pursuant to san francisco administrative code section 22a.6. supervisor chu: thank you very much. we have john walton, but before we do that, supervisor president chiu, would you like to say any opening comments? supervisor chiu: thank you. i want to thank john and the department technology and all the various cio's around the city that have put this first proposed five-year plan for communication and technology. plan came out of legislation i sponsored last year that we worked on together, and is modeled after our 10-year capital plan, and i think it really is a great step, and i appreciate the plan put forth to deal with the fact that our city has until now not really had a long term planning process around information technology. as we all know, we have outdated technology. much of our city's i.t. is

satellites. we have seven e-mail systems we are trying to concentrate into one, dozens of data centers we are trying to consolidate into a handful, cal was agreements between various departments. these are just a few of the many projects that we have city-wide. i want to let you know that i think this plan is a good first start, and i think there are many details that many of us are hoping to address. i look forward to the conversation and the presentation. supervisor chu: thank you. mr. walton. >> thank you. director of the department of technology and chief information officer. a few brief slides. 10 slides perhaps. i know we distributed the report previously. to perhaps give you highlights from the report so we can have a conversation or you can ask some

questions or make suggestions on how to improve this as we go forward into the future. as president chiu indicated, this is the first time we have published a five-year plan for technology in the city. i want to perhaps highlight the fact that this is not a technology plan. there is confusion at times, given the fact that we are highly decentralized. this is a citywide technology plan. we have taken a lot of care to get input from various departments. we have gone to a number of public hearings about this plan. this plan is really designed to be a structure that departments can look at and see how their day-to-day operations and long- term plans for technology in their apartment fit into where they want to go in the future. having said that, the place we

are at in this plan is asking for your approval of this as really a strategy for the city to pursue. the vision for this plan really is creating a connected city. when we created the plan, we did not want to put initially a lot of detail into specific hardware and software. what we wanted to do is create a vision for where we want to go as a city. san francisco is seen as a leader in using technology to deliver better services. every department, as you have probably heard, through the budget hearings, are really trying to leverage technology now to better deliver services within that department. the public health department the medical records at, you have things that people are trying to do to leverage technology to provide better internal capabilities to their staff and to provide better accessibility, more unique applications, make

our services easier access. the plan focuses a lot on taking advantage of the success we see, and what can government learn. we hear of this deadlock. what can government learn from the successes of technology. we are the hub here in san francisco of a lot of tech firms. we meet often with these very successful entrepreneur is a technology companies and try to learn from them what we're doing. san francisco, for example, we are one of the leading ones that uses facebook to connect to our citizens. we write applications so people can use applications that they are used to using in their personal life to connect with city services to take advantage of those. we began to use a lot of the cloud offerings.

if you have been to the meetings, you have heard about the cloud offerings, the shared applications, how they can be used to lower the costs to the city. we are trying to take advantage of some of those technologies are on the e-mail project, how we provide web services and things such as that to leverage some of those cloud and web technologies. one of the hard things to do we have talked about in previous meetings is how you measure progress, how you measure success if you approve a plan like this over five years. if you look in the appendix of this plan, what we tried to do is lay out all of the requests that departments see themselves needing. not dissimilar to, as was pointed out, modeled on the capital plan where you look at the future and try to project, based on what has been installed or what departments think they need to do -- you end up with quite an extensive laundry list of projects that departments would like to implement over the next few years, whether they are

replacing existing applications or implementing new technologies. we tried to pull out of that through these meetings and highlight for you in this report perhaps 10 significant or strategic initiatives that we would recommend that we come back and report to you on a regular basis on how we are making progress. i could take a few minutes on this slide perhaps and give you some specific examples of what we mean. one, the open data, open sf initiative is one of those projects that epitomizes what we want to try to do to leverage the public interest in making government work better. this initiative was started quite a while ago. the idea is to put government data on the web, make it accessible to the public. it has been very successful. i know the general services administration department and 311 has now taken the lead on

this and is getting departments more data on the web, but out of this initiative, we had over 60 applications created at no cost to the city that the public, simply by having access to the data on their own time, whether it is companies, whether it is just interested citizens with technical abilities, have created applications that citizens can use in san francisco to access services to utilize the city data to get the services they want without going toward traditional us coming to you asking for money, going through a long process to create these applications. the next one, enterprise applications, is a generic term we use to talk about rather than doing things on a department by department basis, really looking for commonalities across departments where we have shared applications where we are doing similar things. there is a number of examples i think we could use to talk about why we want to leverage common

needs. e-mail is a great one. we have talked about how we are trying to take the 7 e-mailed existing systems around the city and collapsed them into one. the e merge project is a great example where you have multiple time keeping hr management systems in the city, and we are collapsing those. we will continue to look for opportunities to leverage, and implementing a single solution that meets all the needs of the city rather than individual ones. we have talked a lot of that data center consolidation, and that is near and dear to at least my department's heart. we have implemented that now in our move. we were able to collapse a number of our server is down. it helped us meet our budget reduction goal. we were able to meet our budget reduction goal to a degree

because we were able to utilize this type of technology, now that we have approval to take this idea out to all departments, work with them to find ways to take physical servers and turn them into virtual servers. we think this is a real opportunity to report back to you on how the city can reduce its data center footprint and save money in the future around equipment. city-wide broadband and wifi access -- this is a significant way. i'm sure you have heard from your constituents, they would like to see more free wireless in public buildings and public spaces, and we started a steering committee with the library, with the parks and wreck -- rec department, and we have an initiative under way to make sure we have republicanwifi -- free public wifi in the city. by putting them on broadband, we think we can improve services to city employees in those

departments. the enterprise agreements -- we have talked about that a lot. we implemented a few now. we just signed the enterprise agreement for e-mail to have a st. -- single agreement for e- mail in the city rather than multiple ones. we hope to bring back to you in the next few months working with the office of contract administration and enterprise agreement, and we're working on several others as well. city-wide security, you have heard in the news numerous times in the past. i know security costs a lot of money when we make mistakes, so we are starting an initiative again appeared rather than having every department have to solve the security problem by themselves, to share information, we have a monthly meeting now where we bring all the security personnel from the city together, and we facilitate conversations and look for solutions where we can address these security concerns. voice-over ip is starting to take off as an initiative. a lot of people are excited

about this. we have an outdated integrated phone system we use in the city, and we have a number of exciting pilots under way to start to really determine what the right solution is for the city for voice over ip. we told what we want to do is come back in the next few months and start to show what savings can be achieved. consolidation of staff and share building. i'm sure you are all aware that every department tends to maintain its own help desk staff, its old way of supporting its equipment within the buildings, so we are trying to leverage the good leverage thehsa -- we are trying to leverage the good work that hsa did. consolidation of reduction of mail services. again, it is an opportunity where we have similar solutions are around the city's embedded in apartments where we think this is another one where we can

collapse into consolidated services and perhaps save the city some money, be more efficient. my favorite, having come from the private sector, looking for ways to market things is we have a lot of opportunity, i believe, and i am happy to say that we signed up our first customer on this plan that as we deploy fiber technology around the city, we have the capacity, we have the ability to also provide this type of fiber services to other government clients that nonprofit agencies to, frankly, to other businesses. this is a way we can actually generate revenue using our technology investments we are already making that have very low incremental cost to generate revenue over time for the city, and we are excited about not being seen as a cost center, but as a potential revenue source for the city and helping contribute to the funds of the

city. one of the challenges when you do a plan like this, as you are aware, with any process, and i know you will be going through the budget, is we are such a large organization -- 40 or 60 apartments, depending on how you want to classify, and we face the same challenge when we are working on the strategic plan. what we decided to do, even though the appendix really does include all of the project that every department and the city is really asking for over the next five years, in the plan itself, what we tried to do is consolidate and come up with a middle ground that paints a picture of what we're trying to accomplish, what our goals are by major service area. if you are familiar with the budget document, it leverages how we handle the budget document and handle the safety area so when you read the documents, please keep in mind that is why we do the major service areas approach because we want to highlight the commonalities of some

departments and maybe where they can work together to come up with shared solutions. supervisor chu: we have a question from supervisor kim. supervisor kim: when you say city technology leaders, who are you referring to? >> every department typically has a head i.t. manager, and we conducted several workshops over the last few years asking them to come in and combine the groups by service area and talk about what their service area was and how they saw themselves contributing to the overall i.t. vision for the future. that is what we mean. supervisor kim: do we ever reach out to the tech sector in san francisco, the private sector to ask for their feedback and input on what we can do to upgrade our technology? >> we do. we actually sponsor a number of events with the department of technology hosts experts coming in and speaking at brown bag events where we invite i.t. leaders and have industry experts come in and talk to us from either stanford -- stanford often comes and speaks to us.

a lot of start up companies come in and speak to us. some of the capital venture folks. they come and talk to us as i.t. leaders about what they see in government or what they see in private sector and how that can be applied. supervisor kim: can we get a list of folks you have reached out to in the private and academic sector? >> sure. the report also includes how we are distributing funds, and this is just to give you a sense of, not dissimilar to the budget process, there is a lot of departments that need technology, and we tried to give you a picture of how we are distributing i.t. funds are around the city and how these funds contribute. when you look at these funding levels in the report and went back to what the goals and objectives are, you can often see the opportunities or challenges that major service

areas might have in achieving some of their goals over time, so hopefully, you can see some of these. you can see how that perhaps it's into this plan and the major service areas they are associated with. one of the most important things for me in this plan that we spend a lot of time working with the controller's office on and the mayor's budget office was the financial section. often, i see these strategic documents that come out around technology and environmental technology, and they do a good job taking a vision and talking about what they want to achieve over time, but what i have often seen in the past in this type of documents is a lack of financial detail about how we are going to accomplish these. at the end of the day, if we do not have the resources, do not have the money, do not have the staff and we are not honest with ourselves about what it will

take to accomplish these visionary ideas, we set ourselves up for failure, so we work closely with the office, would be cfo's around the city to talk about how we would change our approach strategically to funding some of these initiatives going forward. the guiding principles, i would say, behind the idea is we would look to consolidate. we would look to standardize, rather than ever when buying their own unique technologies, rather than looking for standard technologies that meet our needs, and we would try to simplify a lot of processes, creating a lot of individual systems and trying to figure out how to tie them all together. we would try to find ways to streamline and simplify things. this is the last slide. it starts to paint a picture about where we are trying to get

over the next five years financially and solve perhaps, again, not unlike the capital plan problem, the fact that there is a huge demand when you look in the appendix, when you look in the report, a huge demand by departments for technology expenditures. as we have had these conversations before, we are all keenly aware of those technology requests that seemed to be in competition oftentimes with other important items that you folks are considering to fund on every fiscal year. when you look at the -- at this table here, what it is really trying to paint is a picture of the future. looking at, for example, the funding source and the second column, the initial project request, and then the proposed plan, it starts to show you over the next five years where we want to be. for example, one of the areas we have not taken as much advantage of as we want to in the future is using finance vehicles to fund technology going forward.

initially, what we saw was around $18 million worth of the technology requests citywide, taking advantage of financing, and we think that we can change that so that we can shift about $96 million of those technology requests to a finance-type vehicle. similarly, the grants area we are showing rather flat right now. but, you know, that is an area of the department of emergency management, my department, other departments, we are trying to invest more resources in that area to look for federal grants come homeland security grants, other grants like that to use to fund technology. as a caveat, having gone through this a number of times, the danger of grant-funded technology is it can lead you down a road where you spend a lot of grant money to procure technology, but if you do not build in the capability to maintain or replace that technology over time, it creates a huge asset cool that you need

to find a way to either finance or replaced over time. the non-general fund -- these are the large departments that you hear from. we see spending to be rather constant in those apartments over the next five years. i'm sure you are aware mta, airport, and you see are all heavy users of technology, but the technology they use within their department is critical to their ability to provide services. the good thing about the project is their projects do not typically impact the general fund where we see the deficits. the change that has been happening over the last year is now, we are not just looking at those apartments at silo the part of that employment their own technologies. we are taking advantage of their investments in technology to provide a benefit to the entire city i.t. infrastructure.

a great example, for example, to the data center consolidation project is the fact that the airport has taken the leadership role in constructing a data center for every department in the city to use at the airport without that huge capital impact we would have seen on the general fund otherwise. then, of course, the thing we're really trying to achieve is the reduction in the impact on the general fund, so you can see from the chart that initially, what was projected to happen was about $164 million impact in technology requests to a general fund source. we think we can reduce that to about $40 million, which is about an $8 million goal year to year over the next five years, and technology funding, which is significantly less than what was originally anticipated to be the impact of the general fund for technology in the future. then, as i said on one of the previous slides, really ramping up the opportunity for additional revenue, using some of our technology investments,

not only to provide service, but to look for opportunities to generate revenues. having said all that, not giving enough time to ask questions, our goal is to report back to coit, which has directed us to take these 10 key strategic initiatives as indicators of health of the plan. we see this as a living plant. we told everyone we do not want the plan to be approved and put on the shelf and then five years, we pull it down and reflect back on what we thought we wanted to do. what we want this to be is a living document that every year we can update, and they have directed us to come back and collect information from the leaders in these areas and report back on a regular basis on the progress we are making, both in accomplishing the goals of the projects associated with these initiatives and how they are improving services and/or saving the city money. supervisor chu: thank you very

much. supervisor chiu: thank you for the presentation. i have two, is based on what you just said. first of all, i appreciate that you will be taking the next step of figuring out what we are going to get things done. let me take a couple of the i examples of things that are embedded in this that had taken a while. consolidation of e-mail. we decided at the first meeting i attended in february 2009 that we were going to consolidate. it is now two and a half years later, and it is not done. data center consolidation -- we said early last year we would have a plan by the middle of last year, and there is no deadline of when that project is slated to be completed. i know it is complicated, but we have not put a mark in the sand on when we expect to get that done. and a price agreements -- it was in 2007 that we did an audit where we said we were going to get this done. in 2009, we provided funds to your department to move forward with conversations around the city to consolidate enterprise

agreements. we are still not half way there. then, one major project, which i know is removed from your department and moved over, is our run the justice program, which we had said over 10 years ago we were going to move forward with, and 10-plus years later, that is not done. my question to you is what is your intent, and how do you expect the various departments to set deadlines and actually accomplish them? that is one of the challenges we have, and i think the customers of san francisco have as well. >> that is a good point. maybe i can speak to that a little bit. i think that is where we see the power of coit, quite frankly. where we have to move the conversation away from is each department on its own charge with an -- succeeding or failing as an individual department. i think we have grown the committee.

the mayor's office, the board of supervisors, 10 representatives from the largest to the smallest i.t. groups around the city, including anti a, pc, airport, -- mta comedies -- mta, puc, airport. we are contributors and leaders, and it is a city challenge now, and i think they've taken seriously now that progress is not being made, and that is why there were not regular updates on the project, that day, as the leaders, are going to step in and ensure that those projects make progress. so we are committed through the subcommittee structure and our regular reports to clearly identify why they are not moving if they are not moving, what we need their assistance on to move them forward, it is resources,

conversations we need to have to move the ball forward. i think we can use the committee to accomplish those goals. supervisor chiu: i hope you are right. i think the challenges with large bureaucracies and the committee is even if you have one body, -- as you know, it is made up of department heads and folks from many departments. there is not a single point of accountability that we are all looking for, but as someone who sits at the table, i look forward to being part of that and seeing what we can do to say that we're going to meet the deadlines that we put down, and that is something i will hopefully be working with the mayor's office to do as well. the other question and comment i have is, obviously, the appendix lays out the potential projects over the next five years. many of these projects, just by their top line description, seem like things that could cut across a lot of apartments. for example, if i look at the mta, it lists projects having to do with asset management,

computer room consolidation, desktop refresh, disaster recovery, help desk management, internet filtering, oracle database consolidation -- these all seem like projects that could cut across a lot of different departments. my concern is that we need robust and strict use of criteria to decide which projects get identified, particularly when their projects get cut across particular departments. as i look at the list, many of them do not seem to be specific to a department as things that we could spend for citywide. >> the motion was made when coit approved tentatively these projects to go forward.

the appendix is flat for an opportunity for consolidation. so we plan on using the coit project review process. every dollar that is expended to the computer store, for example, goes forward. we're going to ask if this is not an opportunity to consolidate, an opportunity to revisit. >> again, i thank you for all your work. we will be talking. supervisor kim: just a couple of follow-up questions as well. one feedback i have gotten from some folks is that it is difficult for a vendor to come for the pipeline if they do not have a level of competency, that

they have already contacted with you. it is certainly not unique to the apartment technology or to the city of san francisco -- it is certainly not unique to the department of technology. i was wondering if this was a serious issue. >> the way we currently do that, to answer your question, you are correct. i think the government has a complex procurement contracting process that is unique from government to government, it was never the same from one city to city or county to city. what we have tried to do, and i know what the office of contract administration has tried to do is be clear with vendors