Perseverance & People-First: What It Takes To Digitize A City Government

Everyone has a story about grappling with local government. Often mocked (or maligned) for its contrived bureaucracy, towering stacks of paperwork and painfully slow office clerks, local government is in need of a digital overhaul. The trouble is, when thousands of people rely on an existing system continuing to function (however slowly), it becomes near impossible to change it from within – unless you approach the problem from an entirely different direction.

I spoke with Joseph Cevetello, CIO of the City of Santa Monica, who told me about his introduction into city government, how he helped to create transformation, and why empathy is the most important ingredient in any digital transformation.

“Luck is the residue of design”

Although Santa Monica had a reputation as being “a leader in sustainability and for being on the cutting edge,” Cevetello was shocked upon arriving in the city in 2017 that “everything was on paper, everything had to have a wet signature… a lot of my colleagues said ‘oh the public loves to come to city hall and interact with us,’ and I would just laugh!” Because this has been “the way things were done” for so long, the City’s staff had been convinced that “looking people in the eye was the most important thing,” says Cevetello. However, given that the previous system was the result of an “edict” passed down to staff by the then City Attorney, leading to a mentality of “doing things a certain way because I’m required to do them,” says Cevetello, this change would instead be a result of collaboration and consultation. “If you own the transformation you can’t point to somebody and rail against the change,” Cevetello argues. Rather than just shouting into the wind that things needed to change, Cevetello instead brought together 75 of his staff and members of the public in a six-month strategic planning process “to identify where they wanted this change to go… I wanted them to collaborate and create something that they would own and stand behind, very simply it wasn’t my plan – it became the City’s plan,” Cevetello explains.

This process and ‘buy-in’ from city staff and members of the public led to very quick progress with the city’s digitization and, when Covid hit, Cevetello states that 90% of the staff had laptops with always-on VPNs so they had the exact same experience at home or the office – “we pivoted to working completely off-site within 36 hours,” Cevetello says. Alongside a partnership with ServiceNow, a cloud-based platform company that delivers digital workflows, the city was also able to pair that ‘back-end’ work digitizing staff workflows with a front-end app for the public, which “made a huge difference because it allowed us to continue the same city services under Covid as part of one digital ecosystem,” says Cevetello, “that no other city was in a position to do.” “We got lucky that this flexibility timed so well with the pandemic,” he continues, “that to me was helping people transform and change – and the employees owned that change process,” he continues.

Digitizing empathy

When discussing how he encouraged his staff to ‘own’ the change to digital working, as well as building on their suggestions for how to change things, Cevetello repeatedly came back to the concept of empathy as a key function of any change process. “It started with empathy, and I think the city is starting to understand that people want this frictionless experience,” he states. This idea of empathizing with the end-user and tirelessly trying to understand just what people want was clearly hugely important to Cevetello, and he gave an interesting example of just how important understanding “the customer” is in such a project:

“Whenever I told people I worked for the city, invariably they would tell me they’d been waiting months for X… there was always some bureaucracy hindering them. The head of the planning group knew that people having to come in and present documents was a pain point, but he was very much ‘doing the best with what we have’ and thinking within the existing model. I recorded a conversation with my physician one day who had also been stuck in some planning issue for months, and when I showed my colleague the transcript it blew his mind. Nobody had spoken with him about how terrible their experience of the service [was]… He actually called me up and said ‘I get it now, I kept thinking if we just change this or that a little bit then we can fix it.’”

Simply by showing his colleague that the current system was not helping ‘the customer’ (Cevetello “defines [his] role as trying to improve the experience of our customers”), Cevetello was able to appeal to the empathy that his colleague had not been able to tap into in the old system. “When you think a system is working, it becomes easier to convince yourself that by doing a little more work within the model, things will change,” says Cevetello. “I try to empathize with the person at the end of the chain and understand all of the roadblocks that people are experiencing… by doing that you become somebody who challenges, not somebody who maintains or tweaks [the system].” Working from a place of empathy, Cevetello challenged the belief that the existing system was ‘the best we can do’, showing that the work needed to change was far more effective than ‘tweaking’ the system from within. “I was new to government but if I had been working within that system previously I don’t know if I would have been able to empathize as much,” says Cevetello, “It’s about getting outside of that mental model and finding empathy.”

Humanizing digital transformation

Digital transformation is most often introduced to an organization by someone at the top who wants to find more efficiency, increase productivity, and use the latest advanced technology to do so. But digitization doesn’t have to be so clinical, and speaking to Joseph Cevetello about his very human approach towards digitizing Santa Monica’s governmental processes showed that putting people first is always the most effective way to start any transformation project. As Cevetello puts it, “It takes a lot of time and energy to listen and find out what people’s real problems are… but that’s how you apply technology successfully.”