Public Records Management and the Future of Records Apps

Happy Friday, everybody. Welcome to In Case You Missed It, GovTech's weekly government technology news roundup, where we take a look at Some of the biggest GovTech news from the past week, give you our thoughts, our perspectives, and most importantly, what it means for the market and for the citizens that government serves. This week we've got a great show. We're going to talk about the broadening GovTech market and how state and local government agencies have more options than ever to meet the most pressing challenges. We also curated our top 100 companies in the government technology market, what we call the GovTech 100, for its 7th year. So we'll break down some of the highlights there as well as this GovTech App Store moment that's happening. Today's episode is also made possible by Optimir, and we're excited that we're going to be joined by Ray Carey, the CEO of Optimir, later in our conversation as he answers our questions about their recent emergence out of ArchiveSocial, Monsido, and NextRequest, and most importantly, what it means for digital communication compliance and community engagement. But first up, guys, let's talk about the week that was. What a wild roller coaster of market activity as we launched our GovTech 100, and I'll start first with some perspectives that I wrote on just what's happening in the market, what we call the App Store moment of sorts. You think back to the iPhone's emergence, there was no App Store at that moment in time, and a year later when Apple rolled out the App Store, there was this collision of developers and interested entrepreneurs and investors that came together and really created an entire new category and an entire new market segment. Now GovTech's not a new industry, but it's having a very similar moment. And I broke down some of the drivers that I saw behind it as you look at just cloud and you look at investor dollars and you look at all of the interesting dynamics that are happening here. I'd love to get, you know, Joe, your thoughts on this, 'cause I know this has been a market we've been following for a number of years. Tell me a little bit about what you see happening right now.

You know, when you look at these dynamics, to me what stood out about the App Store moment is How will procurement respond to this? You highlighted it in the article, the last, you know, 20-plus months we've seen the loosening of procurement that's facilitated the market to move faster, but now we're like, how are we going to sustain this long-term? How are we going to see the contract vehicles, the cooperative contract vehicles respond to this app store moment? Are we going to see those contract vehicles, whether they're state-term or cooperative, become the marketplace? And how are those organizations gonna respond long-term to this app store moment?

Jed, what do you make of all the craziness that's happened? I mean, we've interviewed a number of companies and market experts, and, you know, it just seems like GovTech is just now heating up. What do you make of this moment?

Well, to piggyback off of Joe's point, I do think the procurement issue is pretty essential to consider here. And we have to think about this in terms of teamwork. You know, it's gonna require governments to loosen up a little bit, and it's also gonna require our vendors also to loosen up some. But the other thing that I want to draw attention to here is the idea of looking toward the future. What, what are we aiming for? And Dustin, I want to go directly into your article here. You make a really interesting point here about in the future, what if you were able to obtain information using your voice or a text message without having any application pre-installed? You know, what if your phone could query any government law or service based on the context you provide through your decentralized identity, location, time of day, and other contextual inputs? The application and services are abstracted from the user. That last part right there is what really speaks to me, and it kind of gets my imagination going, like, how can we all move toward this point? And so again, it's going to take everybody working as a team to do so, both government and industry is gonna have to bend for this to happen.

Yeah, I think it's a really good point. And there was some LinkedIn conversation and chatter on this article earlier this week as we were talking about how do we make that happen, right? Who's responsible? Is it government? Is it industry? And I think, Jed, to your point, it's both, right? When we look at standardization, industry plays a really critical role in that. You look at kind of what Apple did with HealthKit and some of the other standards that they created to allow for, you know, all kinds of competitive interaction of data. What if government did the same thing? What if companies in our industry did the same thing? Government also has a role in this too, because they can change a lot of these things through procurement. I mean, imagine if standardization was an RFP requirement when an agency went out for bid for a system that they were doing, if interoperability was built into it. So I think we're going to start to see some of this change, but, you know, this moment is just starting. It seems like this market is hotter than ever. And, you know, kind of to that point, We rolled out our GovTech 100 this week, so year 7, as I mentioned, 100 companies that are moving, that are shaking, and that are really pushing the envelope in government. And what's really notable about these— this list is there's so many companies that are doing great work in the GovTech market, but these are companies that are focused on state and local government as a customer. They're focused on regulated industries like state and local government, and they're using technology to solve the most critical problems the government has. And so You know, we've seen this list evolve so much over the last 7 years. Joe, you've been involved, you know, from the beginning. Tell me a little bit about what stood out for you in kind of the release of GovTech 100 version 7.

Well, I think the consistency, the consistency in terms of how we're all seeing the market, how we're seeing the same market dynamics at play from the federal funding. You mentioned some of the financial activity behind it, that the number of new entrants on the list also stood out to me as as a positive indicator of growth. So to me, there's just a lot to like. And I think to me, whether we're looking at the shifts in the market to the growth in the market, it's the underlying optimism with what the last maybe 18 months have meant in terms of the digitization process of government, addressing the plumbing. We talked about that on our webcast earlier, right? The need to critically address some of the automation opportunities in government, the foundational aspects of dealing with local government or state government as a resident. There's still a lot of work that can be done, but these companies are doing that hard work and they're proving that there's a viable market here, uh, from those that are in the top 100, but also those that hopefully will be there next year as well.

Absolutely. And this market's performing for investors. I mean, we did a hypothetical thought exercise in our webcast earlier this week, and we took one of the companies that had IPO'd back in 1990 and said, if you invested $100 at that point, what is the rate of return on that? And we found it's about 12,599%, about a 24% annual growth rate of return each year. So, you know, this market is performing for investors, as we saw during the pandemic. It's recession-proof to a certain extent. But Jed, you know, one of the things that we talked about kind of leading up to this too was this great feature piece that Thad had written that kind of talked about a lot of this momentum. Anything stand out for you in this, uh, in this piece?

Yeah, Dustin, in general, I just thought this was a really well-done piece. Anyone who wants to know about the GovTech market and, and what's happening should go to this article immediately and read all of it. It's very lengthy, but it's not boring at all. It keeps it moving. The pace is great, and a lot of great information here. You know, one of the things that stands out to me, Dustin, going back to your piece, how this piece ties into your article You know, cloud is such a big deal here, and one of the things in Thad's article that really stood out to me said that 30% of cities have already moved 30% of their applications and systems to the cloud, and then furthermore, 75% of city technology leaders believe that they can move 30% of their applications and systems to the cloud soon. And that also holds for county IT leaders. And so we really are seeing the cloud become bigger and bigger and bigger. And the thing is, it was already moving toward this way because of citizens wanting dynamic services and things like that. But then you also had the pandemic that came into play. Also, the other thing too, off of the pandemic, is this, Supply-side problem that's going on right now. You know, supplies are not— vendors are not able to get supplies to governments as quickly as they used to. And so the cloud is going to become more important as these products are basically delayed. And we know those delays are probably going to occur for the rest of this year, if not into early next year. And so the other thing too is I had a conversation with someone from the Center for Internet Security within a couple of months. His name is Curtis Dukes, the executive vice president and general manager, and he said that many organizations, whether public or private, struggle to maintain basic cyber hygiene due to a lack of resources. And so what's his solution? Well, he says that small or medium-sized organizations in particular, which would include a lot of local areas, a lot of governments, that if they're having a hard time competing with larger organizations for the cyber talent that they need to be secure, that the cloud offers them hope. The cloud is sort of like not exactly a sanctuary because you still have to, you know, you still have to cross all your T's and dot all of your I's, but vendors can really help you absorb a lot of the resources that it takes to be secure in the modern environment.

Great perspectives. We'll make sure to put all of these links in our show notes, but I want to transition now to our featured guest today. He's a former Olympic swimmer and the CEO of Optimir, a 2022 GovTech 100 company. I want to welcome to the show Ray Carey.

All right, great. It says I'm in the show. Thanks for having me.

You are in the show, Ray. Thanks so much for joining us.

Yeah, thank you.

So maybe to start, we'd love to learn a little bit more about you and kind of your journey to the CEO post at Optimir. Share a little bit about your background.

Yeah, I'd love to share about my background. First, just, you know, I was listening in, and what you guys are talking about as sort of the App Store, these shrink-wrapped specific problems to specific sort of solutions solving specific problems in government, I think is spot on. And it's a lot of what we're trying to do here is take a very specific problem, have a very specific solution that is affordable, that can go from New York City to Duck, North Carolina, I know one of you spent some time in the Outer Banks. I'm here in North Carolina. I do think that's the future of software and it is the future of GovTech. So I thought I'd just mention that. But me, I've been involved in technology for 25 years, for my whole career as a banker and investor and a manager. I'm now the lucky CEO and janitor of Optimir. And I came to Optimir as the CEO of Archive Social, one of the building blocks here of Optimir. This is my third assignment in— the current CEO and janitor role. My last company was called Amplify, and I helped some of the world's largest brands like, you know, McDonald's or General Mills or Estée Lauder kind of harness the data in their customer communications. And that data was moving from traditional communications— think email and phone— over to social. So that should sound familiar. It's a powerhouse company now. It's got about 1,000 employees and continues to sort of help those global folks. But Archive Social allowed me to get back to kind of a mission-driven company, which was cool. Before that, I had a company called NeoNova, and we were helping roll out rural broadband from Alaska to Key West. And, you know, felt really good to tell my mom, man, I'm helping the rural broadband program. So Amplify was great, but it's nice to get back to a company that, you know, you can kind of brag to your mom about making your small bit of difference.

Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us. Optimir was recently formed out of ArchiveSocial, NextRequest, and Monsido as a public records powerhouse. Can you share more about the, the vision for this new company?

Yeah, you know, our mission here is to try to help government communicators build trust in digital communications. All of our communicators know they do their job because great communication is totally key to having a great community. If you don't have great communication, you're having a hard time building that community, engaging the citizens in the way that you want, but it's really hard to do. There are so many rules and regulations that our customers, government communicators, are subject to. It can sometimes be paralyzing. I just want to talk about the issue of the day, the landslide that happened, or what's going on with COVID but I'm paralyzed by all these regulations around data retention or ADA or FOIA requests or data privacy laws. And so that's why we brought together, you know, these 3 great companies so that, you know, our customers can focus on the message and we focus on them.

Ray, how does Optimir work with government agencies right now to modernize the way they manage public records and communications?

Yeah, I think, you know, back to this idea that we help them build, you know, trust. Because there's all these regulations and these regulations and rules, there's a reason, you know, there are— those rules are there in my mind to drive compliance, and too often they drive liability. It's kind of like, you know, saying we have speed limits for safety, not so that we can give people tickets. And so we believe it takes sort of a holistic approach to your communications, social, web, workflow. So that's ArchiveSocial, Monsido, NextRequest, social web workflow. And the issue in social, the biggest issue that people have is one of record capture. So unlike other forms of communication where I send it to you, the chain of custody is really clear with an email per se. You have it. The chain of custody on social media is really murky. It sits on servers. cloud servers, as we've talked about, at Facebook, at Twitter, and if it's gone, it's gone. Oftentimes they won't give it to you even if you're the White House. We've looked in the archive and 1 in 12 records is edited or deleted within a year in the archive. And so if you don't have a real-time version of those, you are missing a fundamental record of your government communication. So we work with folks on social to make sure that they in fact have a permanent record of the communication that they have. On the web, there's lots of issues on the web. You have to say, you know, comply with your policy, but the biggest issue that we're working with folks on the web is accessibility. Nobody would build a government building and in the parking lot not have parking spots for folks that, you know, have placards and need, you know, access, but we build websites that are not accessible to millions of folks all the time. And so we have to have that same mindset that what we do in the physical world, we have to be doing, you know, in the digital world. And if you get those 2 right, you know, we start there, you get those 2 rights, you're, you know, creating this massive volume of digital records, and you have to be able to produce those things without bankrupting your agency. And so we work with folks on automating their workflows, we work with them, you know, to handle time-intensive tasks like redaction. And then one thing that we've seen, particularly in the public records production space, is, you know, there's lots of, uh, we call them like, you know, oopsies, where people then produce confidential information. And so we scan all these records ahead of time and give them risk scores to keep you from accidentally maybe producing something that has Social Security numbers or, you know, private citizen data. And unfortunately, that happens at times. And so that's— One of the great things about having, you know, using technology to, you know, correct for what can be human process and human process errors.

Yeah, it's great to see you tackling these problems. Earlier this week when we rolled out our GovTech 100, I was, you know, giving my predictions for the year, and I'm super bullish about public records. And, you know, as you said, I mean, agencies are so stuck, you know, with the paper kind of mindset and paper processes. And, you know, what happens now in this digital world when you rely on Facebook and you rely on these other platforms and you have to be able to produce those records? It's such a critical challenge for agencies to make sure that they're a part of. So, you know, really, really excited about what you're doing. Now, we've seen a general trend that citizens, you know, are having shifting expectations, and they have greater expectations now on the public sector. You know, no longer do they say, oh, it's government, you know, they're old school, they can, you know, use green screens. They have much greater expectations on government to deliver services differently. And so those old ways of doing things are no longer accepted. How are you seeing this, the way that this is impacting agencies and how they should think about kind of the record and communication aspects of what they do?

Yeah, I think this is in many ways government is very unique and different, but in some ways it's the same as the rest of industry. And people that want to communicate with their citizens, with their customers, with their constituents, you have to communicate in a way and in the place where your citizens live. And that's increasingly Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and social media. You have to communicate, particularly in a, you know, a post-COVID world, in a digital sort of accessible way, and that means on the web. So we're seeing this massive growth in social media communications. One of our largest folks in the archive is the CDC. So just think about how much the CDC was putting out on Facebook 2 years ago and what's going on right now. It is driving this, the size of the archive. If I look back 3 years ago, our average public agency had about 4 accounts. So think 1 agency, 4 accounts. That might be 2 contributors, a Facebook and a Twitter. Right now, that's tripled. That's 12 accounts on average. So 12 accounts on average. The number of records per agency over the last 3 years, 3x, up 300%. That archive today has around 3,500 agencies in it. It just crossed over half a billion records. So what is happening is government is engaging in citizens where they live. That's a major sort of push for folks. An example of this, I was on with a school superintendent and he said, Ray, I really don't like social media. I really don't. I said, well, kind of, man, why are you talking to me? And he said, Well, my parents are in their late 20s and 30s. He was a superintendent of K-12 schools, and he said, if I want to keep a secret, I'll send them an email. They don't read their email. He said, I don't have all their cell phone numbers. If I need to get the word out, I have to do it on Facebook. Our government communicators are meeting the expectations of citizens and meeting them where they live in the way that they want to communicate. Another big change we're seeing is in the record space, transparency has always been at the core of public records law, Sunshine Laws, you know, FOIA and Freedom of Information. We're seeing citizens want transparency in the record production process, not just for the records, but where does my request sit? How many days? Who's approving this? How can I get back that? And so you need a system fundamentally to be able to not only be transparent, as a government, but to be transparent in the way you are being transparent, to sort of stretch the analogy. So we're certainly seeing those 2 big, big trends with citizens demanding that from their public officials.

You know, I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier, and that was accessibility. When you look at that, it's certainly been a major theme in our surveys. It's been a theme in some of our past guests as well in terms of what they're doing within their jurisdictions. How is Optimir approaching making records and communications more accessible to the constituents.

Each of our solutions, these— I loved what you said around these apps. We got solutions that they can go together, but they solve a very specific problem. The problem on the web is you need something to monitor your sites and domains. That is Monsito, the name of that product, and was one of the companies we brought together here. Fundamentally, I love when you have a combination of one, you can reduce risk for public agencies. There is more than a— more than one sort of demand letter per day in a public agency threatening lawsuits for inaccessible websites, right? So it is a place that there is a significant risk factor with financial implications, you know, for folks. But if you pass that sort of like money thing, it's just the right thing to do. Everybody communicates, wants to communicate in a way that is accessible to all folks. I haven't met one of our customers who's trying to build websites that can't be digested by people with disabilities. And so we are monitoring the websites across the board. If you look at our big agencies, they may have hundreds of people producing content on websites, hundreds of folks, and one misstep can really get them into trouble. So you need some automation. to monitor those sites and domains. Are they complying with the policy? Are they complying with WCAG accessibility guidelines? A little example of this for folks in the audience that just need to put it concrete is scan every single image needs to have what's called an alt text that describes what that image does. Somebody who's visually impaired, their reader can read that website. We scan the website and for all of these potential violations, these potentially risk factors, and so that, you know, it can be scored, prioritized, and then dealt with.

Ray, I'm glad that you mentioned the theme of compliance because that's something that continues to evolve as the years go by. You know, anytime you talk to government agencies, there's always a large group of individuals within that agency. It just seems like compliance is almost like their number one concern. So What are some of the macro trends that you're seeing impact record and communication compliance that agencies should take note of? And then second, how are you responding to these changes? Yeah.

And so, you know, there's more records, there's more lawsuits, there's more of these demand letters around accessibility. But there's one new sort of threat vector and one new, you know, issue that came up, started coming up about 6 or 7 months ago. that I really wanted to draw people's attention to, and that is the issue of social media blocking and viewpoint discrimination. Our system, we've been working with folks for years to archive their social media, but we started seeing this pop up where agencies were being sued because somebody was blocking users, didn't have a good reason why they were blocking users. Recently, there was one in Colorado State, $25,000 for a Senate president, city of, uh, you know, in, uh, Rhode Island, $7,000 for blocked comments. We have— we're seeing dozens of these every single month. And if you looked at the policy, most ever— all of our agents say, well, we don't block anybody. I looked in the archive, 80% of public agencies are blocking folks, and no one's writing down why. And, uh, we're starting to see records requests for show me everyone you blocked on Facebook. And where they're going to go through and say there are 8 specific, uh, sort of exclusions to free speech, and you better have a reason why you blocked those folks that is a sort of constitutionally, uh, valid reason, or you're going to have an issue with viewpoint, uh, discrimination. So specific sort of compliance with, uh, free speech and sort of First Amendment, uh, violations is something really new, uh, and active that we see growing. And so we built into the system the ability in the back of the APIs for Facebook and Twitter, we can get everyone who you've blocked and then create metadata where you write down, I blocked this reason for this specific violation. So when someone comes to you and says, you've blocked me, you can say either, no, I didn't, definitively, or you can say, I did because you violated our policy in this specific way. Here's everyone else we blocked. And it wasn't because they were of a political affiliation or they said something about the mayor's spouse that the mayor didn't like. And so this is a— it's a new real threat vector for folks because while our communicators and our PIOs are usually doing a great job, they have people that get access to their social media that may not be as trained, might be an elected official that goes a little haywire and puts their agency at risk.

I think it's a really good point because when you think about compliance, you don't always— you think about, you know, the records retention side of things, but not like, hey, the metadata on why you made certain decisions electronically that have implications on records retention requirements. So a great point there. So I'd love to learn, you know, as we think about— we just started 2022, you know, what's on your radar for the year ahead? What's next for Optimir?

Yeah, so we're spending a lot of time in data privacy. You know, we have a pretty big operation in Copenhagen, in UK, and GDPR and data privacy and how you handle consumer information is very robust. That is coming with CCNA in California, there's laws in Vermont. You can raise your hand if you've been assaulted by cookie banners popping up on websites in the last 6 months, that is directly related to law and regulation changes around data privacy. We've just introduced a product called Consent Manager, which is the first accessible the first sort of accessibility-driven cookie banner called Consent Manager. Imagine you do all this time on your website making sure your website is compliant and accessible, you get a third-party cookie banner and the very first thing somebody pops up in front of them doesn't have that same rigor that the rest of your website has. So I think 2022 is going to be a year of continued growth in data privacy, both regulations and solutions for us. We have in alpha a new product called Archive Chat. We are seeing modern collaboration communications like Slack and others get used in government, and that has the same duty of care that email and social media has. And so we're working diligently on that. And then we're growing. When you have these shrink-wrapped sort of applications that you've talked about, you can create a high degree of velocity. We add about 150 public agencies a month. We added 1,500 public agency customers last year alone across the 3 companies. And so we need to hire optimists. And that's officially the word of an employee at Optimere, by the way. So we got, we got a bunch of hiring to do this year as well.

I love it. So the easiest question you're gonna get today is where can our audience go to learn more about your company?

Well, one place, thanks to you folks, and I'm humbled and pleased to say, is they can go to the GovTech 100. That's one great place to do so. Thank you for the honor of being on the list. I think that was great. You can also friend us, you can follow us, or you can check us out at optimir.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us, Ray. We really appreciate you taking time to chat with us today, and thanks to Optimir for making today's In Case You Missed It livestream possible. We'll have all the links to learn more about Optimir and anything that we discussed today in our show notes, so please make sure to check them out. That's all the time that we have for today, so join us again next week at Friday at 12 PM Pacific for more GovTech news, insights, and interviews. Have a wonderful weekend.