Tanya Hannah from King County, Washington joins me to chat everything from use of the cloud to employee engagement. We'll tap into some advice for civic leaders on how to leverage data, talent and scalability through tech to deliver a more accessible and available government.
Tanya joins the Govlaunch Podcast to share her story and to encourage other public sector leaders to think about ways that they can be cloud first, mobile first, and to incorporate omnichannel engagement and strategies for meeting the public wherever they're at 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
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Featured government: King County, Washington, USA
Episode guests: Tanya Hannah, Director and Chief Information Officer
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. Today, Tanya Hannah from King County, Washington joins me to chat everything from use of the cloud to employee engagement. We'll tap into some advice for civic leaders on how to leverage data, talent and scalability through tech to deliver a more accessible and available government. Tanya, thanks so much for joining me today. Let's start by having you introduce yourself and what you do for King County.
Tanya: (00:49)
Lindsay, so glad to be here. I'm Tanya Hannah, chief information officer for King County, Washington. Our technology spans over 64 lines of been business, whether it's healthcare, transportation, environment and sustainability to public safety and general government administration.
Lindsay: (01:13)
Well share with us briefly some core objectives for King County in the realm of innovation.
Tanya: (01:19)
Wow. You know, King County is a regional government that supports nearly 2.3 million residents and King County delivers services and products that must meet the needs of the people who live, work, play, or do business here. And quite frankly, our goal is simply to be better, do better, than other governments. To be literally the best run government for the communities we serve. It's about ease and convenience for those who interact with the county. We also think about how we can be efficient knowing that time is money for employees and the public, and we need to be good fiscal stewards of taxpayer dollars. It's also about leveraging technology to improve people's quality of life and support executive priorities, climate action, you know, sustainability, things around supporting kids and ensuring that kids are off to a great start so that they can thrive here within King County.
Lindsay: (02:39)
That's great. And overarching themes that I think a lot of local governments are looking towards, Wanna get down to the nuts and bolts in this episode, more specifics on, on how you keep focused on these types of objectives. King County is the 12th largest county in the US. A lot of local governments out there probably have fewer members of their community than you do employees across all your departments, so with an organization this large and complex, what would you say keeps your team or teams focused on these core objectives?
Tanya: (03:14)
You know, there are a couple of the areas that I focus on and the first one is around having a shared purpose. We are here to serve the communities and tech can enable it. So how do we understand where the needs are greatest and how can we best help, uh, county employees which there are over 16,000 of them,be able to leverage that tech to deliver, uh, products and services and information in the ways that the community needs it. The second area that I'm particularly focused on is employees and engagement. And how do we recognize, uh, the contributions of each and every person is tied to the mission of King County, right? Cuz we're better together. And I think that also helps us to attract, retain, and grow our talent here at the county. And then finally,I have a saying that today's disruptions are real, tomorrow's new normal, and how do you lead through change and recognizing that the world is constantly changing, certainly technology, um, and the acceleration and use of it is occurring at a breakneck speed.
Tanya: (04:34)
And what are those particular opportunities we have to reimagine the way we're delivering services, how can technology be the enabler, whatever comes next? And so I think we all, whether you're a smaller or a large jurisdiction, you know, I believe those are the key components, right? Having shared vision and purpose as really drive employee engagement. And then how do you lead through change? I think that can set a course, particularly as we see the rapid acceleration, um, of technology. Right, right. You know, over the last two years.
Lindsay: (05:34)
Of all the initiatives you've been in and this could even include cool technology rollouts that you've been involved in. Is there one that you're particularly proud of?
Tanya: (05:44)
No.
Lindsay: (05:45)
Or one you think would be really cool for the community to learn about.
Tanya: (05:48)
Oh, there are so many. We have a couple things that I'm particularly proud of is our omnichannel engagement, really thinking about how do you leverage all of the digital, uh, channels? how do you leverage all of the digital channels to meet the public where they're at, whether it's phone, web, video, chat, digital assistance, um, you name it like we're there and how that will shape future interactions. I'm also particularly happy about, um, our work in doing inclusion and really understanding that whether we're talking about digital payments.
Tanya: (06:32)
How do you serve the under-bank or unbank, or thinking about accessibility and not forgetting about our residents that have hearing or site or ambulatory impairments. Just all of the work that we can do to ensure that everyone can participate, whether it's, internet services. I think we've done an amazing job around modernization, leveraging cloud mobile to offer, you know, products and services that meets the communities needs. And then probably finally is data, right? Data is the heartbeat of digital transformation and you can't really unlock organizational business value without it. And our work with data has been off the charts.
Lindsay: (07:31)
Yeah. And you have a lot of it.
Tanya: (07:33)
Yes.
Lindsay: (07:35)
So I'm really glad you brought up data. It's a hot topic in local government, obviously data driven decision making, how to get data faster, be more transparent with your data. Curious, what are some of the unexpected or less obvious areas you've seen your data work has had a positive impact in King County?
Tanya: (07:55)
I think over the pandemic really watching leaders and even employees at all levels of government recognize the importance of data. You know, whether it's from the strategic value, side of things or just operational and how do you do continuous improvements? When we think about all of the complex opportunities that government has, whether it's with homelessness, health, public safety and taking the data and really trying to optimize your operations or understand whether or not policy decisions are working, are like really huge benefits to government.
Tanya: (08:53)
During the pandemic, we had like all of the COVID dashboards where you could look at it locations and see where outbreaks were occurring, or just trying to understand, um, the strain on hospital systems. Without data, like we would not have been able to do any of those things. So particularly proud to see that all of our work over the last five years has really grown into something special. Yesterday my team kicked off a month-long datathon, which is, bringing in speakers from state and local government to speak on topics of privacy and cybersecurity, equity, health, and transportation. And I am just amazed at how this work has blossomed over the last five years.
Lindsay: (10:00)
Well, you're a technology guru and a lot of people don't know that all this data work, there's a significant amount of infrastructure behind, you know, where are you storing this data or those types of things. So, and these are questions that innovation technology departments are grappling with. King County has migrated to the cloud as a cheaper alternative to these on-prem data centers. A lot of local governments are looking to do this, but there are a lot we speak to that are still very hesitant of anything cloud-based. what would you say have been the biggest benefits to migrating off-prem and into the cloud?
Tanya: (10:37)
First, I'd just like to say that cloud isn't necessarily cheaper or less expensive alternative to data centers. There's a whole funding and economics model behind OPEX and CapEx and I would encourage every government to really look at the numbers to understand where the value proposition is. But, what cloud does allow is agility, mobility, and scalability. So you can innovate by offering new or better delivered services.
Tanya: (11:18)
You can reach, um, and connect with your public anytime, anywhere, you know, hashtag this connected government. It allows you to think about resiliency and continuity of operations. During the pandemic, a lot of governments, small and large had to go offline because they could not scale or they didn't have the mobility necessary to continue operations. And I think a lesson learned coming out of the pandemic is when there's a crisis going on, where do people go and look, they're looking at government. So what are ways that we can always be available? I think is key.
Lindsay: (12:19)
So you're located in Washington, which is right around the corner from both Amazon and Microsoft. you're leveraging both of them for cloud services. You wanna break down what you're using each of them for.
Tanya: (12:31)
Oh, that one is actually a great question. Microsoft and Amazon are both strategic partners, too. Their headquarters are here as well. The way we think about which, which cloud is appropriate, we think about the workloads. We actually put, um, our workloads in the most appropriate cloud whether it's AWS or Microsoft Azure. We also have our data actually in, both clouds as well. And there are some important considerations. People need to think about. One, is there talent? And I'm talking about the employees that they have on staff understanding what are those particular skillsets, et cetera. If you're like a C+ kind of shop or .net, Microsoft is probably much more appropriate. There are also the capabilities and functionality that you need to consider. Like if you wanna do cognitive services, one vendor may be preferable over the other.
Tanya: (13:56)
And then finally, you also need to think about the applications you're running, because sometimes that determines where the appropriate workload should be. if a vendor has tuned their application for one cloud over another, that may influence where the application will run best. So there are multiple factors that go into the decision of where do you place workloads and particularly here at the county where we have on-prem to AWS to Azure. You know, we're thinking about all of our workloads appropriately, but also how do you have continuity of operations, particularly when we're thinking about disaster scenarios, right? There's cyber out there and all of these things, how can you recover? And I think that is a benefit that I don't think we acknowledge enough about where to, how to leverage cloud and where to place our workloads.
Lindsay: (15:11)
Right. And a benefit that maybe some smaller local governments are thinking is probably not a reality to have two cloud providers and OnPrem and business continuity for every scenario. You have the best of, I guess, all worlds there. We talked about up this a little bit before you can make services more accessible, easier for your community to interact with the county. you wanna share a few specific examples.
Tanya: (15:35)
Things that we're doing here out in the county is, our Omni channel engagement. Being actually in the cloud has allowed us to leverage,chat, video, phone. Just having the ability to scale, in ways that we never even thought about pre pandemic. When I think about one of our success stories was during vaccinations and having our voice response be able to schedule people, send text messages, do call outs if there were extra vaccines at the end of the day and alert people in a certain area that, Hey, if you can be here within 30 minutes, you could get a vaccine. That's what being in the cloud allows because you can be mobile first and you have a broader reach in the way that you, you meet your public where they're at. Other things that have occurred, include what we've done on the back-end with our data and being able to run advanced analytics, join datasets so that we can really understand a person whether it is in our public safety arena or in our health and human services. And I think we're gonna see more and more innovation occur within this space.
Tanya: (17:21)
We've also done things around robotics process automation RPA, and really thinking about intelligent document processing. And how do you redact PII and have bots like help you within your workflows? That's one of one of my favorites. So we're gonna see, continue to see more and more innovation occurring, and that's where we can grow and develop our talent because they're working on the latest and the greatest.
Lindsay: (17:59)
I love that last example that you give. As a resident, I'm like, yes, please automate as much of these. Why do to fill out the same form? Do you not know this information about me already, a micro chip somewhere in here? Like don't, you know,? so I wanna pivot a little bit and talk more broadly, would love for you to share what you think is the biggest challenge local governments face today, regardless of size.
Tanya: (18:23)
I think what we're seeing, particularly as we come out of the pandemic is what does this, and I hate to use this quote unquote, new normal look like. There's been much talk around, do employees want to come to work five days a week as we did pre pandemic, or has the pandemic really altered the ways in which we, as employees want to engage with our employers? And not only that, what does the workspace look like in terms of physical? Because, you know, you used to be crammed together and then we've kind of gotten conditioned for social distancing. And that's being brought into our physical spaces and how they're designed, whether or not we're a full 40 hour work week within the office, or is there a hybrid. And it's also factoring into whether or not we're gonna even retain our talent.
Tanya: (19:36)
There's much to be said about the great resignation and whether or not employees are going to look for other opportunities that meets their needs. There was a study that I looked at that said,
Even more so than compensation, employees who have the ability to work remotely or hybrid are more, more likely to stay with their current employers than those that want to force you to come into the office every day. And I think we're all in this experience together, and it's gonna be a fascinating, couple of months and, you know, into the next year of what, what really transpires.
Lindsay: (20:32)
Are there any strategies your county or department is trying to really mitigate the turnover and promote employee engagement? I know there's a lot of unknowns, but anything, anything you're trying that maybe others would wanna try?
Tanya: (20:47)
So back in late 2020, early 2021, all of the county departments and agencies really sat down to discuss what does the future of work look like? And don't get me wrong. The future of work is now. but what does it look like? And do we have opportunities to reimagine the way that we're providing services to the greater, the greater community? And so every department really is thinking about what does the future mean? Um, and most departments except for those where you really need to be on site to perform your work such as transit operators, right? You can't really do that. And I even have folks that support 911, some of that, you really have to be there, uh, to do your work, but what does it mean for everyone else? And I think most departments, agencies landed to hybrid where you're in the office one or two days a week to fully remote, which is what my team is doing.
Tanya: (22:05)
I'm not sure where the experiment is going to go, but we all need to think about how do we make a brand new employee experience for our teams as well as, how do we think about the public that we're serving?
Tanya: (22:26)
We've done innovations that I'm particularly proud of, like our jury selection during the pandemic. It moved online and we petitioned the State Supreme court to keep it on online, right? You just dial in instead of coming downtown. We've also pivoted in the way that we deliver some of our services. Downtown, you would have to go to how many other different buildings just to conduct business with the county and opening back up, which, our offices opened just the other day after two years of being shuttered to the public. Now you can only go one place and you can handle all of your business in one location. And pre-pandemic that wasn't even on the roadmap. So I think the pandemic has certainly been a good chief innovation officer and helping governments small and large really rethink How do you operate in a modern time and how can technology, um, be the enabler and or the driver of these changes?
Lindsay: (23:49)
Any last encouraging advice you wanna leave our listeners with?
Tanya: (23:53)
It is such an exciting time to be in tech, particularly in public sector. I think we all need to seize the opportunities that the last two years has brought us, and really try to think about ways that we can be cloud first, mobile first, think about our data, think about omnichannel engagement and how you can meet the customer, the public, wherever they're at 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Lindsay: (24:33)
These are great points. And your role is heavily involved in technology, but we really didn't talk about technology. We talked about staff engagement and more the leadership that you're involved in. And so I really appreciate you showing all your advice on behalf of your team and King County. And we look forward to continuing to follow your innovative work.
Tanya: (24:52)
Absolutely. This has been so much fun, Lindsay.
Lindsay: (25:01)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch, the Wiki for local government innovation. You can and subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcast. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki@govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.