There is a changing technology landscape and government is having to undergo a shift to become as effective as possible. There are unique challenges and opportunities of the public sector in adapting and innovating with new technology: legacy systems, regulation, data foundations, and workforce skilling. Listen as our experts share how they are driving progress for their organizations – guiding their organizations to be more agile, customer-centric, and collaborative – while putting both their employees and their citizen stakeholders first.
There is a changing technology landscape and government is having to undergo a shift to become as effective as possible. There are unique challenges and opportunities of the public sector in adapting and innovating with new technology: legacy systems, regulation, data foundations, and workforce skilling.
Listen as our experts share how they are driving progress for their organizations – guiding their organizations to be more agile, customer-centric, and collaborative – while putting both their employees and their citizen stakeholders first.
Featured Experts
Tom Kambouras, Chief Information Officer, NYC Employee Retirement System
Valerie Adamo, Chief Technology Officer, Ontario Pension Board
Sarah B. Nelson 00:03
Welcome to The Progress Report. I'm your host, Sarah B. Nelson, Chief Design Officer for Kyndryl Vital. So I think we're all really, really aware that the technology landscape is changing. We're all navigating societal changes, social political changes, climate system changes. And people are starting to make demands on organizations that they be more agile or customer-centric, or collaborative. And of course, the public sector is not immune at all to these changes. So if you add on legacy systems and regulations, data foundations, workforce scaling, you've got this soup of big problems to tackle. So today, we've got some fantastic guests with us from the public sector. And we're going to talk about how public sector organizations are and can leverage technology to better serve humans now and into the future. Valerie Adamo is the Chief Technology Officer for the Ontario Pension Board. An award winning innovator, Valerie has led public sector technology infrastructure initiatives throughout Canada in healthcare, workplace safety, and insurance and now pensions. And Tom Kambouras is the Chief Information Officer for the New York City Employee Retirement System, serving more than 400,000 public sector pensioners. And formally, he was the CTO for the New York City Public School System, which is the largest school system in the US. So we have a lot to cover. And let's just dive right in. I'd love to hear from both of you a little bit about each of your organizations and what you do in them. So let's start with you, Valerie.
Val Adamo 01:43
So the Ontario Pension Board is one of the major pension plans serving the public sector, the Government of Ontario. We are one of the oldest pension plans in Canada and one of the most complex. We have approximately 90,000 members, and we are about a $31 billion asset base. We are very unique in that we offer advisory services, if you remember in our plan, you have free access to our financial advisors to understand the role that your plan plays, and to understand how you leverage that to capitalize on your own investment plan and your retirement plan. And it's a very unique offering. And it's something about which we are very proud of.
Tom Kambouras 02:23
Here at NYCERS, so New York City Employee Retirement System referred to as NYCERS as short, we are the one of the five systems for city employees, the largest of the five - I wanted to add - that we have for the 400,000 members and pensioners roughly around 240,000 active members and another 160 to 170,000 ex-members that are receiving benefits. So these are defined contribution benefits where they pay much for the entire lifespan of a person. So large system serving a wide variety of public employees. We are quite complex; we have 6 tiers and 62 plans. So yeah, the complexity in terms of administering the benefits does become quite involved in because of everything that goes on for those plans and tiers.
Sarah B. Nelson 03:13
You know, what strikes me listening to both of you is how much impact you have on the people that you serve. One of the things I picked up on from - both from your bios - but some of our conversations also is that working in the public sector, like this is really personal to you. And I wonder if each of you could talk a little bit about that.
Tom Kambouras 03:36
It is personal. And it's a commitment, right? It's a commitment to you know, serving the public. And in the two roles that I've had with the city government, there was an impact. In my original role at the Department of Education it's about the impact of education in an inner city school system: quite large, 1 million children. When I was there, we had 1,380 school buildings that we needed to administer. Closing the digital divide - especially for some of the inner city neighborhoods - was a large undertaking. Here at NYCERS: similar thing, right? You are a career public servant, when you retire, you have a pension that you count on. And the way we administer the benefits and the pension, and the timely manner in order for you to receive your benefits is about our most concerns. We have a customer walk-in center that people come in; it was part of our transformation. We try to reach out and make these services available online, but a lot of people still like to come in because they like the personal touch. So it's about really, making everybody comfortable. So you had when you had a 20/30 year career as a public sector employee here in New York, we want to make sure that your benefits, you don't have to worry about receiving your benefit.
Val Adamo 04:46
So I spent the first 25 years of my career serving in the public service, first with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which is the workers compensation board here in Ontario, and then subsequently serving as an infrastructure management for the healthcare for the province of BC. And one of the things I learned in observing others, and in knowing what the job required of me was the great commitment, and the selflessness with which many public servants serve. And so what was compelling for me was the idea of spending the last portion of my career - and I've been now at OPB for over 10 years - and the last portion of my career serving those who served others. At Ontario Pension Board, we have a very unique purpose statement. Our purpose is really to serve those who have spent their time serving others, and to ensure that at the end of their journey - however short or long it may be - that their pension plan is there as a promise in return for all of the work that they have put in, in the public service. And for me, it's a very compelling thing, because, the public is a very large group of people, and no two of them agree. And so serving in the public is actually a unique challenge; I found the work to be more demanding, and yet more rewarding, because what you're what you're delivering are critical things to people in the in the execution of their lives.
Sarah B. Nelson 06:11
Both of you talked about serving these people in different contexts, like there was digitally supported and then there was in-person, and there was personalized. And I'm curious about how you manage all of that? And how can technology help you manage all of those different kinds of touchpoints?
Val Adamo 06:31
If it had not been for COVID, I think I would be giving you a very different answer than the answer I'm giving you now. But I would say that COVID presented for us an absolutely amazing opportunity to increase the way in which digital supported the staff of OPB. But it also allowed us to use many of the video conferencing capabilities that were available to us through Teams - in our case - and really create an environment where we got to practice first with each other. But then very quickly, we went to serving our clients in a video conference way. And so I would say we now think of it as a choice of our customers and our clients. And so I would say for us, it starts with 'what is the medium that we think is both safest and appropriate for the client?' And we go from there to understand how best to serve. And we use digital when it makes sense to do so. Many people when making big financial decisions prefer to have a person to speak to. It's more comforting, and it's more thorough, and there's no pre structured script. So I can ask any questions that I want. And I would say that the video edition has become a permanent part of our toolkit now.
Tom Kambouras 07:43
I couldn't agree with you more than Valerie, on that aspect of it and I do wholeheartedly - COVID kind of expediated that experience; it forced us a little bit, if I can term it that way. In the past, we were kind of set in our own ways, and we kind of did things a little differently, but they were good, they were effective. But this new digital means of communicating or with all the different mediums with the clients, actually has broaden the way we do customer service in a more effective way, more refined way. We're always looking at self service options, what we could actually kind of make self service. So at any day, during the week, the weekend at nighttime, late in the morning, clients could actually get their information. There's one thing to log into our website and get your information. There's another another way to actually be able to set up an appointment to come see somebody remotely, that we're thinking differently with everything. And going back to what we mentioned earlier, I think COVID has something to do with it. I think that's one of the positive things that came out of COVID. It forced us to kind of employ these type of mechanisms and enforce our workforce to accept them easier, because that was the only way we could do business and provide services.
Sarah B. Nelson 08:19
So, you've you've got a population. So pensions are by definition is is working with an aging population. And at least right now, not digital natives. How do you work with this population? Specifically?
Tom Kambouras 09:07
It runs the gamut, right? So like you said, we have a variety of people, some of our older population - like our tier one, tier two folks - still like the touchy feely thing, where they need to talk to somebody they need to be in front of somebody, and believe it or not, they still like to receive a check no EFT (electronic funds transfer). That's the gamut of what we were experiencing. So we have we have to deal with and make services available for that sector of the population where how some of the newer folks that are going out now are totally digital natives, they they like everything online, any sort of a transaction. They don't prefer to talk to somebody. But I think where we cannot dismiss is that you know, we need to maintain all these all the services, the gamut of the services, to be able to serve the population as best we can. Because we have such a variety and diversity amongst them.
Val Adamo 09:59
The only thing I will and add is that we saw a more rapid sense of adoption within our staff. But we also saw our staff extending the technologies that they were using in a hybrid world to their clients much more quickly than we thought that they would. And I think because we were all even - our clients - were doing it under duress of the COVID environment, there was a greater acceptance of the imperfections that were there in the early going. And we work together to resolve those because our clients were also encountering because they serve the public also, they were also encountering the direct use of the same tools for their services. And so I think that it was a massive force multiplier in the acceptance, and and subsequently, I would say, we are definitely seeing that audio/video has had a huge uptick in our client base, because they too, are more comfortable in the audio/video interaction with their clients. So I think in the public service, it was one of the positive outcomes in a in a force multiplier way.
Sarah B. Nelson 11:09
How did sort of data, AI, cloud, edge computing, how does all of that fit into your strategy for now moving into the future with it, but also, maybe in your transitions?
Val Adamo 11:24
On the OPB front, I would say that one of the key enablers for us was the fact that we began the cloud transition a couple of years before COVID. And so we were actually able to go remote, without worrying about the maintenance of this stuff in a building, and so on and so forth, to a large degree, because of infrastructure choices we had made like Cloud, and like remote DR, etc. And so we were positioned, I think, much more effectively than anybody understood, to go to that remote world. And so that really, again, helped us to sell the organization, the management team and the board, on the idea that these seemingly irrelevant technologies were actually critically important to the success of the organization. And I'm very happy to say we are now 95% in the cloud, I would say it's also caused us to refocus on our data, and really seek to increase our data literacy as an organization and seek to increase our understanding of the potential uses of data as use cases, as a part of our modernization. We embrace the idea that use cases will emerge and these tools will help us to respond sooner. I would say we're not yet really in a position to respond aggressively, but we're on the path to have that happen over the next several months, and probably the next year or two.
Sarah B. Nelson 12:47
How about you, Tom?
Tom Kambouras 12:49
So I'll start off when we were we had to go on and COVID, we were positioned already, because a lot of our services that our internal users consumed to do the work of pension administration, we have a lot of the virtual desktops, that allows us and aligned us to very quickly transition to the home user. We moved the entire agency in two weeks, basically, New York City's work at home policy was non-existent to that point; it was not allowed. So nobody was actually furnished with a laptop. That was the biggest crunch during that time. And one of our biggest struggle is data, we had really no data governance or data structures that were like standards, so we also were doing a parallel cleanup in terms of doing some of the data cleansing and profiling, so it's consistent. But overall, Cloud is the place to be; data center isn't a fad of the past. You can't afford to just spend $250 per square foot to keep a data center going.
Val Adamo 13:43
I would say there's two other enablers for us. One I would say is that we have an awesome cybersecurity program and an awesome set of behavior-based learning tools for our staff. And I think that that served us very well in building reputational trust with our clients. We are very responsive; if anybody in our client base thinks that they've got an issue, we'll help them if they're calling us to say, you know, did you send this or whatever we will help them. And I would say that that process caused the IT team to get much closer with the business. It also caused the IT team to get much closer with the board. And so I think that we've we've really helped advance the thinking within the organization about safe technology. I think understanding the relationship of technology, with the strategic direction of the organization and engaging the board and the senior management team in seeing how those align is also really critical to being able to advance and take on some of these new technologies in a reputationally safe way.
Sarah B. Nelson 14:49
What I hear you guys also are starting to point to is a question about how you work with stakeholders and the government, like policymakers or agency leaders. What is your relationship with them, often probably around a lot of these issues of regulation and security and data governance?
Val Adamo 15:08
OPB treats our stakeholders with the same respect. And same appreciation for partnership that we treat our clients and our staff. And so I would say we have an excellent relationship with our key stakeholders within the government. We understand the constraints that they're operating within, and we discuss with them the constraints we're operating within, so that I would say we enjoy a very trusted adviser status to the government. And likewise, they will work with us to influence the actual implementation. The setting of policy is theirs, for sure, but they will work with us to figure out how to implement that policy and what is a sensible impact on our plan, and then subsequently, on the actual implementation plan, so it's a very fulsome obligation, it's one that we live in all the aspects of our work, and honestly, I believe makes a huge difference to how quickly and effectively we can operate.
Tom Kambouras 16:04
Likewise, we actually work with the different entities here either at the municipal level, and at the state level, in some cases, on policy, or even law. For instance, the New York City has a cyber command center that they monitor all city entities for compliance, threats. Our CISO works very closely with those folks there they're back and forth on what the exposure is on some of the threat landscape. On the policy side, our Executive Director, through the board works very well with a lot of the older city entities and the unions. And lastly, at the state level, the pension is run at the state level, all the tiers and plans are defined at the state level, not at city level, so we have relationships going there as well.
Sarah B. Nelson 16:53
I'm wondering about how you attract talent, to be able to deliver the services that you do? And sort of part of that is where does sort of diversity work into that?
Tom Kambouras 17:06
I, as a CIO, have to worry about attracting tech talent. In this modernization effort that we've actually set forth, we also have an ODT component where we actually want to make sure our organization development and talent is engaged in how that next generation of worker will be based on what we're building. The other thing that we like to do is, as far as retaining talent that we've done recently is for our full-time employees this hybrid work work model that we're in engagement with actually was a good thing to keep people around, because not every agency adapted that. So basically, they were on site three days a week, two days at home, and we have the option to pick which three days or two days to work at various locations, whatever meets everybody's schedule. So we decided at one point in time, right before we came back into the office, I think a couple of days a week, very early after COVID, that our consultants are going to be 100% remote. So that expanded the talent pool now that we could actually recruit from because now the person didn't need to live geographic here; we could have a consultant from Texas.
Val Adamo 18:07
This organization, quite progressively, almost 30 years ago made a decision that they didn't feel that in the Toronto marketplace, they could attract and retain talent. Almost 30 years ago, they moved to outsourcing a significant portion of IT. When I came in 10 years ago, it would be fair to say that it was outsourced in a sort of a very traditional way, it was kind of a transactional sort of thing. And I believe in today's world, you can't have transactional partners, you can only have true partners. And so I would say we put a lot of effort and energy into building very strong relationships with sort of five key vendors: our security, side vendors, our infrastructure supply vendors, our application management vendors, our telephony vendors. And so from that perspective, we have have honed our talent in building great governance practices for that for the execution of overseeing someone else executing the work. We maintain all of our architecture, our requirements, our testing our project management, but the the technical part, if you will, is out sourced and we do that through public procurement, but then we work very, very hard to build amazing partnerships with our vendors. And I would say our vendors outperform by far. And I would say we have seen as time has gone on, we've seen our workforce shifting a bit so that we are attracting younger participants into our workforce now. And I think a lot of it has to do with the level of flexibility and the level of conversation that we have about why we're here. People want to provide great service, just not any service. And so I think when you're working in an organization that supports that passion, and does so all the way from the purpose statement all the way through to execution, I think that really helps. And in fact, when the Ukraine war broke out, we had had eight vendor partners who were living and working in the Ukraine. And we were checking in daily on where they were and what we could do to help them. I never imagined that I would be worrying about people in a foreign country and their health and safety. But there was an expectation, my CEO walked over and said, 'are the folks in the Ukraine okay?' And I would say our value proposition is, is much, much greater and much broader than what we pay. And for people for whom that matters, we are now an employer of choice.
Sarah B. Nelson 20:31
And what advice do you have for aspiring public sector, public servants who are interested in the technology space?
Tom Kambouras 20:39
This is an exciting time for somebody coming in right now. What's true about the public sector space is they traditionally, ideally, and collectively, we all agree that we lag behind some of the some of the private sector companies, not as much as we would have thought 15-20 years ago. But right now we're at the precipice, I think now, in my estimation, many of the public sector entities are engaging in cutting edge technology initiatives. They get to work on very exciting and new stuff. We are getting a lot of relationships with some of the local universities here in New York, and we have a co-op or internship program, to kind of try some things that they want to they want to get engaged in. Somebody wants to be a network engineer, the other person wants to code in Java. Back the days when I would the DOE, we had, I want to say about 25 to 30 CUNY interns working for us any anybody given the time, which a good chunk of them eventually became employees, because as soon as positions open, and they finish their studies, and we had open positions to put them in, they were hired. It's rewarding to see that, based on those opportunities, and circumstances that some of these people have stayed with the city, and they're making careers within the city themselves. And they're going to be longtime city employees.
Val Adamo 21:50
My take on the piece would be to say, it's a place of passion. And it's a place of conviction. And so I would offer that the business case is always more than the almighty dollar. And so if you want to contribute to things that are important to people's lives, and that can influence very large numbers of people, public service is the right answer.
Sarah B. Nelson 22:15
For each of you, what does progress look like?
Tom Kambouras 22:18
For us, progress is steady progress. Obviously, we know living working and living in the city environment or in a public sector environment, the speed to market or the speed to finish things is not as as it is on the private side, because we have all these other constraints and things that we need to deal with while we're doing our day-to-day work and delivering on some of these initiatives and projects. But reflectively, looking back and see where you were a year, two, three, four years ago, and where you are and what your roadmap is to get, and you have a roadmap to achieve certain things. I have 15 years of experience in city life. The city does not look like the way when I came in 2008; it's not the same.
Val Adamo 22:57
I would say for me that progress looks like people in technology working hand-in-hand. It's not an 'or' it's an 'and.' When we can make technology an assist and not feel that we have to replace people with technology. I think when we can find the right place to let technology do what takes speed and what takes sort of rote calculation, and let people do what people do best, which is helping each other. I think, for me, that would be the ultimate progress.
Sarah B. Nelson 23:29
Well, I want to thank you both very much for coming in. And I also want to thank you both for the work that you do. I think that the public sector is often underestimated in just the power you both have talked about the power to impact a lot of people's lives in really important ways. Thank you both very much.
Val Adamo 23:46
Thank you.
Tom Kambouras 23:47
Thank you.
Sarah B. Nelson 23:50
Well, I hope that you enjoyed today's conversation with Valerie and Tom; I know that I did. It was really fascinating to hear about these transformations in the public sector. The customers and the people we serve are really the central and most important thing. So thank you all again for listening to The Progress Report. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it with your friends and family that you think might also be interested in it. You can subscribe anywhere that you find your podcasts, and I can't wait to talk to you next time.