Technology vs. Government

Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome to another episode of GovTech's In Case You Missed It, where we speak with thought leaders around GovTech to identify innovations, market trends, and issues that we believe you need to know about. Today, our special guest is the Honorable Lloyd Levine, who served in California State Assembly from 2002 to 2008, and he's also co-founded the Center for Technology, Society, and Policy in the School of Public Policy at UC Riverside, where he's currently a senior policy fellow. So Lloyd, welcome to In Case You Missed It.

Thank you very much, Joe. Good to be here.

So in addition to doing all those, I know our paths have also crossed professionally, where you are also a national senior executive with T-Mobile, helping them on the state government strategy front. But for those of our audience that might not be that familiar with you, please tell us a little bit more about your background and your work in GovTech.

Oh, sure. No, happy to do that. Yeah, I've been a lifelong political junkie. really, for me, you know, a lot of people love politics. I like policy. I really love public policy. Politics is what gets you to the table to do public policy. So when I served in the legislature, I chaired the Committee on Utilities and Commerce. We had jurisdiction over energy policy, of course, but also broadband, you know, telecommunications, cable, video franchise, all of those sorts of things. And because, believe it or not, you know, in that time, the internet was still relatively new, a lot of technology legislation came to me as well. And so I've just been interested in the GovTech space since that time. When I left the legislature, which is just a fancy way of saying I ran for state Senate and my opponent got more votes than I did. But when I left legislature, I helped companies in mainly the technology and utility space get things done with government. And then T-Mobile asked me to come over and help them in the government technology space. And so I really like that. You know, what T-Mobile is having me do is what I've done my entire life. It's what I call for in the book that I wrote, is really helping governments to modernize their technologies to maintain their technological relevance as we move into what I call in the book Generation T.

That's great. So I mean, you just talked about it. You wrote a book. Now we're here on GovTech, and we thought that the title of your book was pretty interesting. It's like GovTech, it's technology versus government. It talks about these irresistible forces that Meets an Immovable Object. So maybe you can talk to us a little bit about the book. But how did that point of view, how did that point of view kind of come together? Where did it come from? And how did it shape your, you putting this book together?

Well, I actually talk about a little bit about that in the introduction. And, you know, the title is really the play on that old physics problem of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, what happens? Um, and so, you know, it— when I was in the legislature, which by the way is a phrase I do try to limit the number of times I utter in any given day, um, you know, I, I still remember in my first year, uh, there was a bill, uh, to require cell phone companies to disclose their rates. That bill, uh, came at a time when cell phone companies were just going towards one-rate plans where, you know, and for those of you who are older, you remember, you know, long distance, don't call long distance before 8 o'clock, it costs more money. Phone calls, you know, were charged based on how far you called, when you called. Number of minutes you used that. That was the model for telecommunications up until that point in time in the early 2000s when cell phone companies were going to what they called back then the bucket of minutes. Now it's just a cell phone. And it didn't matter. You could call New York 1,000 times or your neighbor once and you still paid the same amount of money. So because of that, how do you disclose the rate? The rate's $20. It's $20 if you make one phone call. It's $20 per call. You know, and so, you know, if you make 2 phone calls, it's $10 per call. You get, you get the gist there. But I remember, you know, in this hearing, Myself and one other legislator had to raise that point. Nobody else had seen that. And here we were trying to legislate something that people in that room didn't understand. And then fast forward to a number of years later, I got a call from a reporter at the San Diego Union-Tribune. This was after I left the legislature, wanting to ask me some questions about why the animal rights movement was so successful these days. And I was not expecting that, honestly. And so I'm like, I had to think for a little bit, and I really chalked it up to 2 things. And again, this is kind of in the introduction of the book. One was a person, a singular person who came to the legislature, but that was not replicable. I like to look for trends. I'd like to look at things foundational, replicable. But beyond that, it was also technology. You know, gone were the days when the, you know, the industry of animals, zoos, circuses, etc., owned the access to media. Now, everybody has in the palm of their hands, in their pockets, what amounts to the means of creation and distribution. You essentially have an FCC license, a high-definition camera, and a printing press all right here. And the barriers to publication were dramatically lower. So there were things that the animal rights movement had been saying all along that the industry would say, oh no, that's not true. And so now they were able to actually document some of the things they were saying, and it kind of forced a reckoning. And separate from the animals and that, to me, it was about the technology. The technology fundamentally changed engagement in the policy process. And that's what I most was interested in. And then, as somebody who's been in the industry, the title of the book, comes from the concept that over the last 20-plus years, technology has completely transformed everything in America. It has just— it is the irresistible force that has run over everything. When I was a kid, if you wanted music, you'd go to the record store. You're hard-pressed to find a record store these days. Travel agents are, for the most part, a thing of the past. And you just— you can go, you know, shopping malls were on the ascendancy, on the ascendancy, Amazon, and now the number of shopping malls in America is declining. You couldn't think of an industry for the most part, that wasn't transformed dramatically in some way by technology, except for government. You know, the old saying, you can't sue City Hall, that, that giant immovable presence of government. And what happens when the, the, the force of technology collides with government? And the playing field that I see that playing out in is what I call Generation T, the people born in 2002 and later. That's the first generation in American history that's grown up wrapped in a technology bubble. Broadband to the home, and I know I've gone on a little bit here, but I'll wrap up in a second. Broadband to the home was first deployed in 2000. The iPhone came out in 2007. If you were born in 2002, '03, '04, '05, you probably don't remember a time when your parents didn't have broadband to the home. It reached 70% penetration in 2010, and then it flatlined as you're now looking at the late adopters in low-income areas and rural areas. But by that time, you know, the preponderance of America had technology in the home, and those kids were surrounded by it. And, you know, and they reach for technology to engage in the world instead of going down and knocking on their friends' doors to see if they could come out and play, or picking up the phone and dialing the digits. They— everybody's texting one another. Want to make a restaurant reservation in 1970 or '80? You know, flip through the phone book, call the restaurant. Now you go to OpenTable. I mean, you just play this out over and over again. That generation reaches for technology reflexively. What happens when they become employees of government or government seeks to have the employees? You know, a lot of government now is facing staffing shortages. What happens was they try to lure these folks who are so technology forward to become part of government. And then what happens to the, to the service side? These, these are the people who are also going to be customers, customers of government. So anyway, that's a long answer, but that's, that's the genesis of how I created this and where the title came from.

No, and I love that. I appreciate that background. And you think about those generational gaps, right? Not only retention, but having— does government have the tools in the workspace to make it attractive for those people to seek public sector employment? But, you know, moving beyond that, the book also covers, you know, obviously there's tremendous amounts of success with government and technology, and you know those as well as I do. But there are also, you know, some high-profile technology failures and your time in the, you know, at the state, those crossed your desk as well. Maybe you could kind of dig into what are some of the impacts that you've seen when things don't go right beyond just the dollars and cents of it? What are you seeing in terms of the overall impact to constituents?

Oh, I mean, the easiest one to point to is right here in California, you know, with EDD during the pandemic and the technology and the computer system that collapsed under the weight of the demand. You know, it's an antiquated, outdated system. that require— that is run on an antiquated programming language, uh, that only a few people know. Um, and so, you know, because of that, uh, there was a huge backlog of people waiting to get unemployment checks during the pandemic. That has a material effect on large numbers of constituents that, you know, that's, that's the easiest one to point to. There's others that you can look at, you know, across the country, um, whether it's procurements of technology where they procured iPads with no keyboards and then, you know, And we're talking millions of dollars to procure iPads for hundreds of thousands of students and no keyboard. So it made them relatively useless. Obviously, that has an impact on student performance. Another one that I've talked about repeatedly is the digital divide itself. And we delve into some of that in the book here, that once the pandemic hit, some of us in this realm had been talking about the digital divide for years. And suddenly, the schools closed down and Everybody's like, hey, did you know there are some people without internet access? We're like, yeah, we kind of did. And so school districts had to scramble to provide internet access to kids before they could even provide instruction. And so there was, you know, there was some serious lost time there. I mean, you can go, you know, just— it doesn't take much. It takes a quick Google search. In fact, I don't want to contradict your statement because I've learned, you know, don't contradict the host. However, I would like to qualify it. There are some examples of government technology successes you can point to. The preponderance are not necessarily failures, but inaction.

Hmm.

And, you know, and that's really where the challenge lies. It's not so much the failures, although that is a huge problem. It's the lack of progress, meaning the world is moving ahead in technology, and that actually exacerbates frustrations and perceptions in this way simply. those people who are customers of government or those policymakers, not the people in the agencies and the bureaucracies who understand why things are the way they are, but those who aren't there.

Yeah.

Travel the world and they see technology. They see how technology works seamlessly. I've used my own example, you know, in an episode of a different podcast where I was flying at 35,000 feet. I had internet access on the plane. I was ordering something on Amazon. It was delivered the next day. contrasted that with the process of obtaining— and I know this is mundane— carpool permits for carpool stickers for my electric vehicle, which I had to fill out a form, print it out, sign it, fill out the rest of it by hand, enclose a paper check, mail it off, and get my stickers like 6 weeks later. Now, no, it was not urgent that I have overnight the stickers, but it's a contrast in those processes. People experience the technology of the day in the rest of their lives, and that contradicts— including policymakers, And that contradicts directly with the experience of government. So when something like the EDD crisis happens, policymakers are left confounded. I don't understand why this happens. Well, that's the disconnect we talk about in this book.

So I want to, I want to stick with that for a second because it's not about funding. Because, you know, I think one thing that many people don't understand is if you took most of the state budgets, if not, if you took all of them actually, and you plotted them on the Fortune 100 list, Most of them, 45 or more of them, would make the Fortune 100 list from their overall budget. And that translates to IT spend. I mean, frankly, in a state like California, New York, Texas, their overall IT spend rivals that of some of the biggest, most prominent companies in the US. So when you talk about that lag between public sector and private sector, what contributes to that, the inability maybe to keep full pace? Yeah, I mean, Keep pace?

Well, I think it's, it's, it's really 2 things. I mean, yes, funding, you know, you're right, the funding is there, but it's also not there. Um, and I'm as guilty of this as the next person. Um, you know, when I was there, I wish I had some of these thoughts when I was in the legislature. Um, also as an aside, there's a separate book, uh, called Recoding America by Jen Pahlka. Fantastic book, should be required reading for all policymakers. Uh, you know, that, that really delves into these issues as well. And while the funding may be there, it's what, you know, it's what it's spent on. It's the culture of how that money is spent. You know, and I also want to say, sometimes the money isn't there because policymakers don't necessarily have that viewpoint of, you know, that technology is an ongoing process. Well, we've just paid for that. We don't need to pay for it anymore. Technology evolves and things need to be upgraded. The problem is these antiquated behemoth systems require a lot greater expenditure than the more nimble systems of the future, of the present even. And it's the transition from those behemoth antiquated enterprise systems to the current systems that pose the problem. So instead, they end up with patchwork on the technology. The other side is the culture. It's very much, and I'm not one of those people which is partially why I wrote this book and why I love Jen's book so much.

Yeah.

I read too many books where technology folks from the outside with no government experience pontificate from on high. You should just do this. Here's what's wrong, et cetera. I'm not going to criticize the culture. I'm going to explain the culture. And I'm guessing a lot of the folks on the podcast probably recognize this anyway, listening to the podcast. You know, government culture is to essentially do everything. It's a process-oriented culture, not an outcome-oriented culture. It's designed, you know, in one level to avoid the agency direct— you know, it's designed to avoid having politicians, you know, called out in the media, the agency directors called out in legislative hearings. And how do you do that? Well, here's my checklist. I did everything. Jen uses a great example in her book about, you know, building a cement boat. Well, the specs said to build a cement boat, and I did, so I didn't get fired. If I had built a wooden boat that, you know, had floated, I might get fired because, well, you didn't follow the process. Right. Following a process is immunization against any employment action. And so the culture of government over time has evolved to be very process-oriented and less outcome-oriented. And I think that's a problem as well. And again, I don't want to blame the people, the bureaucrats. I mean, you know, a lot of this falls on the policymakers and the culture, especially when there's turnover in policymakers and there's that lack of cohesion that would lead to a better outcome from the bureaucracy. And you could look at the same kind of concept in the private sector, you've got your strategic leadership team, senior leadership team, and then you've got the lower levels. And if there's too big a disconnect and there's, you know, too much turnover, you're not going to have that same level of cohesion. Well, that is kind of what happens, you know, in the legislative process as it relates to the bureaucratic process when it comes to technology.

Yeah, so a couple of following questions. I mean, you've been on that other side. You've been the legislator, you voted for bills, you've not voted for certain bills. You've been there as they, you know, reviewed kind of the state's approach to technology. And you mentioned when we kicked off this episode, you know, going through and your peers maybe not having a full grasp at that moment of time in terms of understanding where technology was in the moment. What do you look at when you look at policymakers today? Do you think there's still a policy disconnect and how do we begin to close that gap? Or bridge that gap?

Um, yes, I, I do think there's a disconnect, and I don't think it's a malicious disconnect. I think it's a disconnect that's a product of a political system that has different imperatives than the bureaucratic technology system. Um, legislators, to a degree, are outcome-oriented. Uh, they pass legislation to drive outcomes. That is really the metric in the legislature. I'm not saying it should be, but that is. In fact, I, I, I was, to a degree, a victim of that I, I sought to introduce the maximum number of bills every year just to give me flexibility. It didn't mean I pushed them all forward. I worked on really, really, really substantive issues. I wanted to focus on the big weighty issues of the time. But because I took that tack, my win percentage was lower.

Yeah.

And I got, you know, when I was running for Senate, my opponent, you know, hit me as being ineffective because I didn't pass a high enough percentage of my bills. I wrote with the PUC and Governor Schwarzenegger the California Solar Initiative. The 20% renewable portfolio standard, the first-in-the-country plastic bag legislation. I did the deregulation and then reregulation of the telecommunications industry in California. That's just to name a few of them. You know, these were big, huge national pieces of legislation, often first-in-the-country type pieces of legislation. So no, my win rate wasn't as high as if I had eliminated them. But the way I like it, you know, some of it is strategy. It's like, do you start a chess game with, you know, less pieces than you're allowed to? No, but that's illustrative of the culture of the legislature. How many bills did you introduce? How many bills did you pass? I had one legislator come to me one time and say, oh, all of your bills, they always have a lot of no votes and a lot of discussion. Mine all passed with no no votes. And I remember thinking, well, that's because yours don't actually do anything. And these aren't things you say in the time, but sitting here now, I'm happy to say things like that. So that culture of how many bills did you pass? you have a press conference. Um, you know, one of the things that I've, I've become, you know, more appreciative of over time, and again, you know, I know this about my book, but I really, you know, Jen's book was fantastic and she talks a lot about this as well, is the administrative process. The administration, the administration has always kind of been viewed as the less intellectual stepchild of the policy process. The policy creation process was supposed to be is, you know, cerebral, and you're— but implementation is, is vital. Um, and the, the, the, you know, longer I go, the more appreciative I am. And I don't think there's enough focus in the legislative process on how is this bill going to be administered. And I think there's a huge, huge breakdown there in that. Um, so how do we change that? I think people who are interested in this have to do Not just a better job, but a different job of advocating for some of the changes that need to be made. I think that, you know, we need to not just engage in traditional ways, but there needs to be a different method of saying, hey, here's the problem, here's how we're going to solve it. Not just have the technology folks lobbying against this bill and for that bill, but really working to change the technology culture. And again, that's the great unknown. Going back to Generation T, maybe Generation T is the answer. Maybe as that technology generation enters, maybe they do become the change, the culture change that changes the relationship between legislators and technology and, you know, and the bureaucracy as it relates to technology. Or maybe they're a victim of it. I don't know.

You know, coming out of the pandemic, we saw that government can move quicker. We saw the loosening of procurement rules. We saw the easing of various regulations. We saw the time from when an RFP was issued to implementation get get much shorter. When we look at that, we also look at the rising expectations, we look at the digitization of services, we look at the impact that generative AI is having and continuing to have on public sector. It's clear to me that like we are moving faster, government is moving quicker, but there's probably obviously still more we can do. What else can we do to kind of continue to move in this direction?

Well, obviously culture is the biggest You know, changing the culture of the way government does things. One thing you touched on in there, and there was a lot in there, and I'd love to talk about all of those things because they're all really interesting topics to discuss, was e-government, government services. And here's a little interesting stat that, you know, again, we— I talk about this in a couple of chapters in the book. I've talked about it in other places. The groups that use e-government services, if you go to the U.S. Census Bureau, who has fantastic data on this, Mm-hmm. They are primarily lower income, minority, and seniors. If you go to the Pew Center for Internet and American Life and look at their longitudinal data, or in California, the California Emerging Technology Fund also has great data, the groups who are least likely to have internet access are lower income, minority, and seniors. And so essentially the people who would— who utilize government services the most, uh, are all— and could benefit from e-government And government could also benefit from that shift, are the least likely to have that access to those digital literacy skills or the technologies to utilize the e-government services. You know, people like you and I, we renew our driver's license. I might get my carpool permits. Maybe somebody can buy it, get a fishing license, or, you know, or those sorts of things. But, you know, on a weekly or monthly basis, you know, we don't engage with government that often. So the benefits of e-government, it's a convenience, but, you know, not having to go to the DMV, you know, to renew my driver's license, whatever it is, it's convenience, but it's not a daily or weekly convenience. Those people who are engaging daily and weekly might have a greater benefit. There might be more efficiencies. So looking at how, you know, understanding not just providing e-government services, but understanding the target population. You know, and I've— too many times I've seen people say, oh, we created a website on that. You created a website to close the digital divide. That's great. You know, and so I think, you know, that looking to the future of e-government services is key because that is the bulk of what a lot of governments do. You know, the others, the sensor-based technologies and things like that, that's a little bit easier to do. It's the services side of things. It's the data storage side of things, you know, that becomes challenging. So that's the one piece of that that stuck out as something I wanted to address.

So, you know, we talked today about Generation T; we talked about the changing of expectations and all of the things that are occurring. But as we look at this relationship between government and technology, and you're someone who's been on both sides of it, maybe you could share with our audience a little bit of advice, maybe starting first But the public sector, what can those that are tuning into the episode today do to change their approach to technology? Now, keep in mind, GovTech's audience is the C-level community, the IT implementers, those at the front lines. And we'll talk about industry next.

Well, they can read my book and they can read Jen's book and they can call. No, in all seriousness, education is really important. You know, making sure that you don't assume you know everything, to the leaders. Don't isolate yourself. Be open. You know, reach out to the administration. Focus on administratability of what you're writing, of the policies you're creating. Understand that whatever you write, you know, I could write a law repealing the law of gravity. The implementation of that's going to be a bit of a challenge. And so, you know, and that's actually a derivative of an opening of a lot of my energy speeches when I I ask people what the most important law in energy policy is, and it's the law of physics. You know, you can't repeal it, you can't amend it, and you have to understand it to create energy policy. But the, you know, those are the types of things that need to happen from the top down. They need to understand the system's broken and try to understand the changes and be willing to ask experts, hey, how do I, how do I change this? What could we be doing better? How do we, you know, build the consensus? And then focus less on passing the legislation and more on transformational change, whatever that process may be. And the end result may be a piece of legislation that leads that transformational change, but focus on that transformational change as the point, not the legislation as the point. And don't focus on the volume of legislation, but what is the impact that I can have you know, in a number of years. I would think that that would be the biggest thing that you could do. You know, in my current job, I get to work with a lot of government technology leaders, and a lot of them understand these things intuitively, and they're— I don't want to say victims because I don't want to describe them as victims. I'll let them describe themselves. They're put into a system that to a degree makes their jobs harder than they need to be.

So now you do find yourself on that industry side of the equation. And as you look at your engagements, every day with various state and local leaders. What do you think industry can do to make sure that not only that your technology fits and solves a problem, but can be implemented and ultimately help your government customer be more successful?

Sure, and again, I think education's important there. Instead of working, you know, we get trapped in these systems where the legislators introduce legislation and the lobbyists come out and try and kill the legislation, etc. Um, you know, and then within companies you have 2 sets of, of groups. You've got the, the groups, the sales groups primarily, that are working with the agency heads to get their technologies in there. And then you've got the legislative affairs people who are working on the legislative side, you know. And that's just the way the system is, and it perpetuates itself over and over and over again. Um, and what you need to do, I think, is, you know, those groups need to come together not necessarily for the purpose of running legislation, but to have these substantive conversations, perhaps led by, you know, a few legislators who have a real interest in making these transformational changes. Not everybody's going to be interested in doing this, but some people can lead. And so it's going to be an iterative process where government or the private sector gets together not to advocate for my technology or your technology, but for a different way of government approaching technology, because we in the private sector, in the technology industry, We understand how our technologies work and we understand that the cycle of development, release, the benefits, you know, and we're trying to interject that into a system that isn't necessarily designed, you know, to match that. And so working more closely with those people to educate them and to reach agreement they need— the government needs our technologies, and I use that broadly. The government needs private sector technologies to keep pace and remain relevant. How they go about adopting and implementing those is where the gap lies.

So the easiest question you're going to get from me is, where does our audience go to learn more about the work that you're doing, obviously, to get your book and to connect with you personally?

Well, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can go to the UC Riverside School of Public Policy website. I'm there as well. You can go to Amazon to buy the book. I'm happy to engage in any of these forums. This is something I'm passionate about, not just for me, but for my kids. My kids are Generation T. They were born in 2010 and 2014. So what is the government that we're leaving them? Is it going to be a government that remains relevant and has technological relevance and can help solve problems more efficiently, or isn't it going to be? So I'm happy to to engage with whomever, however, to work collaboratively to affect some of these changes. And that's how you can reach me.

Well, Lloyd, I appreciate you for putting the book together. Look forward to obviously having our audience dig in and for you taking the time out of your day to join me on this episode of In Case You Missed It.

Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it. Appreciate the time.

All right. Have a wonderful weekend.

Thank you. You too.