Rob Lloyd grew up a military kid who lived in 12 states and three countries and went to seven schools by the time he graduated high school. He hopes Seattle is his “forever home.”
The new chief technology office with the City of Seattle, Lloyd arrives from Silicon Valley, where he served as chief information officer and then deputy city manager for the city of San Jose, Calif. He previously held CIO jobs in Avondale, Ariz., and Ashland, Ore.
Lloyd said he likes taking on big challenges and helping communities, and he thinks Seattle and other cities are being challenged like never before by issues such as public safety, homelessness, downtown recovery and more.
“Seattle’s defined how it wants to take these challenges head on, and technology and information are going to play an integral role in how we collapse those challenges and overcome them,” Lloyd said. “That’s been my background and why I think the City selected me, and how I can bring, hopefully, some value to the mission.”
Lloyd is especially looking forward to getting beyond the walls of City Hall to forge essential partnerships with community members and companies that make Seattle a thriving tech hub.
“When you live in a tech savvy community, everyone tells you how you could do your job better,” he said. “And they’re probably not wrong.”
GeekWire caught up with Lloyd for this Q&A, which was edited for brevity and clarity.
What makes you the person for this job?
There’s a lot of overlap in what the city asked for in the CTO posting, and what I’ve done in my career. Strategic technology leadership, leading organizations through change in technology, leading multi-departmental initiatives from the technology lens, engaging outside of the City in partnerships — all of that is stuff where I’ve had a deep history, including community engagement and strong resource management through tough times.
It used to be that you could be bureaucratic and the challenges of government were very siloed. It could be just a transportation problem in a transportation department; a policing problem in a police department. Now when you look at homelessness and you look at justice reform and you look at climate problems, all of those are multi-departmental and multi-disciplinary.
So in front of us, I would say it’s no longer swim lanes, it’s water polo. And we have to come up with models and use technology in ways that allow us to bridge gaps and work together in new and novel ways, to have information, to have tools to take on these huge, multi-departmental, multi-domain problems.
What does a City CTO do?
At the highest level, the CTO leads the city’s use of technology, its use of data, its efforts on innovation, ultimately to deliver exceptional city services. More deeply, I serve as the principal technology leader for the city. So that means I have responsibility for the city’s technology vision, its voice on strategy, the resources, the management of technology. I report to the mayor and serve on his cabinet, and so I have the oversight of delivery of technology services for him within the city. It also means I lead an organization of about 670 employees. It’s about $270 million of operating budget, and about $24 million of capital budget.
The work includes engaging with residents on advancing digital equity and privacy, engaging on civic technologies and affordable connectivity. It includes the Emmy-award winning Seattle Channel. So, think technology, innovative services, information.
If I can wrap it up in one line, it’s using all of those resources and technology and information to unleash our people to render exceptional municipal services.
And if the mayor is somewhere and he can’t get a cell signal, that’s your fault?
[Laughing] It is absolutely my fault. Everything that’s broken that’s technical, you can point it straight to me.
Are there tools or software that you’re looking forward to implementing? How does AI figure in your plans?
There are a couple of areas I foresee that we’re going to be investing in some innovation drives, just based on where the mayor and Council and departments are saying that they need to solve problems. And AI is going to be one of those areas where we’re going to make a concerted push, I have no doubt.
We’re going to have to watch and be mindful how AI is impacting the environment we already own and manage, and that it’s not doing things that are breaking the tools or incorporating features or using data in a way that crosses the line. We have responsibility to our community and as a city, we have an ultimate imperative of responsible use.
AI and specifically large language models and natural language processing have an ideal role to help us overcome language barriers and ADA barriers for our community. It’s purpose built for that, and so in terms of access, applications, engagement, we’ll keep on investing in that, because it’ll collapse some of the barriers so that people can access services and access their representatives and access their government easier and better.
And then there’s administrative efficiencies internally. How do we do memos, policies, grammar, searches, redaction? Those administrative efficiencies can make one employee be as efficient as three or five. Queuing, dispatch, language barriers, emergencies, transportation flow and safety, flight detection and response, cybersecurity, fraud and tax enforcement, planning and permitting — these kinds of very bureaucratic and hard to understand processes. AI can actually help people understand things and get through complicated processes better.
Coming out of Silicon Valley, how do think Seattle will be similar and different in meeting challenges?
[They’re] very tech savvy, very diverse, very engaged communities, that are demanding and have high expectations. You have a lot of community partners and members that expect a lot, and that’s fair and it’s good. That was kind of the trick to my success in San Jose. It’s the reason why we were way ahead on using AI in 2018. We invented some digital services, created National 311 Day, worked with Zoom when they were a $20 million company — now they’re an $18 billion company. If you work with companies and community partners and nonprofits, you can actually pilot and come up with solutions and try things that are new and different. And Seattle has that kind of rich environment where you can cultivate, and I have no doubt that we’ll be able to do some of those novel pilots and invent some things and do some of the things that are game-changing.
With the tech companies we have here, the community partners here, we’re going to actually be able to do some pretty amazing things, and that’s very similar to Silicon Valley. So Seattle’s got a lot going right for it.
Tell us a bit about yourself personally. How do you use tech? Are you a geek away from work? Do you have favorite apps and gadgets?
I’m a big hiker, big family guy. I have two daughters, I’m a proud girl dad and I’m a geek. I looked at the apps I use the most and it’s in this order: LinkedIn, text, Yelp, Zoom, FaceTime. And if not for Maps, I would get lost. You’d have no idea that in the Cub Scouts and Webelos that I had an orienteering badge because I literally don’t know how to get anywhere anymore.
My number one and number two websites are LinkedIn and arXiv, so I am nerdy enough that I’m actually reading research articles. I was actually one of the early people who read the sentiment neuron article by OpenAI when they were just a nobody nonprofit, and I worked with them when people didn’t even know who they were.
I’m also a big fan of well run water and wastewater infrastructure. That really is geeky.
https://ift.tt/4zThAqS July 22, 2024 at 02:44PM GeekWire
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