have to assume that your job is somehow tied to the administration.

Chris Vein: Maybe.

Dan Farber: And does that impact you in anyway in terms of your long term planning, knowing that if we don't get elected again then you may not be the CIO anymore?

Chris Vein: I think, going back to my experience with the White House, I was nonpolitical. My job there, regardless of the president, regardless of my personal feelings toward the president, was to make sure that the White house ran as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And that is a core belief that I have as a person and certainly bring to the city and county of San Francisco as its CIO. So whether I'm here tomorrow or not, whether WiFi succeeds or whether it fails, whether my fiber plan ever goes anywhere, doesn't make any difference as long as I'm putting a plan out there, getting people to talk about that plan, getting some type of agreement and moving some things forward, then I'm ahead of the game.

Dan Farber: Well Chris, thanks very much for speaking with me.

Chris Vein: You're welcome, my pleasure.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Chris Vein, who is the CIO of the city of San Francisco. For CIO sessions, I'm Dan Farber. Thanks for watching.