Introduction
In this episode, I’m joined by CIO Jonathan Feldman. Jonathan is the Chief Information Officer for the City of Asheville, North Carolina. One of Jonathan’s core beliefs is that you can’t run IT without being a customer-focused organization.
Civic organizations are not that different from corporate organizations. During his 14-year tenure at the City of Asheville, Jonathan has brought a keen eye toward building trust in the community through transparency and data. During our conversation, Jonathan explains how advocates are your allies, not your enemies.
Speaker Profiles
Jonathan Feldman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/1jfeldman/
Jonathan Feldman Twitter: https://twitter.com/_jfeldman
City of Asheville, NC: https://www.ashevillenc.gov
Audio File
Featured Hashtags
#CIO #Data #Community #Trust #Board #CEO #DigitalTransformation #CIOitk
Podcast Transcript
Tim Crawford 0:05
Hello, and welcome to the CIO in the Know podcast, where I take a provocative but pragmatic look at the intersection of business and technology. I’m your host, Tim Crawford, a CIO analyst and strategic advisor at Avola. Up in this episode, I’m joined by CIO Jonathan Feldman. Jonathan is the Chief Information Officer for the city of Asheville, North Carolina. One of Jonathan’s core beliefs is that you can’t run it without being a customer-focused organization. Civic organizations are not that different from corporate organizations. During his 14 year tenure at the City of Asheville, Jonathan has brought a keen eye toward building trust in the community through transparency and data. During our conversation, Jonathan explains how advocates are actually your allies, not your enemies. Jonathan, welcome to the program.
Jonathan Feldman 1:00
Thanks so much, Tim
Tim Crawford 1:02
Jonathan. You’re the CIO for the city of Asheville, North Carolina, and you’ve done some pretty interesting things. The first thing I wanted to ask you about was this really interesting open data portal, especially as we talk about data enablement and the importance of data enablement on the CIO’s agenda. Can you talk a little bit about the portal and some of the other things that you’re doing around that?
Jonathan Feldman 1:28
Absolutely, so back in 2012 staff and I were getting all of these public records requests, and it became clear that it was completely insane to fulfill these in a bespoke way, right? Because what we could do if we had some automated means, you know, instead of fulfilling it multiple times, we could just fulfill it once. And so we started looking into ways of doing that, and the answer was there were a couple of government entities that were doing this thing called open data. There weren’t any in our neck of the woods. There weren’t any in our part of the world, but we thought it was really important to do interestingly before we ever went to the open data portal, right, which is an automated way of getting public records. We thought it was maybe a good idea to sit down with all the stakeholders and talk through all of the potential issues and all the potential needs that we were fulfilling. Right,
Tim Crawford 2:38
you mentioned the stakeholders, and I have to imagine for a civic organization the number of stakeholders takes on a markedly more complicated environment as compared to a corporate entity. Can you talk a little more about both stakeholders, but then how you start to create that political balance with your customers, both with regards to data, but just how you engage,
Jonathan Feldman 3:04
sure. So, for a public institution, I think what we need to remember is that the community is what should be driving us, right? That’s not true at all levels of government, that’s not true for all governments, but ideally that’s what should be driving us. The community elects the representatives. The representatives are generally some kind of board, and they generally appoint a chief executive as a public entity. We work with primarily the chief executive’s office, but we also deal with department heads, because it’s through department collaboration that we create public technology services. At the same time, the entire reason we exist is because the community elects an elected board, and so we’re primarily here to do the public’s business, obviously, and part of that business is transparency, but as you might imagine, in government there’s always this not reluctance, but there tends to be a fear of data, and this was certainly true back in 2012 more so than today, where we have more of a culture of transparency, but I think it’s even true in the private sector, folks don’t release data because they think, oh, it’s draft, it’ll make us look bad, we really need to close the month before we release data to anybody, and all of those I don’t want to be embarrassed, I don’t want to be wrong, I don’t want to be seen as failing type of emotions are what lead to folks not being as transparent as they could be, which necessarily then means. Stakeholders are less agile,
Tim Crawford 5:02
so when you kind of get into the head of understanding what that stakeholder looks like, what that customer looks like, is this a role that you, as the senior most person in it, takes, or where does your team kind of fit into this?
Jonathan Feldman 5:23
Well, we sort of have an unusual, or at least unusual for the time IT services team. We have a team that specifically exists. We organized, reorganized in about 2013 to have a team that is the public technology group, and it’s obviously my mission to make sure that the community gets what they need, but there’s also a team that’s specifically there to make sure that we’re doing not only public technology service deployments but also data engagement, you know, engagement with the community around data, and the community could be department heads, it could be the folks in the field, firefighters, folks who do water meter data collection, but a lot of times it’s just regular folks like you and me in the community.
Tim Crawford 6:23
Let’s maybe shift gears a little bit. There is this concept of moving not just within your own organization, but how you start to move the conversation in terms of the executives and in a corporate arrangement, the board, so the board, the CEO, the CIO. What’s your take on that relationship today?
Jonathan Feldman 6:48
So I think of the chief executive, and I know that there are a lot of businesses that have a chief customer officer, but I do think of the chief executive as the penultimate chief customer officer, and I think that’s true in the case of cities, right, the city manager needs to understand what’s happening in the community, and the city manager needs to be meeting with community groups and taking the temperature, I think in general, because we live in the age of really fast information transmittal, really cheap information and knowledge transmittal, and because there’s a kind of social Darwinism going on, right, where when you as a corporation release a terrible product, people know about it 15 milliseconds later, right. The same thing is true of government, and so I think the best way that a CIO can stay close to the CEO and the board is by staying close to the customer.
Tim Crawford 7:56
How do you stay engaged with your executive?
Jonathan Feldman 8:00
I think when you get to an organization where you haven’t been in that vertical before, your first mission is to learn everything about that organization that you possibly can, that type of organization. When I got to City of Asheville, I had never worked for a city before, so what did I do? I went and I took a municipal administration class, which is the class that you take if you want to be a city manager, so all of a sudden I was equipped with the vocabulary, I mean, I wasn’t ready to be a city manager of a city as large as Asheville or anything like that, but I was equipped with the vocabulary, I was equipped with the problems that most chief executives of a city face, and I have found that through my career, when I do that, whatever vertical I’m with, I tend to do a whole lot better. Right? If you didn’t know anything about HIPAA working for a hospital, you’re really going to be in trouble, right? And so on. So I think that’s probably the single most important thing you can do as the CIO of any vertical, is just understand the business, understand the mission deeply.
Tim Crawford 9:16
There has been some conversation that it’s adequate enough just to look at papers, look at data, and be able to understand your customer. What actions do you take to really kind of understand your executive? But then, if they’re really the chief customer officer in some ways, how do you understand who your customer is, who that stakeholder
Jonathan Feldman 9:39
is? I think you’ve got to get out of the building. I think you’ve got to get out from behind the desk, and you’ve got to be with the customer, right. So, for example, I tend to go to certain community meetings, my staff goes to certain community meetings, we get in with the various segments, because there’s always customer segments. Right, and so for a city it’s customer segments like the developer community, it’s customer segments like small business owners, but it’s also neighborhood groups, it’s also advocates, and we don’t need to get into this today, but I think one of the mistakes that a lot of folks in city government make is to treat advocates as not being a legitimate customer group, because, oh, by the way, they are right.
Tim Crawford 10:28
Can you maybe talk about what an advocate is? For those who might not understand, just a rudimentary kind of basis.
Jonathan Feldman 10:34
So, an advocate is basically somebody who’s saying, I don’t think things are going well, and I am advocating that they happen differently, and that could be something pretty tame, like we really want parking to work better. Okay. Well, we’ll listen to you there, and you say you want the ability to get parking information on your smartphone. Okay, we can do that, or maybe we won’t do that. Maybe there’s funding issues, or whatever, but it can get pretty hot too, you know. In the consumer world, product defects, you know, there are advocates about product defects in city government. Unfortunately, sometimes we have massive breaches of public trust, and when those massive breaches of public trust happen, I think that the responsible thing to do is to treat those folks as carriers of information on behalf of everybody else, right, because they’re the folks showing up to the meetings, they’re volunteering their time, they’re not getting paid, and yet they want something better for the community. And so I think, as employees of city government, we have to remember that everything that we do really should link back to the community, and so we should treat people who want to make the community better and make city government more trusted as really our allies and not our enemies.
Tim Crawford 12:05
I have to imagine that there are some complexities that come from that too, because you also would have to contend with someone that is incredibly passionate, maybe even to the point of protesting a particular, I don’t know, a particular statue or a particular way that the government is run or a particular individual that’s leading an aspect of government something that they are passionate about, and how do you ensure that you are bringing those voices in in an appropriate way?
Jonathan Feldman 12:38
Well, first I’ll say nobody’s perfect, right, but I think that the biggest mistake you can do is not try, right, to say I can’t be perfect, and therefore let’s just not even bother. One example would be when we had a video disclosed, it was leaked somehow from our police department of a body cam of an officer brutally beating an African American man unarmed walking home from work, and you can imagine the public outcry that happened after that, and there were protests, and there was a petition, and those are all things that we should have expected, because that wasn’t a failure of just the police department, that was a failure of city government, and everybody who works in city government absolutely wanted to do everything that we could do to make things, if not right, at least to do the right next steps, and one of those steps that the community was asking for was dramatically more transparency from our police department, and as you might imagine, that’s not always easy.
Tim Crawford 14:07
Sure, I have to believe that again it comes back to balance. You have to think about the benefit of the public, but then also there are other complications that come into that, where you might want to be more transparent, everybody might want to be more transparent, but there might be reasons that you can’t go into as to why you can’t be transparent.
Jonathan Feldman 14:30
Well, once you actually get everyone to the table, right, and I mean everyone, once you get the advocates, once you get the departments involved, once you get the data experts, and once you get, you know, management at the table, the funny thing is that when you bring up the issues in a respectful way, the advocates say, “Oh, I totally get that, and I’ll give you an example, it’s sort of difficult to work. Release what the demographic and the gender of an officer is right with use of force data, and use of force is when a police officer has to use force to subdue a suspect, and that kind of thing. So it’s kind of hard to release the gender and the race in some instances, for example, let’s say you have one Latina woman in the whole of patrol. If you release that data in use of force, you correlate Latina and woman, and all of a sudden now you know exactly who was applying that use of force, which is not okay,
Tim Crawford 15:41
sure.
Jonathan Feldman 15:41
And that’s a real example, and you know the citizens involved agreed to abstract that a little bit and do it more, you know, to chunk it differently.
Tim Crawford 15:51
Sure, sure, presenting the data in a very different way, so that you can still accomplish the objectives that everyone is hoping for, but
Jonathan Feldman 15:59
that’s right,
Tim Crawford 16:00
you’re not bringing other factors into the mix that you all agree shouldn’t be there. That the interesting thing is, we go through this conversation, and some that that would be listening might be going, okay, this is you’re talking about civic situations, but I see a lot of parallels between the challenges you have and the challenges that you’ve been able to overcome as their CIO with those that live in the corporate world. Let’s kind of shift gears a little bit into this concept of the traditional CIO and the transformational CIO. This is a hot button, right? The traditional CIO, very tech focused, it’s about the tech, and the transformational CIO tends to be more business or customer focused. I want to get your take on this, and also kind of what you think is causing this shift.
Jonathan Feldman 16:49
So, Tim, I can’t imagine not running it as a people business. I think that even if you have the best technology in the world, if the people are doing the wrong things with it, you’re just failing, and you’re failing hard, and so I can’t imagine not being customer focused, you know, throughout my whole career, through growing up, that kind of thing. All success that you ever have is by being helpful. When I was taking one job and moving my family, my 10 year old said to me one time, Dad, what if they don’t like you? What we’re moving, then what? And I said, Son, I’m going to tell you what my father told me, which is it doesn’t matter what else happens if you go into a job and you’re looking to help people, and it’s not about anything else, primarily. It’s not about the money, it’s not about the glory, it’s not about making yourself look big. If you go in there and you sincerely are there to help people, it’s going to be okay.
Tim Crawford 17:56
That’s great, and what a great teaching moment, too. Indeed, yeah, so kind of, as we wrap here, because it’s just been an absolutely fascinating conversation, and from such a unique perspective, too, it’s not the traditional corporate perspective, which is great. I think those differing of thought is is something that we need more of. What excites you most about the CIO role today, and where it’s headed. When you think about where it’s going, when you think about your role at the City of Asheville, as well as just the role as a whole, right, as a profession. What excites you most?
Jonathan Feldman 18:37
The thing that excites me most is that I think we are at the, you know, beginning, middle, or end of the end of it, and the beginning of something actually wonderful. When we talk about this digital transformation thing, you know, we talk about everything from customer focus, we talk about usability, we talk about conversion, we talk about metrics, but at the end of the day, if we really get there, it means we’re doing everything from lower training burden, higher trust in the organization, more useful software, more useful digital systems, which, of course, will then make fewer so-called shadow systems, we could talk for another half hour about that, and we’re going to start moving from a place where people can’t stand it right, which is what I call sociopath it, and we’re going to move to a place where we’re delighting customers, where folks say it is the best part of going to work, that’s what excites me,
Tim Crawford 19:47
that’s that’s a great place to wrap right there, and it’s very customer centric, very customer focused, that becomes your north star. Jonathan, thanks so much for your time today. And sharing your perspective on these different aspects, I think it’s really important, even regardless of your coming from another civic organization or corporate organization, there’s so many nuggets within this podcast to unpack even further and to learn from. Jonathan, thank you so much.
Jonathan Feldman 20:18
Thanks for having me, Tim,
Tim Crawford 20:22
for For more information on the CIO in the No podcast series, visit us online at CIO itk.com or you can find us on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, and Stitcher. Don’t forget to subscribe, and thank you for listening.
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