GUEST COLUMN.

In today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, government leaders face a maddening number of challenges. Technology advances outpace policy. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions get more impressive (and potentially alarming) each day. Cybersecurity threats get more sophisticated, and the defenses created one month aren’t sufficient the next.

Juxtapose this whirlwind of new activity with the evergreen challenges of local government—organizational siloes, lack of documentation, and limited budgets – and the challenges can be overwhelming. In their efforts to cope, local governments are forced to confront a number of choices with no guarantee that they’re making the right ones.

Making Advanced Technology Decisions for Your City

How do we decide what’s best for the city? In my experience, we often leave these decisions to our technical leadership. Whether overt or covert, technology is in the driver’s seat. Dr. Craig Watts, Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor at the University of Texas - Austin, describes it as an “alignment problem.”

In a podcast episode about AI's potential to combat or scale injustice, he discusses who needs to be at the table when we design high-stakes systems in public

service. As he says, when building teams composed of multidisciplinary expertise, it is important to consider expanding who is at the table, who is in the room when conversations are happening, and when decisions are being made about what’s being designed and deployed and what the downstream impact might be.

While Dr. Watts referred to the design of the solutions themselves, his insight led me to consider what it might look like if we were more intentional in engaging our non-technical partners. What are some ways we can position the executives who oversee administration, finance, operations, and infrastructure as informed strategic partners and provide them with more context to have productive conversations about leveraging emerging technology?

While there is no shortage of content for technical professionals to stay abreast of trends in technology, empowering our colleagues requires other avenues. Providing them with opportunities to hear directly from peers in other municipalities is an important step toward more aligned solutions. You or your team could provide an overview of takeaways from a conference you attended. Additionally, attending training or networking events and debriefing together can create shared context and serve as a foundation for what you create together in your organization.

Reimagine Data and IT Governance

Now, more than ever, governance plays a critical role in optimal decision-making for the best uses of technology. This is not a new idea, but there are fresh opportunities to make governance more impactful through means such as governance committees. They can be helpful in realms far beyond compliance, including alignment, commitment to the problem, and holding space for collaboration.

The alternative to this kind of stewardship risks placing procedure above seeking solutions. To keep your governance aligned and human-centered, appoint individuals who are comfortable moving to common goals.

A rapidly changing technical landscape calls for agile and modern IT governance and portfolio management with hyper-visibility to the people who occupy the executive branch positions that ultimately will be making the decisions.  A governance committee should be multidisciplinary. If it only includes IT professionals, you will have blind spots. The committee needs to be driven by values and clear criteria.

Ten years ago, I designed an IT governance structure for a spin-off of a publicly traded multinational firm that produced medical solutions for hospitals. Every leader wanted to see how our technology investments aligned with each business area. They also locked into three drivers for technology investments: margin, globalization, and reducing technical burden.

How odd would it have been if the Chief Data Officer pushed a data product, which was cutting edge and amazing, but did nothing to address their priorities? Sadly, we do this when we make technology the driver. A multidisciplinary governance board will help keep your solutions laser-focused. When targeted at alignment, the technical solution should become clearer.

Cutting Through Complexity with Curiosity

There are some common themes to the critical work of making proper choices. Here are the ones that resonate the most for me:

• Avoid making decisions out of frustration or fear.

• Improve data and tech literacy

• Remain curious and ask questions to connect business issues to proposed solutions.

• Engage governance committees to think through paths forward with the intent to ground them in a clear understanding of the challenge and potential solutions. 

   

By promoting alignment and demystifying the technical space for our colleagues, we can share the burden of this complex landscape. We ensure our technology investments are strategic and address the issues our constituents care about the most.

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