Former county CIO reflects on lessons learned from decades in government

When Steve Monaghan became the first chief information officer of Nevada County, California in 1999, few agencies had internet access, not many staff had emails and they were focused on reacting to problems and fixing them, rather than changing systems for long-term success.

“They never had the time, the capacity to actually work on the business to put in systems and procedures and roles and responsibilities and documentation,” Monaghan told Route Fifty during a wide-ranging interview recently. “Instead of patching this in two hours and then doing it again next week, let's spend 10 hours and do it right. They could never figure out how to spend 10 hours to do it right, even though over the year, it would have saved them dozens of hours. That was the culture I walked into.”

It took time to turn the organization around, but he appears to have been successful. Nevada County placed in the top five in the Digital Counties Survey by the Center for Digital Government and the National Association of Counties for 20 straight years, with six first-place finishes. And now, Monaghan has released a book outlining his experiences in the rural county in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and what every government tech leader can do to make their teams perform more effectively.

In short, technical skills and the ability to quickly resolve issues will only get people so far as government technologists. They also need to focus on a healthy IT organization, Monaghan said, which includes building strong values, structure, culture and service to act as a true partner in government, rather than as a vendor.

“There's a difference between being an IT expert and being an IT service delivery expert,” Monaghan said. “I always use the automotive analogy. Everybody knows how to drive a car, that doesn't mean they can work on a car. Some people work on a car on the weekends, but that doesn't mean they could run an auto shop. And people who run an auto shop wouldn't know how to do fleet maintenance for an insurance company with 40,000 vehicles. It’s very different scale and different perspectives, and enterprise IT follows the same path as well.”

Getting there is tricky, however, and Monaghan said the biggest barrier is making sure that employees can find time to do more than just fix problems. That may mean having a certain group of people picking up another’s work while they document a process or fix a system that constantly breaks, but generally everyone must feel like they are valued and their work is important to achieve those aims.

“It takes that mutual feeling of, we're all in this together, we're looking out for each other, and that leads into the whole concept of organizational health and building a healthy organization,” Monaghan said. “It all comes from culture; it all comes from organizational health. If you don't have a healthy organization, employees are just going to do the minimum, so they have to feel like they really matter, that they're important, that they're doing meaningful work, it makes a difference, they're valued.”

Those kinds of capabilities, then, are not technical skills so much as they are leadership and people skills, which Monaghan acknowledged colleges and universities “don't teach that stuff to us in our computer science degree program.” But it speaks to how tech leaders’ roles across government have changed, with CIOs at the state level also becoming less focused on being technologists and instead focusing on managing vendor and governmental relationships, people and organizational change.

Artificial intelligence is throwing uncertainty into those efforts to manage change and modernize legacy technology systems, especially amid ongoing employee anxiety over whether AI will replace their jobs altogether rather than augment them. Government leaders cannot rely on new tools to clear out their technical debt, help them deal with a wave of employee retirements and create capacity among those who are left while also helping find millions of dollars in the budget, Monaghan said.

“You're not going to find the solution in the budget line, you're not going to find the solution in buying a new tool or doing some big IT project, you're not going to find the solution in hiring more staff,” he said. “What you have to do is take care of your team, you have to build your organization, the machine that delivers IT services. Work on that machine. When the budgets are tight, that's great because it gives you capacity to actually work on the organization because your customers don't have a lot of money to be demanding new projects from you."

Monaghan’s book is free, something he said is his way of “paying it forward.” In the meantime, it is incumbent on government leadership to build relationships with their technologists and provide them the necessary support. They should also be encouraged to break down organizational silos and work together, he said.

“A CIO can only be as successful as their leadership team, and the leadership team magnifies and compounds and makes what they want to do possible,” Monaghan said. “I think a lot of CIOs get caught up in the major projects, the politics of the organization, and they let their managers run their operational units individually. They don't spend enough time pulling them together to work as a team and to measure success as a team rather than those individual silos.”