Transcript

Digital DC: How to Create a New Culture of Digital Government

March 17, 2011

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ANNOUNCER: [Audio Starts] on the subject, Digital DC: How to Create a New Culture of Digital Government.

The call was recorded on March 17, 2011, and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on the PDF Network and upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com.

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry from Personal Democracy Forum here with you again for another one of our regular PDF Network conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers and doers and innovators in the political technology space.

As always, we are thankful to our sponsor, AT&T for making these calls possible.

And this week we are really pleased to be joined by Bryan Sivack, who until recently was the Chief Technology Officer or the city of Washington, DC. Bryan is going to be joining us to talk about digital DC and how you can drive a culture of change inside government to embrace the possibilities that network communications technology bring both to how government works inside as well as how well it works in relation to the public.

A little background on Bryan, he is perhaps not your typical government bureaucrat, his background is really much more in being a software entrepreneur. He helped start a company in 1998, worked in the arena for more than a decade and was actually hired in 2009 by Mayor (Fenti) to fill the shoes of Vivek Kundra who folks know went on to be the Obama Administration’s first Chief Information Officer.

And in some ways, those were perfect shoes to have to fill because Kundra had already launched a lot of important programs inside DC’s government using technology and also with open data. So, to some respect, Bryan was building on Vivek’s shoulders, but he has plenty of his own war stories to share on how -- you know, what the struggle to change the culture of government is like from the inside. So, we’re really looking forward to this hour.

Before I hand off the baton to Bryan, I’ll just remind folks that the format for our call will be for the first half hour it’ll just be me and Bryan talking and then in the second half, we’ll let you pose questions. The way to do that will be to hit *6 on your phone to get into the caller queue, and then I can call on people and unmute your phones for you.

Thank you for joining the PDF Network call. Bryan, take it away.

BRYAN SIVACK: Sure thing. Thanks Micah. So, first of all thank you very much for having me on the call. This is a subject matter is pretty important to me and one that we worked quite a bit on in DC so I’m happy to be able to share some of the war stories with (AUDIO GLITCH).

So, as you said, as you described you know, I probably do have a somewhat different background than most government bureaucrats. I think the focus -- if you wanted to (AUDIO GLITCH) the focus of my career to this point, it really has been to bring innovative technology solutions to bear on solving problems that exist in general. And the public sector’s a really interesting place to do that.

My first efforts were through a company I started in San Francisco in the late 90s, I moved to London in 2005 to expand to Europe and Asia. And then in 2009, then Mayor Adrian Fenti brought me onboard -- and I pretty much immediately set to work trying to help district residents and visitors get more out of the city and the services that we provided through these innovative applications of technology both internally and externally.

But you know, it’s funny, a funny thing sort of happened right at the beginning. I noticed quickly that there was a great deal of low-hanging fruit to be had. Actually somebody once described it to me -- once described working in the DC government to me as hunting in a zoo. But really I noticed that creating and sustaining a significant change on the technology front would really require something much more fundamental and I think a lot more difficult, which is specifically a significant shift in the culture of government.

You know when you think about it, I think the big problem is that for the most part elected officials these days are really motivated by fear more than anything else. You know, you’ve got your 24-hour news cycles, you’ve got people getting biased information from 30-second TV spots and networks that lean one way or another.

And you know, no politician really wants to see their administrations criticized for any reason at all. And then you have the media that’s actually doing the criticism, they’re constantly looking for the “gotcha” stories. And this really feeds a kind of unvirtuous circle, which I think drives elected officials really deeper into their shells.

So, I think we need a fundamental reset of the way the government actually works, and in this case technology can be an enabler, but really only if those who are enabling it are interested in you know, making this fundamental deep change.

I think it’s pretty clear that innovation really does truly happen on the edges, so one of the big challenges when I started was focusing on how to encourage these edges to break out of the status quo, to get out of this cycle of fear and really, truly innovate.

So, at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, of OCTO, we set out to do pretty much just this: and in general, I saw my role there as I think perhaps a bit different than many agency directors are typical government leaders. My view of the job really was to point the shift in a very specific direction and then make course corrections along the way as things came up.

And the folks that are pulling the oars, the ones that are actually doing the work are the ones that I think have the best ideas about ways to make various processes and products more efficient and better. And so a big part of my job is I thought is really provide air cover if the ideas didn’t work out, or if they needed to be tweaked, you know, if something when wrong.

So, in short I really had to make it not only okay to fail but to celebrate rapid and cheap failure as successes as opposed to losses.

So, for me this really all started I think you can kind of go back to literally my sixth day on the job, and I had an All Staff Meeting to sort of introduce myself and my ideas. And I pointed out to the agency that our mission was really to serve our “customers” who continued on making little air quotes around that word. And those “customers” would be the internal agencies and employees that relied on the services we provided, as well the residents and visitors to DC who take advantage of everything that the city has to offer from the service we provide as well as from a technology-focused perspective.

So, I explained further that within this general mission, our main focus should really be on creating as high level of customer satisfaction as possible, whatever that takes. And I used some examples from the private sector, Zappos is a good example, a company that has an incredibly high-performing operation and they got where they were by focusing more on customers sat than anything else.

And then I sort of closed it by announcing to at this point what admittedly was probably a very skeptical crowd that I wanted everyone to focus on thinking about new ways to execute their personal missions in their jobs without being afraid to fail. And that I was always available to discuss any issue, I had their back, any time, any place.

And you know, it was funny because this was one of my favorite parts of that meeting, right after I finished, the very first question I got was, this all sounds great, and it all sounds really familiar and you know, it hasn’t worked in the past, so how do we know you’re telling the truth? And my response to that was really the only honest one I could think of on the spot which was basically that they’d have to simply trust me.

But I think the interesting thing to note out of that is that the guy who actually asked the question, instead of me you know, kind of coming down on him for calling me out on something like that actually wound up becoming one of my closest allies in the agency and trying to affect some of this change.

So, you know, kind of fast forward a little bit, I think you know, these things had some very interesting affects. People had been entrenched in years of bureaucracy and so it took a while for people to come around to this viewpoint, but as you know, changes started occurring in the way that people looked at their jobs, we could see some really specific and significant affects.

The agency itself wasn’t as organized in a relatively traditional way, it’s very silo’d and it’s structured in such a way that individual groups tended to work within themselves to solve problems that came up. But as it turns out, most of the issues that we faced were really necessary to deal with across the agency, you needed to get lots and lots of different people involved.

So, this new focus on customer service really required people to break out of these silos and actually for the first time in a while, engage with other people in the organization.

I think the really interesting thing about this, too is that it provided really a lens for people to view any decision that they had to make through. So, whenever they were faced with a specific choice, people quickly came to terms with the fact that the right decision was the one that maximized customer satisfaction.

Along with those sort of symbolic wall breakings, we engaged some -- and actually some physical wall destruction as well -- I’m a hater, a big hater, of physical barriers in work places. I think that they tend to create mental barriers, they prevent communication. And so one of the things that we did was actually started breaking down -- physically breaking down walls and cubes and work spaces and creating communal work spaces with lots and lots of breakout space and this had a huge impact on communication and collaboration.

I think a lot of people have heard about Mayor Blumberg and Mayor Fenti’s bullpen-style operations and you know, we sort of took that a step further and really just, I mean really moved as many walls as possible.

MICAH SIFRY: This is just in OCTO, right? Can you just clarify OCTO is in effect the technical division of the government. We’re talking about what, several hundred employees out of how many?

BRYAN SIVACK: Yeah, so OCTO -- basically, the agency is about 600 people, it’s a mix of contractors and FTEs. The DC government is overall about 36 to 38,000 depending on who and when you ask. And we were responsible for basically every aspect of technology internal to the government, so we managed all the ERP systems, email, all the telecommunications and networks, all of that kind of stuff.

And then we also did customer-facing technology.

MICAH SIFRY: You mean public customer as opposed to the customer being somebody inside some other branch of the government?

BRYAN SIVACK: That’s right.

MICAH SIFRY: You really mean both. I mean customers, you have two kinds of customers, right?

BRYAN SIVACK: Exactly. And that’s sort of what I tried to explain the very beginning was that if we were going to look at our constituencies as customers, we had to kind of break it down between the internal and external.

On the external side you know, we focused on lots of stuff, digital divide was a big, big thing for us, providing broadband to the masses along with the things that go along with broadband access in order to bridge that gap.

And then we also were really responsible for helping all of the other agencies detail their plans for technology implementations that could help them deliver better products and services.

So, it was a pretty wide-ranging role but allowed us to I think really innovate in some interesting ways. One example I think along with some of the things that I just mentioned, from (AUDIO GLITCH) would be something like our implementation of an internal micro-blogging tool called Yammer, which probably many people have heard of or probably used.

It was an interesting roll out. We set it up and we didn’t actually mandate its use.

MICAH SIFRY: Say a little bit more for folks who don’t know. Describe what Yammer is.

BRYAN SIVACK: Sure, Yammer’s like Twitter but it’s for internal collaboration basically. You know, it has many of the same features and it just allows for quick communication across multiple devices, so you can have a web client, you can have a client on your mobile. We actually built an interface, and open-source interface so we actually published a (inaudible) that would do a Twitter-fall style display on the kiosk that we had sitting out in the reception in our office.

So you know, we tried to make it very visible. But we didn’t --

MICAH SIFRY: What would somebody see if they were using it? What kinds of messages would it show?

BRYAN SIVACK: Well that’s part of the interesting thing, right? So, we started with just a few people literally on my floor in my building. We didn’t mandate its use, we just sort of let it go and let is self-market if you will.

And the interesting thing to me was that it very, very quickly gained in popularity and in just a few months in we had literally thousands of people who had joined the network from every agency including the mayor’s office and the city administrator’s office.

And so, when it was just OCTO, you know, obviously many of the conversations were technology focused and some of them were about questions that people had in the course of doing their jobs and help that they needed from others. Some of them were discussions about iPads launching and things like that.

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But as we got other agencies involved, we started to see a lot more I think pretty interesting types of conversations. People talking about new initiatives that their agencies were launching, people looking for help and advice on how to do certain things, messages from the mayor’s office and the city administrator’s office. So, it really took on a life of its own and there were some interesting bumps in that road.

Communications folks in the mayor’s office and the city administrator’s office were a little concerned, if you will, about potential leaks of information and things like that. So, in order to -- and that’s sort of a vestige of I think of old government culture. In order to solve some of those problems, we basically just set them up on the system and said, look, you know, you’ll see what’s going on and interestingly most of these communities are very self-policing and so I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of things that cause any issues. It’s one of those things where we can write terms of use and mandate specific ways of actually utilizing the system, but in a way I feel that that kind of locks it down a little too much and prevents uses that we might not have thought of that could actually be very beneficial.

MICAH SIFRY: Right but somebody getting on had to be -- not anybody could join, right? You were vetting or someone in your office was actually -- a government worker in DC couldn’t invite kind of their friends to use it?

BRYAN SIVACK: No, you had to have a dc.gov email address. So, it was limited to the DC government. But you know, that’s 38,000 people, right?

MICAH SIFRY: Were there any leaks?

BRYAN SIVACK: Not at all. In fact, not only that, but you know, I can’t think of a single instance where somebody mis-used it or somebody used it in an inappropriate way.

MICAH SIFRY: Did people ask for help in how to use it?

BRYAN SIVACK: It was mainly people teaching each other. One of the things I wanted to do actually towards the end of my tenure was set up sort of a little class on some of the features and some of the things that you could actually do with the tool because I think that if you didn’t utilize it correctly or take advantage of some of the features I should say, then you were missing out on some of the benefit.

Unfortunately, we didn’t actually get enough time to actually do that but it was something that I definitely wanted to do.

MICAH SIFRY: Fascinating. Can you give us an example of where you ran into challenges that you couldn’t surmount or to what degree does this require sort of the embrace and leadership from the very top in order to succeed?

BRYAN SIVACK: Yeah, I think actually a really good example of that -- so about half-way through last year, I sort of decided that it was time to kind of pull out the stops and really make some significant changes to the actual culture of government the culture of the agency and really try to transform the agency into almost like a Silicon Valley style workplace.

And so we actually set off on a journey to implement a results-only work environment, or a ROW. And for those of you who don’t know what that is, the idea behind it is fairly simple. Basically nothing matters except what you produce and what you deliver. And what that means is that you know, we are all typically at any one of our jobs since the day we started in the working world measured by usually hours, right? Show up at 8:30, leave at 5:30; if you’re not sitting at your desk the whole time, you’re obviously not doing work. And the actual deliverable sort of falls below that.

And you know it’s interesting because if you think about it, we really should kind of look at it a different way. We’re all hopefully responsible adults when we got the job and we should use that as the default starting point where you know, you as a responsible adult who knows what your deliverables are, should be able to make the right decisions in order to get those things done. And it doesn’t mean sitting at your desk from this time to this time. If you do have to interact with people in order to do your job, then okay, you need to make the decision that you have to be physically present in a certain space at a certain time because you know that’s when other people are going to be there. But other than that, you shouldn’t have to -- we shouldn’t be telling people what to do, we should be letting people make their own decisions.

So you know, it was one of these really interesting things when we started to role this out, there -- you know, it’s so contrary to the way that we typically work that it took a while for people to really get their head around it. You know, a lot of people thought it was a work-from-home program, which it absolutely is not. While the idea is that you can work from home, and you can work from wherever you want, you can work from the beach if you want. The real critical component is that we’re treating you like a responsible adult to make your own decisions, and we’re going to measure you on the things that you are delivering as opposed to when and where you are delivering them.

So, it was really interesting because you know, the process itself made a lot of sense. You know, people in the mayor’s office completely understood it. I think -- and they were behind it, I think the big challenge was that we -- I started to implement it kind of during the primary for the next mayoral election, the primary was in September and the general was in November.

The thing about DC is that the general election doesn’t really matter, it’s such a democratic city that whoever wins the primary is basically the new mayor. And you know, I kind of ran smack into a transition unfortunately and as forward thinking as Adrian Fenti and his administration was, it was somewhat atypical for government and I think we kind of ran into that when the new folks were starting to take over.

And so unfortunately it got shut down to a certain extent you know, after the general election and kind of during the transition.

MICAH SIFRY: Say more about your vision for how that would work because I’m trying to wrap my mind around it.

BRYAN SIVACK: Not really, at the end of the day, you as an employer still responsible for delivering certain things, right? So, you know, if you are a coder, you know, working on applications for the Department of Motor Vehicles, you are responsible for delivering the things that you have committed to deliver in certain frames.

What we’re just talking about doing is essentially basing the measurement of your performance on delivering those things as opposed to how you deliver those things, right? With the assumption that if you do deliver them, you’re making the right decisions in order to get them done.

So, you know, if you need to be in the office at 10:00 every morning for a general meeting with other people in your development team in order to make sure that there are no issues or nothing is going wrong, and we actually implemented agile methodologies as well right around the same time so that was part of it, right? You are expected to make the right decision and be at that, whether you have to be physically present or whether you can webex or conference call in or something, that’s again up to you and the team.

But the deliverables are still there. There’s sort of an interesting side effect to that, too, which is that all of a sudden we have a much, much better way of measuring actual performance of employees as opposed to a sort of annual performance review by the manager, which can get skewed in any number of different directions by personality conflicts or the manager basing the review on one of the more recent events rather than overall performance over the course of a year, that kind of thing. You actually have detailed data about how that employee is performing over the course of a period of time.

And you know, so it makes that part of it and the performance measurement piece of it really I think very interesting especially in government where if you’re going to look at you know, disciplinary action or termination for low performance, you really do need a lot of that detail in order to say, well, you’re not doing your job.

And so there was sort of a really interesting side effect of this which would have created something like that.

You know, the -- I think they’re definitely -- when we started talking about this, there was definitely a group I think within the agency that was a bit frightened about doing something like this because if you are a low performer it’s going to smoke you out pretty quick. And you know, my response to that is like, look, bottom line in time of fiscal crunch, which we were definitely in, we don’t have the resources or the spare seats to be able to afford low performers in any place in the organization. And you know, we’re trying to move as fast and as quickly as we can to accomplish the things that are on our plate, and if you’re not pulling your weight, then we’ve got to do something about that.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. We’re coming to the half-hour mark so I want to ask one other different question and then we’ll open up to the people who are listening.

Bryan, can you give us an example of how you know, in relation to changing the relationship between government agencies and the public that they’re supposed to serve -- I mean we’ve heard a lot of talk about you know, moving from the vending machine metaphor of government, you know, you put in money and services are supposed to come out to a more platform model where government is trying to engage with citizens in co-creating better services.

So, I’m wondering if there are lessons there about what it takes to change the mentality of government workers so that that’s okay, or even more that that’s rewarded. That that kind of approach is something that people should aim for.

BRYAN SIVACK: Sure. I think that actually kind of goes back to one of the first points I made around the idea that people are more motivated by fear than by anything else.

You know, you really need to change the general concept that people have about their jobs and let them understand that if they try something new, if they listen to the public, if they embrace the negative comment as opposed to you know, brushing it aside or rejecting it, it actually solves some problems. There’s a huge amount of benefit in that over the sort of typical you know, batten down the hatches, turn out the PR flunkies kind of approach.

And that was actually one of the really, really big things that I tried to get across to most people, which was you know, in the course of doing your job, you’re going to come across any number of different ideas either from yourself or from colleagues or from people that you run into on the street that happen to start talking to you about something that you’re involved in. And if we don’t provide a mechanism for people to actually experiment and innovate and try some of these new things, we’re never actually going to change.

And so you know, what I really tried to convey to everybody was that I’m not going to punish you if you try something new and it goes wrong. You know, maybe if it’s a really, really, really dumb decision and you know, something horrible happens, yes, we’ll have some words. But you know, those situations I think are very, very few and far between.

I think for the most part, you know, as long as we try new things and we innovate in ways that allow us to quickly identify where things are going wrong and then kind of course correct, we actually get a lot of benefit out of that and it’s really celebrating these failures as opposed to not talking about them, right?

I wanted to encourage as many people as possible to try to innovate and to try to do new things. Actually a really good example of that is an internal example. We had a team of people that were responsible for our middle-ware architecture and we were using when I got there a relatively old proprietary product that had been end of lifed and we were paying lots and lots of money for extended support on it even though it had been end of life.

And one day one of the guys working on the team came up to me and he actually gave me a proposal, a very well thought out, very detailed proposal for how we could get out of this proprietary, this sort of old, expensive proprietary situation and move to an open source, open standards based solution for this middleware product, which middleware, it’s funny, it’s not sexy, but it’s critical, right? You’ve got this application that’s basically connecting lots and lots of other applications together and passing information back and forth, so you have to have that and it has to be something that works.

But he had, in his spare time because he felt so strongly about the way that this stuff should work, came up with this proposal, presented it to me and honestly it was a no-brainer. The details that he had put in there were clear, were concise, were complete. And so we went for it.

And we were able to, within the schedule that he defined and within the cost parameters that he defined, actually replace this older solution with this new open standards one. And so I think that’s a great example of taking ideas from everybody out there and letting people run with them and not necessarily dragging your feet in bureaucracy and process when it’s obviously a good idea.

MICAH SIFRY: Great. We’re at the half-way point and I want to start to open up the call to people who are waiting to ask questions and so if you have a question, hit *6 on your phone and that will get you in the question queue.

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First person up looks like it’s Steven Buckley. Go ahead, Steven.

PARTICIPANT 1: Thanks for having this today, it’s a subject that is near and dear to my heart. The idea of culture change in the government. I spent 25 years in DC and I worked for five different federal agencies, so they can vary but the basic things that we make fun of in Dilbert comics exist all over the place to varying degrees.

And I’m particularly heartened to hear Bryan talk about that the primary motivation is fear because we can have all the wonderful technology in the world but it’s really just an enabler and unless you go to the root causes of why people are afraid of the status quo and address those, then all the technology in the world is not going to get people to stick their necks out if they know they’re going to get chopped off.

And I did bring this up during the open government dialogue back in 2009 so if people go to Twitter and look for trans, I’m @transpartisan, they’ll see a link there about how I’ve been trying to raise this. Kudos to that and I’d love to be able to carry on the conversation later some time.

MICAH SIFRY: Did you have a question Steven or did you just want to make that note.

PARTICIPANT 1: That was it. I’m like, well I guess the question is why more people are thinking that technology is going to save us. (Inaudible) was talking, I always hear him saying how he’s going to hardwire the culture change. Do you agree with that or do you think that we’re relying too much on technology to change human --

MICAH SIFRY: I actually want to take that question and torque it slightly if you don’t mind because I think it’s true that human nature and fear are still terribly important motivators. But Bryan, do you think that maybe as the new generation comes in, right and some of the older generation retire, that peoples’ comfort level with some of these tools that are much more interactive, much more real time transparent in certain ways, you know that some of the culture will change like the same way that two generations ago the level of sexism in the work place that was just accepted because that was the culture, that there’s been a big cultural shift, including changes in the law and changes in work place rules.

I’m wondering to what degree you think that peoples’ immersion in connection technology, the younger generation, is there less fear? Or is it still an issue that you have to address directly by re-assuring people that it’s okay to fail if they’ll fail quickly.

BRYAN SIVACK: That’s a great question and sort of a great lead up to that question. And I think the answer has a lot of different facets to it. On one hand, we’re going to have to change especially in the technology area because there are some jurisdictions out there that are going to lose something like 40 to 50 to 60 percent of their employees in the next five years just due to people retiring have been around forever.

And that basically obviously implies that we need to find replacements for those people which for the most part should come from the new generation of public servants, people who are graduating from college who are entering the work force for the first time who have a desire to actually do some good in a community.

But again as you said Micah, these people are used to different environments, right? They’ve grown up sharing almost everything about their lives and they see no reason why not. I think that we’re going to have a real hard time attracting people like that to public service if we don’t make some significant changes.

So, you know, I think there will sort of be a let’s change it from the inside phenomenon that we see and I think we’re seeing that today. You know, we all kind of go to these conferences all over the place, around open government and gov2.0 and all this kind of stuff, and we tend to see the same groups of people I think at most of these things, and I feel like over the past couple of years I’ve seen these groups slowly expand.

So, I think there is something to that but I think we do have to make some fundamental changes to the way that we actually do things in order to attract more of the people that we want to attract.

So, I think it’s kind of both but I do think that the fundamental bottom line culture changes is one of the most important things that we can focus on.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, great. Okay, our next caller --

PARTICIPANT 2: Great, thank you. My name is Jill Zyman, I blog at Write Like She Talks but I’m also a city council member and I was elected in 2009 and I’m in my second year, I’m in a suburb outside of Cleveland, it’s called Pepper Pike and I really appreciate having this opportunity to ask you a couple of questions. I ask all the people I can think of these kinds of questions and honestly some of the hurdles just don’t seem to go away.

So, if it’s okay I’m just going to shoot them at you. We definitely have that generational issue that you were just talking about and one of the problems that I find is that you can have all the savvy early adopters regardless of their age getting involved, but it’s the purse string gatekeepers who aren’t changing in my opinion quickly enough, and I’m not even that young.

So, part of what I’m dealing with, it’s not only the fear, it’s just outright refusal and resistance. So, I’m constantly finding myself trying to think of how do I persuade them? How do I make them comfortable? How do I make them not feel threatened? And also how do I get people to run to replace them?

Those are all issues that from what I can see in certainly the Ohio landscape, many, many communities are dealing with. I think Ohio happens to be pretty far behind the curve in terms of moving forward. We have a brand new county government which does seem to be acting much more quickly in terms of adopting and looking into the use of technology for efficiency and just for good government.

So, I guess my questions have to do with what advice you have for -- what techniques you have found to kind of get around some of these hurdles because removing them takes some time and we’re working on that. But I’m also interested in getting around them while we’re working to remove them.

And just last thing I’ll say is I kind of see it the way self-serve gas pumps started to come in in the 70s and 80s, you know, the price was going up and that was seen as a way to cut the cost, but even now you can still if you want to drive around and find your full service gas station. But by and large, as the decades have gone by and you know the generations have dropped off, people just accept that it’s going to be self-serve.

So, I see a lot of my current colleagues as people who for them, they’re just never going to be comfortable with online materials. We have a couple colleagues of mine who don’t use email period and I’ve been pushing.

So, I’ll stop there but --

MICAH SIFRY: Send us the names of the ones who don’t use email, okay? I think we (laughter) it sounds like a Tech President story.

Bryan, go.

BRYAN SIVACK: So, you know, I think in a lot of ways it’s -- you’re talking about a basic sales job. And one of the things that I’ve actually found to be very useful especially in government is an approach which I don’t think a lot of people tend to take, which is when you’re dealing with people who are just really attached to the status quo, they like things the way they are, etc., explain to them in detail until they really and truly internalize it and understand it, what benefits they personally will get out of it, right? And help them understand how they can then market those achievements to help them achieve their future goals.

So, a good example, you know, we’ve been doing open data in DC for a very long time. And there are some agencies and some data sets that have historically been sort of protected and people have been kind of loathe to release them.

And this actually isn’t the case in DC for this particular data set, but it’s one that in many places -- say, you know, the police department is very afraid to release crime data for lots and lots of different reasons. Now we know it’s possible because there are many jurisdictions out there that have released real time crime data.

But you know, the typical reason for that is that the police leadership don’t understand the benefits of putting that data out into the community. And if you can show them some examples of jurisdictions that have released real time crime data have been leveraged outside services whether they’re for-profit enterprises or individual citizens who are just taking that data and doing something interesting with it to say put in a predictive analytic program to determine where crime will happen before it happens and then they can deploy their forces much more effectively and reduce the crime, which is their main motivation.

Then all of a sudden the start to get it, right? They start to see what’s in it for them in order to take some of these chances. And I think that’s really honestly the basic starting point for how to get people onboard with this stuff is really help them get what’s in it for them.

I mean all they see when they first start out is risk, right? They see something that doesn’t exist right now, something that might change and they can see all the negative things that can happen, but they don’t see any of the positives. And in most cases the positives far, far outweigh the negatives, but they just need to understand what those are.

PARTICIPANT 2: Great answer, thank you.

MICAH SIFRY: Thank you. Okay, next question coming up. Your phone should unmute.

PARTICIPANT 3: Hey there, hi I’m Jen Zest, I worked on the Obama campaign and a couple other campaigns and I’m now working for my Congresswoman in New Haven and doing a lot of their data management, which has been sorely neglected. And actually your last answer just answered one of my big questions, but I think that there’s another issue, too, which is communication around the office.

And was Yammer just specific to what you did? Or does that still exist?

BRYAN SIVACK: You man is it a tool that’s out there in the world?

PARTICIPANT 3: Right.

BRYAN SIVACK: Yeah, Yammer’s actually a startup company out of California. And they’ve got a premium model, right, so anybody can literally go up and sign up for it. And sign the organization up for it and start using it without paying anything. So, it’s a great way to just sort of try it and see what happens.

For communication, it’s a great point. Open conversations, open communication is a really, really big deal if you want to make some of this stuff happen, which is way you know, I was saying earlier, not only did we try to address the cultural stuff, we actually tried to address the physical barriers as well.

One of the things that I’m actually -- I’m saddest about in terms of not being there anymore is that roughly I guess is was a few months into 2010, the district actually purchased a new building which my agency was going to move into in a couple years. And I got to have the honor of designing what the actual work space would look like for my 600 people.

And I’ll always remember the first meeting with the interior architects because they had done a few other jobs for different agencies in the city and you know, built very typical government work spaces and the first thing I said to them was like, everything you’ve ever done, forget about that, right? What I want is a space that literally has no walls, I’m even thinking about having a space that has no assigned seats, completely modular, tons and tons of breakout and conference space, place for people to collaborate, all of that kind of stuff. I don’t want an office, I don’t want anybody else to have an office. I just want basically as open and as collaborative a space as we can possibly design.

And they’re reaction was hilarious, I mean their faces lit up, right? They never expected to get that kind of a job in a government.

Now unfortunately, I never got a chance to execute on that but the designs were looking phenomenal and it was going to be a -- what I was hoping was a model for how government should operate from a physical perspective going forward. And yes, we’re the technology agency and you could say it’s sort of the Silicon Valley mindset and all that, but I really think that the results that we could have proven from that would have been hugely significant.

And plus there’s a lower cost to construction because you don’t have to build all these walls and you know and offices and things like that. So, it’s actually -- it was going to be very cool and I was bummed that we didn’t get a chance to actually finish it.

PARTICIPANT 3: It’s interesting how you say that because I also work at a co-working area where they have the exact same thing. They have a major sort of bullpen area, but then they’ve got these other rooms where if you want to talk or collaborate, you can go to those rooms. And now we’re actually trying to set up times because some people want to talk at different times and I thought we should have lunch time where people can talk.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, time management is another sort of secret ingredient here. I was recently in the Google New York office to give a book talk and got a little bit of a tour afterwards and the person giving the tour said, we encourage people to take breaks every 90 minutes to two hours that you cannot concentrate effectively on anything. Your brain needs a break, your brain needs to unconsciously simmer on things that while you’re doing something else, whether it’s taking a walk or getting something to eat or playing ping pong.

So, yeah, but we don’t have a ping pong table here at the PDF office. The next person waiting on the call to ask a question.

0:45:58

PARTICPANT 4: Hi, yes, this is Preston Rey, I am with the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation and we’re doing work with the Bloomingdale broadband bridge community mesh wireless project here in DC.

So, I really wanted to ask having that you have been the chief of OCTO before, we’re really interested in understanding how we can get DC (inadubiel) to be opened up for easy access to citizens because we would really like to tap community broadband networks into that fiber, but you know, OCTO has been reluctant to open it up like more freely.

So, I was really interested to understand sort of what your recommendations are to how to approach OCTO and how to get DC net open so we can have easier access for community broadband projects.

BRYAN SIVACK: Yeah, sure, and actually it’s a relatively straight forward answer. You have to understand that there are a few motivations -- I mean, in any situation like this, you have to understand what the motivations on the other side are, right? And there are a few things that are going on I think and keep in mind everything I’m saying is as of a few months ago when I left, but first of all the main mission of DC Net is to provide continuous and robust services to government agencies, right? That’s how it was designed, that’s how the money was raised for it, that’s what it was built for.

So that’s the main mission and the things that it fits into have to take that into account. Secondly, there’s a huge budget problem in the District right now just like many other places. And you know while DC Net can provide interesting services and lot of value to the broadband bridge project which you guys know I’m a big supporter of, I think that we need to take into account the fact that there are things that cost money that aren’t budgeted for, so who pays for the bandwidth? Who pays for the equipment? All that kind of stuff.

These are the questions that I think the broadband bridge guys, you guys, need to figure out answers to and come at it from that perspective. It kind of goes back to an answer to an earlier question, right? You have to help people understand what’s in it for them and understand what they’re motivations are in order to solve those problems.

MICAH SIFRY: (AUDIO GLITCH) have questions, hit *6 and we’ll get you back into the queue.

Bryan, can you talk a little bit about -- we’ve talked a lot about this sort of cultural change at OCTO and the Office of the Chief Technology Officer of DC, but I’m wondering if you can give us some sense of how your example you know, has rippled out into other parts of the government bureaucracy in DC and where you think the best lessons are.

Obviously as you say, given that the technology office wants to attract people from the technology sector, I mean to some degree you’re competing against private sector companies that are more agile and open in their style, whereas other branches of government they’re attitude may be, well, you know, what those guys did over at OCTO is nice, but we don’t have to do it.

So, given that the subject of our call is how you can drive that change in culture further, what insight can you offer on how that did or didn’t play out in your time in DC government?

BRYAN SIVACK: Well you know, I think the critical thing is actually showing tangible results from a lot of these things, right? And if we can prove that in various cases we’re actually increasing efficiency or saving money or what have you, we’re actually going to be making a very good leadership by example argument to the folks out there who are interested in doing something like that.

And if you have the right elected officials behind you and the right style of leadership who are focused on efficient management and efficient operations, then they’re going to jump all over this.

And DC was definitely that way under Mayor Fenti. You know, anything that we did across the government that was innovative or that showed positive and tangible results, he was a huge supporter of. And so if we had put something in place that showed value, you know, it could band-aided at other agencies that do it, we could find other agencies that were interested in doing it and help them along.

Here’s a great example: we implemented the first -- have you ever heard Net Promoter Score, out of curiosity?

MICAH SIFRY: No.

BRYAN SIVACK: Net Promoter Score is essentially a methodology for collecting information about how the customers of your products or services actually regard your products or services. And it’s very simple basic statement, you know the basic question is, would you recommend this product or service to your friends or colleagues or what have you -- or family or whatever.

And then it’s much more detailed in that in terms of actually designing these surveys and the analysis of those surveys, but what it actually does is provide you with a great deal of detail around which parts of your services and which parts of your products need to be tweaked in order to increase this customer satisfaction.

And so this is something that has been going on in the private sector for a long time. We were actually the first, to my knowledge the first government to adopt Net Promoter Score as a standard methodology for measuring the customer satisfaction of the services we provided. So, the idea was basically to start it as a project for my IT help desk because those guys deal with people in other agencies, 24/7 and so what I wanted to be able to say out of this way how are their services actually being provided and which parts of the services need to be tweaked in order to make them better?

And so the idea was to roll it out there, get the program into a good place and get people sort of trained up on how to actually work with this methodology and work with the tools, and then have an area of practice that we could then roll out to other agencies. Maybe and even hopefully ones that face the customer.

So imagine you’re at the DMV and you go through the line, you get whatever it is done you need to get done and then you get a survey, which you fill out on the spot that gets analyzed using this methodology to tell you exactly whether or not that individual had a good experience. And if not, why.

And then all of a sudden you’ve got all this data to actually make a decision on. The -- my sort of end goal with this was that I wanted to roll it out to the city as a whole, right? Like just a random citizen, would you recommend living in Washington DC to your friends, family or colleague, right? And if not, why? And if so, why?

And that would actually I think provide a lot of data for the policy makers to actually start to make some interesting decisions about things that could be changed to actually make things better.

MICAH SIFRY: And what would stop that from happening? IN other words, why aren’t they doing that now?

BRYAN SIVACK: Well they might still continuing it, I don’t know. Like I said, you know, since I’ve left it’s been a few months and I don’t really know exactly what’s happening and what’s not.

I hope that they are because I think that it was a really interesting way of doing things. If they’re not, you know, what it might come down to is something as simple as people don’t like to have their weaknesses exposed, right? And they don’t like to admit to doing things incorrectly or admit to areas where improvements can be made.

Personally I think that’s exactly the wrong attitude to have. You know, a story from my former life, you know, we were -- the software that my company created and sold was knowledge management software and a component of that was customer forums, just bulletin board systems and stuff that integrated into the rest of the application.

And so rewind maybe to 2004 to 2007 or so, I can’t tell you how many conversations I had with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies where we were trying to get them to understand that having a forum on their website was not a bad thing. The immediate feedback was, well you know, we can’t control what people are going to say, they’re going to say bad things about our company and our products. And I said, well look, my attitude was bottom line, people are out there having those conversations anyway. Either you can let those conversations happen or you can own those conversation and really own the responses to them.

And once they started looking at it that way, it had some impact. And I think government is much the same way. Politicians, people who are in agencies, people who are providing services, need to embrace the negative in a much more dramatic way and you know, really -- if it gets pointed out by the public, thank the people for pointing it out and then bring people into the solution, detail how we’re going to solve the problem and what steps are going to be required in order to get something done and all of that kind of stuff as opposed to this closed off organization that is just afraid to have these things come out.

MICAH SIFRY: We’ve got another question from Jill?

PARTICIPANT 2: Yeah, it’s me again. I just want to say that that sounds like what you just described sounds like something that would replace resident surveys which cities can spend thousands of dollars on and not necessarily even know what to do with the data. Although the shelf life can be long, what you described is something that can really be done on an on-going basis and I could agree with you more that that kind of data and information can really help drive not just so much policy decisions but policy decisions in the way that they’re entangled with budget decisions right now.

I have been on my city’s back for over a year to do some kind of a resident survey, which they’ve never done in 40 years of existence in order to help understand what services are valued and to what extent they’re valued to the point of whether or not people would be willing to pay more and if they were willing pay more, how much more. And what would they want to sacrifice if they don’t want to pay more, what would drop off?

And it really sounds like what you just described is the kind of tool that would really be useful for that kind of purpose.

BRYAN SIVACK: Yeah, so two things to add to that: Net Promoter Score, the methodology in general is beautiful because it’s very, very simple. You know, the survey that anybody’s going to take is going to be -- you know, is going to take a few minutes, it’s not going be incredibly detailed but if it’s crafted the right way, It’ll still provide a lot of information.

And then secondly, the whole purpose of it is for it to be done over and over and over again. Obviously with sometime between surveying the same people, but the important point about the actual score that comes out of it at the end is not sort of the one time, you know line in the sand, it’s more the trend, right? And is the trend trending upwards or is it trending downwards and in what areas and how do we address that?

MICAH SIFRY: We’re almost done. Bryan, I’m going to ask you one last question which is what’s next for you and are you going to be back in government soon or how do we follow your path going forward?

BRYAN SIVACK: Way to put me on the spot, Micah. You know, what I will say is that --

MICAH SIFRY: Let me ask you a different way -- do you want to stay in government? Having had that experience coming from the private sector? It seems like a very fruitful time to be -- trying to deploy these ideas.

BRYAN SIVACK: So what I’ll say is that I loved my job, you know? I woke up every day excited to get to the office and you know to start doing things with the folks that I was working with and really just trying to get stuff done that made a difference in the community.

And I do feel like to a certain extent that my time in the public sector was cut a bit short unnaturally. You know, my heart is probably on the entrepreneur side in a certain sense just because I love building things from scratch and creating new and interesting things out of whole cloth.

But at the same time, there’s so much opportunity to do good in the public sector and to bring some of these interesting ideas to the table that if you do find the right elected official to work for, the world really is your oyster. I mean, you can make a huge amount of difference in a really short period of time.

And so you know, for me right now, I enjoyed the past few months of unemployment, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with my 22-month-old daughter, which has been great, but my -- and I’ve got a few options out there, they’re all interesting and good, some private sector, some public sector and that’s actually the choice that I’m trying to make right now is do I stay in the public sector or to go back to the private sector?

So, we will see. I will probably Tweet a decision when I make.

MICAH SIFRY: Okay, you let us know and we’ll write it up and keep people posted. And we will follow whatever you do with great interest.

Thank you so much Bryan Sivack, former CTO of the city of Washington DC, this has been a really, really interesting call on how you can change the culture inside government from someone who’s been on the frontlines of doing that.

Thanks everybody for listening. Just a reminder our next call which will be in two weeks which we’re actually presenting in partnership with the folks at Enten, the non-profit technology network who are actually many of them are right now in DC at their annual conference, two weeks from now, March 31st, it’s going to be The Anatomy of a Social Media Success: The It Gets Better Project, which was how we’ll look deeply on how one single uplifting online video that started reaction to a really horrific story about the suicide of a gay college student turned into a worldwide movement with thousand of user created videos and tens of millions of views.

We’re going to talk to Scott Zumwalt who is the project manager for the It Gets Better project. That’ll be in two weeks.

Again, thank you to AT&T, our on-going sponsor for these PDF Network calls for making them happen, thanks everybody for listening, again than you Bryan and until are back in two weeks, we’ll see you online.

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