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Bob Leek, Chief Information Officer, Clark CountyHighlighting Bob Leek’s leadership in driving technological innovation at Clark County, this article explores impactful strategies for leveraging IOT, AI, and machine learning to enhance operational efficiency, sustainability, and community engagement within the public sector.
Professional Background and Innovation Leadership
I serve as the Department Head of Information Technology in the role as Chief Information Officer (CIO). I just finished my fourth year here. I moved here after 20 years in Portland OR where I worked for Multnomah County, Kaiser Permanente, Ban-field the Pet Hospital and Egghead.com. My role at Clark County is to ensure that we leverage technology, modern processes and great people to deliver services to over 2.3 million people and 90,000 business in Clark County along with the over 50 million people that visit our region annually.
We treat innovation as an opportunity to do our work differently with a better outcome. We work with each of the 40 departments that deliver services to identify how they measure their success, what we can do to help them improve their services and bring new ideas, process redevelopment and lead the changes needed to achieve their success.
We strive to balance large, enterprise projects like a new platform and content management system for our public-facing websites or replacing legacy systems with new, modern solutions to doing the small things like improving paper processing workflows with low-code options, digital signatures and translation services.
We encourage people to bring ideas and solutions to us for consideration so that we expand the number of people that are thinking about innovation and continuous improvement. And we try to use the many investments we’ve made over the past few years so that we take advantage of things we already have and only make new investments when we don’t have a solution that fits to the problem or opportunity we’ve identified.
Leveraging Emerging Technologies (IOT, AI, ML) and Advice to Upcoming Professionals
The Internet of Things (IOT) has been a key area of focus for us for several years. In areas like building automation systems with smart lighting, heating / cooling and other features, we have worked to reduce our use of electricity and gas while maintaining a great environment and place to work.
Small changes add up over time. Our plans around sustainability center on reducing our use of water, one of the most under-stress resources in our region and taking advantage of our region with solar and other alternative sources of energy.
In our Parks, we are exploring solutions such as remote locks for our facilities, sensors to track usage of park assets and using data and analytics to determine what types of features our parts should have as we continue to encourage the use of our 70 parks scattered throughout the region.
We have over 20 pilots, proofs of concept and other activities in augmented intelligence and machine learning. One of the greatest areas is in translation services, both written, digital and in person. We are evaluating a solution that sits on the counter, with a simple user interface where each speaker chooses the language they want to use that they will hear and see on the screen.
It translates in near-real time, with dialects and other features available. We believe this will be a game-changer in our in-person interactions. The same technology can be used at board meetings so that the board can conduct their business while attendees can choose what language they want to hear through their headphones and see on their screens. This creates the opportunity for better participation by everyone.
We are also working on our public facing websites. We have a couple of sites that have traditional chat-bots, but by loading our website into a proprietary language model and attaching a digital assistant, we anticipate that we will better serve the needs of visitors to our sites and our mobile-responsive screens on a smartphone or tablet.
We work with lots of upcoming professionals through the local universities and colleges and with community-based organizations. The advice that I pass along is centered on curiosity, risk-taking and resilience. There is so much that we can do as technology professionals to support the organizations that we work with to achieve success. My advice is to always ask “what does success look like, how do you measure success or lack of success and what is the first-next thing that we can do”. That creates the opportunity for shared solution designs between the operations and technology teams.
Risk-taking involves evaluating each situation and not letting a desire for perfection prevent starting to work on improvements. Small incremental changes are much better than big-bang change in many cases. Using what we already have is a place to start, and isn’t a concession or failure; rather, it is a way to ensure that investments that have been made are used to their maximum capability.
Probably in no other sector as much as the public sector, resilience is a key trait for success. Budgets take a long time to develop and are only available for a 12-month period. Long term plans can be created, but timing is an important aspect of those plans.
Having a strategy is a great starting point, with tactics and investments continuously refined to allow for course corrections over time. Having a vision of a future state that involves gathering and building in views from multiple perspectives creates a solid foundation for the ongoing work over the months many solutions take to complete. Being resilient in the face of variables that are presented over time that can take work off track requires transparent and constant communication.
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