How do city governments implement new technology program?
We spoke with Brenna Berman, former Chief Information Officer & Commissioner of the Department of Innovation and Technology for the City of Chicago. She was co-founder and CEO of City Tech Collaborative and is currently EVP of Strategic Partnerships at Dense Air. Below is a summary of our interview:
- What can cities do to be better customers for startups?
- Get rid of unnecessarily complex procurement rules and give clear lines-of-sight to real contracts. Solving citizens’ problems takes speed and intentionality.
- How did Chicago use technology to tackle congestion during baseball games?
- Data science + behavioral economics = safer trains. Chicago used ridership information to target straphangers with incentives to travel outside of rush hour, but still take the subway.
- Why is Chicago’s civic innovation system so strong?
- Smarter government takes a village. Talented devs and tech leaders can work with their cities to build software and help their fellow residents. Civic love for the 21st century!
Brenna, you’ve built a lot of government tech programs from scratch over the years. What’s your approach? Where do you start?
The traditional view is that you start with the policy and how to instantiate it into someone’s day-to-day life. In my opinion, that’s backward. You should be starting with what the resident of a city needs and what they want. I think a citizen-centric approach, both to government and the policies it’s putting in place, is most important.
When I was working with IBM, I had the pleasure of defining and implementing the veterans administration system in South Africa. In the US and many Western countries, we know who our veterans are because they enlisted in the armed services and there's a database of all their names and their service records. Veterans in South Africa were part of the rebellion, so it meant something entirely different to actually confirm someone's identity for the delivery of services when there wasn't an established organization that had been tracking them.
Not to make you pick a favorite child, but what’s your favorite project from your time as CEO of City Tech Collaborative?
I love all my projects equally.
One of my favorites involved the Cubs and city transit infrastructure. Before we get into it, I’ll put it out there, I’m a White Sox fan.
Duly noted!
Thank you.
Like a lot of cities, Chicago has peaks and valleys in its congestion on the trains. Baseball night games start at 7:05 p.m. Two train lines run from downtown up to Wrigley Field and on a weeknight, you want to get to the game by 6:00 or 6:30. All your game attendees are riding with the business commuters who are going home. In normal congestion, you as a rider might be uncomfortable. Chicago Transit Authorities saw that some of these trains were so crowded that they were worried about safety—that’s a step up from just being uncomfortable during rush hour.
That capacity creates wear and tear on the lines and the tracks. A single baseball season can impact the lifespan of those train lines by two years.
The gut instinct is just to put more trains on tracks. Well, trains are expensive. You need conductors and that doesn’t help the tracks at all. As much as we love our Cubs, we’re not building a train line just to get to Wrigley Field. There’s a similar problem with the Bears and Bulls games.
We had to flip the problem on its head. It was the professor who heads up Northwestern’s Transit Institute who said “Well, those are all the supply-side solutions. They’re expensive and they take years to implement. What if we look at the demand side? What can riders do to fix that problem, and how can we incentivize their behavior?”
The pilot, which became a fully implemented project, was to incentivize riders to travel outside of the 6-7:00 p.m. hour but not switch to a different form of transit. If they all move from trains to an Uber, you’re just pushing the congestion somewhere else in the city.
We worked with Ideas 42, the Chicago Transit Authority, Microsoft, and Cubic. If you’ve bought a transit card in New York or London (among other cities), you’re a Cubic customer. They run the backend of Chicago’s system too.
We built and piloted three models:
1. Only information. We tell riders it’ll be crowded and uncomfortable. Will that get them to take an earlier/later train to avoid it?
2. Small financial incentive. Chicago’s transit system knows who its customers are: if you usually travel between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., the city will give you a free ride in exchange for riding an hour earlier or later than rush hour. Not just anybody—we could target this.
3. Altruistic incentive. If you change your travel patterns, Chicago will make a $5 donation to a cancer charity on behalf of the project.
The results were amazing—we were able to impact 18.5% of riders, who traveled outside the peak congestion time but did not switch to a different mode of transportation. Any economist will tell you, that’s a huge impact.
Which approach won?
The free ride incentivized the most people.
One of the ways we tweaked the pilot going forward was how we communicated the information. In our first pass, we were sending out information on this program the morning of. Most people make their plans earlier than that because they have kids to pick up, a meeting after hours, social plans, etc.. It’s hard to change your calendar at 8:00 a.m. in the morning for an event that is that night. You probably can make tweaks if you know the day before that your commute is going to be miserable.
Most cities have very savvy public transit riders. They use it all the time and if you give them a little bit of information to make their commute better, they’re going to use it.
You transitioned city government from landlines to VoIP (voice over internet protocol). Chicago has 32,000 employees. That must have been a massive undertaking.
More! There were way more phone lines than employees, including all sorts of things in city buildings. They all had reception desks. If there was a security buzzer, that's a phone line. All of those and more.
I love that VoIP project for a couple of reasons. The cost savings were really clear. It cost us half as much to run a VoIP line as it did to run a traditional phone line at the time. We were able to eliminate lots of phone lines just by auditing what people were actually using, so the efficiency and those savings in the city's budget were fast and measurable, which is great and not always the case.
The city and the mayor had a huge commitment to fostering technology skills jobs for our underserved communities. We partnered with Cisco, local tech providers, and our city colleges to create an internship program where students across Chicago did a six-month certification program. They’d enter through our community colleges, come to work on the project, and learn on the job. Then, they’d be able to interview for a full-time job with Cisco at the completion of their piece of the project.
Being a Cisco-certified engineer is a huge platform for starting your career. More than the dollars we saved, I’m most proud of the number of Cisco engineers who are out there because of that project who might never have considered telecom engineering as a career.
How do complex partnerships like that come together, and how do you manage them?
It’s a little bit easier in city government than in other places. Oftentimes I was carrying a mandate from the mayor. The mayor had made it very clear to all of city government that fostering high-tech, high-paying jobs in our underserved communities was a critical goal for him. Cisco was always a big supporter of Chicago as a civic organization and still is—but I was able to say “Look, the mayor has made this commitment, and we are all responsible for helping him meet it. Here’s a way for us to do it.” Same thing when approaching the city colleges.
At the end of the day, partnerships work in city government when there's alignment around incentives. I was very lucky that the mayor set the policy agenda that made those incentives very clear. Creating partnerships was not always seamless, especially when you’re talking about sharing data across organizations. We still had to build trust in those relationships and work through the mechanisms of connecting organizations. But, we had the common driver of a single goal we’re all trying to achieve.
When you’re thinking about your relationship with the private sector, how do you identify who’s going to make for a good partner?
As a CIO, I had procurement authority. I was signing contracts. So, one half of my job was adhering very closely to the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago's procurement rules, which meant RFPs, etc., and fostering the vendor community to feel like Chicago was going to be a good customer. That's the traditional model of sort of building private sector partnerships.
On the non-traditional side, especially when we’re trying to achieve a greater good than merely a successful system implementation such as job creation, or where the city was taking on technology that was not yet commoditized, such as predictive analytics and open data. We had the ability to go and say, “There are hard problems out there. We know you’re working on them internally because it represents a challenge to your customers. Chicago is working on it because it’s a challenge to residents.”
I had pilot authority in putting us out there as an innovation partner. Sometimes that was through pro bono commitments, sometimes that was through more formal contracting vehicles where we were working on a product together. We were looking for partners who wanted to work with us because they saw value in what the city could bring to the table in terms of its expertise and the physical infrastructure we could open for pilots. The companies we had great success with were looking for a high-value partnership with the city and not a transactional one, and I think we were very lucky. There were a lot of those in Chicago and at one point we had more than 20+ companies doing pro bono work with our data team. That represented a huge extension of the resources we had internally.
Tell me about one of those data projects.
We worked with NASA and Esri to identify and predict heat events. Chicago is very good with snow. There is a lot of technology and data for managing our snow events. But, in major cities when there’s a heat emergency, you have vulnerable populations like the elderly who might not want to come out of their homes for safety reasons and don’t have a family member to check on them. We have had unfortunate instances in Chicago where folks have died in heat emergencies. There’s a strong interest in adjusting Chicago’s response to these events from a public health perspective ahead of time and an emergency management response on the day of.
At the time, publicly available weather data wasn’t letting us model when a heat event was going to happen. There have been far fewer over the last hundred years compared to snow events.
Microsoft was doing another project with NASA that had nothing to do with us. An engineer at NASA was trying to figure out what to do with all the weather data they’d collected. Luckily, Microsoft is a good partner and brought it to us to see how we’d use it.
I imagine the analytical modeling capabilities of NASA are helpful!
Yep. Their data allowed us to build a heat prediction model, but the city can’t really use something stuck on Excel or paper. That’s when Esri became critical. They have a huge market share of cities using their GIS platform. Being able to implement the data into a product so ubiquitous made our project’s reach immeasurable.
How did you come to join the Emmanuel administration?
I was home on maternity leave from IBM, planning to return, when I was asked by a friend of mine at IBM to volunteer on the Emmanuel transition team around the role of data in performance management. Chicago has had many dynamic mayors, but this was a huge sea change. We had Mayor Daley for about 25 years. Rahm Emanuel coming into leadership brought a level of both political and managerial acumen to the table that cities don’t always have in their mayors. He's an international figure. This was part of a trend, you saw it with Bloomberg in New York and Garcetti in LA, among others.
I volunteered a bit and got a call about joining the administration. Emmanuel’s approach to hiring was always to find the best and smartest people. He’d figure out where to use them or the people would figure out themselves where they're most useful. I did not join the IT organization when I started-- I joined the budget office. Anyone who's a government wonk knows that the budget office is where strategy is set. It is where the program plan for the following year is determined and tied to the funding to get it done. The mayor was coming to the table with a huge budget deficit.
That 2012 budget promised to be one of the most active budgets in Chicago's history and gave us the impetus to take on inefficiencies around all sorts of aspects of city management like library management or garbage pickup and look. I joined the budget office first and didn't move over to the IT department for a good year.
Did it take any convincing?
None. Obviously, there's a pay cut. I just had a baby. My husband was starting his own company. There were a lot of moving variables at the time, but I was in for two reasons. One, I was not born in Chicago (I moved there when I was 18) but it has always felt like home. and there are things about Chicago that make it a special place to work. I loved the idea of bringing home all the expertise that I had honed all over the world working for IBM to my own backyard. Then, to work for a leader like Emanuel, who was willing to let us take risks and try to do things differently was really exciting. He expected you to work hard and have sound reasoning for the risks you wanted to take.
The only thing he was not okay with was for you to say no. There's always another answer. The answer is never no.
Who were you working with on a day-to-day basis?
When I was in the budget office, I worked for the budget director, Alex Holt. Budget director is probably the toughest job in any city administration because they are the person telling the mayor, “No, we can't afford it” every time they ask to do something.
When I moved over to be CIO, I was lucky to find a strong partner in our deputy mayor at the time, Steve Koch.
NOTE: Steve Koch is also an advisor to Commonweal Ventures.
Steve really championed the work that my department was doing around changing the partnership between the IT department and other business departments like consumer affairs or transit. We were transitioning from a cost center that was just responsible for processing data and maintaining email to being a value creator that informed our business departments about the art of what’s possible with new technologies. Steve was a huge part of the success we had.
Beyond the mayor’s office, I would work very closely with the commissioners of other departments, because technology change in any type of organization is scary. There are always worries about being disruptive, especially when you’re a city department delivering services that are critical to residents’ day-to-day lives. You don’t want to mess with that. If they’re stable now, why poke the bear? I found amazing partners in those commissioners who understood that technology was a way to modernize the way Chicago operates.
What did success look like for your office and how was it measured?
Formal performance management was run through the budget office and the mayor's office. We had goals around project delivery and budget management that would be the same as any IT department in any company, to be honest.
That's not what the mayor is going to be evaluated on when he runs for the next term or when someone's writing about his legacy. That's going to be about the impact that you had on residents, and you can't really treat them as one monolithic group. In my tenure, we were transitioning as a department. We went from being purely an internal service organization running the city’s IT that residents might not ever see to being much more externally facing, doing things around open data and modernizing city services that residents touch every day.
Talk to me about pilots. How do they work between tech companies and the government?
In general, cities are pretty bad at pilots. Corporations and software companies love to come to city departments and say, “Hey, we'll do a pilot for you.” First of all, you need to have some kind of procurement structure around doing that in a fair way. Cities say yes because it's an opportunity to access resources that they might not otherwise have a way to access. But there are not usually criteria for how to evaluate the pilot or how to define what happens next. It’s rarely in ordinance. So, if a pilot is successful and there's a clear ROI or clear positive impact on residents, what happens next? If the answer is just to write an RFP, there’s very little incentive for the company piloting.
With a pilot, you want there to be speed. One of the ways Chicago did better was giving a couple of individuals in city government the authority to sign different kinds of pilots themselves. You want to be able to evaluate whatever the solution is quickly and decide how to move forward. A small group of us, including the Chief Sustainability and Procurement Officers had that pilot authority.
As CIO, I had the ability to do no-cost pilots with partners to explore the technology they were bringing to the table and how it would work with our current needs in the department. It also gave me the ability to create data-sharing agreements to support those pilots, which are often very important. That authority also allowed me to proactively reach out to companies and say, for example, “We're having challenges with sensors around air quality in the city, and I want to explore what's possible in a given community.”
Smaller tech companies, especially ones on the cutting edge, are not very stable organizations. They have a lot going on. Chicago is a very sophisticated municipal buyer. How did you think about working with startups long-term?
One of the things that the mayor wanted for me, as the CIO, was to engage with the startup community in Chicago and make us a better customer to them. If you can win the work, it can be a really great way to grow a company, especially when you’re on the smaller side. It can take a long time to procure but once you do, they tend to be relatively long-term contracts that are replicable to other cities.
Startups can have a tough time going to market with government. Chicago had two particularly difficult procurement rules. One was around insurance requirements. An IBM or a Cisco-size enterprise could meet them, but just about anybody else didn’t. The second was a requirement around the references provided during the procurement process. You had to be the prime contractor.
One thing we did on the insurance front was partnering with a couple of the largest incubators in Chicago, where a lot of these startups live, and put insurance policies in place at the incubator level that every startup in their portfolio had access to. That’s one way to reduce the risk and benefit the city’s economy and tech position.
The reference issue is solvable too. If you’ve been a subcontractor on a deal for implementations, you could still cite that as an experience that we could use to evaluate your stability and efficacy. If we decided to move forward with a smaller company and wanted to reduce the risk of that company going under or not meeting their technology roadmap, or any other challenge a startup might face, we could put the code in escrow. The same thing happens with bigger companies too. In case there was an issue, and the company was no longer able to maintain the code for us, we could take it in-house if it’s critical to operations. We never had to, and that wouldn’t have been fun to maintain.
How did Chicago’s civic tech community become so strong?
Chicago has some of the most ardent residents of any city I’ve ever visited. The ability to get volunteers for something in Chicago is relatively easy because Chicagoans want to help other Chicagoans. They want to help their city. If you’re a programmer, that’s your skill set to bring to the world. Hack nights and the meetups helped those people find a way to harness that. All we did on the city government side was recognize the strength of our community and find ways to inspire people to work with us by making government a more open organization and attractive partner.
That was our version of getting names on buildings. You know, McCormick Place, the Field Museum, etc., we forget that those were all the titans of industry that built hardscape Chicago, the original infrastructure. We now have tech leaders who want that same impact on their home but they’re going to do it digitally via things like allowing employees to commit a portion of their company time to city work. This is just the next phase of a deep civic love and commitment that started from Chicago’s founding.
Any advice for folks who want to get more involved in their civic innovation ecosystems?
CIOs are tech geeks like founders are. Look up the CIO in whatever city you’re in and if you feel like you could be helpful, not just a traditional sales call, chances are they’ll take a meeting because they likely have the same mandate I did: engaging and empowering their startup community.
You can also join! Government is a great place to bring tech expertise, even if it's only for a couple of years. You don't have to stay for the pension.
