If I was advising Bruce Rauner on technology policy I would focus on getting state government caught up to where cities are in terms of open data, predictive analytics, and getting the systems that residents use to interact with government a much needed user experience review.

Full Disclosure: I’m a former employee of the Illinois Department of Employment Security. I’m also heavily involved in several non-profit organizations that work at the intersection of technology and civics including the Smart Chicago Collaborative and Code for America. (Of which, this blog post is my own and does not reflect the views of any of the non-profits I work with.) And finally, I'm a strong supporter of the Democratic Party and President Obama.

Fortunately, civic technology is one of those fields that has yet to be tainted by partisan polarization. Everyone wants government to be more transparent. Everyone wants government to be more efficient.

Since the recession, government agencies have been expected to provide more services with less funding. It hasn't been exactly a fair proposition. Technology is one of the few areas that can help save these agencies time and money — when done correctly.

If you're not familiar with how I got into technology — it goes something like this: It’s 2009 and the bottom has dropped out of the economy. Banks are failing, job losses are mounting, and people are pretty much freaking out. The amount of work that the Illinois Department of Employment Security had on it’s plate was insurmountable. The State of Illinois hired me and about about half a dozen people to work at a field office on Chicago’s north side to try and help stem the tide.

I knew not to expect the latest and greatest technology working for the state. What I didn't expect was to be using phone systems from the 1990s and computer systems from the 1970s. However, this is exactly what government employees were forced to work with during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Bureaucrats are often lambasted for being inefficient and slow. How about I take away your smartphone, your laptop, and replace it with something built before Star Wars filmed? You wouldn't be that quick either.

IDES did eventually get a new system. It was late and over budget, but at least this one operated in real time. However, the system made the time it took to complete front line office tasks much longer than before. It also crashed quite often. In an environment where the department is severely swamped, this was unacceptable.

At this point, I had enough and started to learn everything I could about technology. Eventually, I became involved in Code for America and OpenGov Hack Night. Eventually, I started doing consulting work with the Smart Chicago Collaborative helping to document the progress of civic innovation in Chicago and managing their CivicWorks Project.

There’s been a lot of progress made in civic technology in the last few years. Examples of this at the city level include the implementation of Open311, Largelots.org, and the increasing number of startups focused on government technology solutions. However, state government still lags behind despite having all kinds of innovation advantages at it’s disposal. And as a former state employee, this really irks me. If state employees are serving the people of Illinois, then they should be equipped with the best systems possible in order to serve people best. The State of Illinois should take full advantage of the skills and talent of our state and move towards solving it’s government technology gap.

Earlier this year, the State Legislature passed the Open Operating Standards Act, following up on their open data law passed last year. Together, these two laws lay out a framework for a more transparent and open state government.

These were not small tasks. While open data policies are becoming more common in big cities, there are only a handful of states that have open data policies.

Data is fuel. Government data is fuel for transparency, fuel for innovation, and fuel for business. Illinois already has a working data portal that has the distinction of also hosting several municipal data sites.

While the policy is there — the actual data on the portal is lacking. Part of the reason is that there’s no dedicated staff whose job it is to hook up existing state systems and link them to the data portal.

The other problem with the open data policy is that it suffers from the lack of a single point of contact for state data.

With the City of Chicago and other municipal data portals — it’s obvious who is in charge of the government’s data. Internally, people know that the Chief Data Officer is responsible for all the city’s data. There’s no question on if this person can get the data. They're the CDO and their armed with a mandate and the authority to determine what should be open and what shouldn't be. Executive leadership is critical in making this point clear. Externally, when people have questions about data or what a particular dataset — the Chief Data Officer is easily reachable. In particular, Chicago CDO Tom Schenk Jr regularly attends hack night and had a direct connection with technologists who can put the data to good use.

Illinois needs a Chief Data Officer

The Chief Data Officer, and hopefully their team, would be responsible for coordinating with each state agency to open their data. The CDO would then begin to evaluate ways to analyze state data to enable agencies to run more effectively. The Chief Data Officer would also be the public face of state data and engage the community around state data.

The other benefit of having a policy where states are encouraged to open their data is that state agencies can then start sharing data sets with each other — resulting in a more collaboration. By having state systems piped into one single portal, it would make this process easier.

I know, I know — the process of going into all the state systems and creating code that exports their data to the state data portal sounds expensive. Luckily, the City of Chicago has already created a tool to make that easier.

Illinois should use and contribute to to the OpenETL Toolkit

First some definitions: ETL is shorthand for Extract, Transform, and Load. This is the process that the City of Chicago uses to take data from their systems and get it onto their data portal. Think of it as plumbing.

The thing that makes this perfect for state government to use is that it’s all open source. Open source means that the code that makes it run is free for anyone to use. From the city’s point of view, the toolkit was developed using taxpayer dollars — so it belongs to taxpayers. This also means that government agencies that use Socrata (like Illinois) can use the toolkit free of charge. And this isn’t the only open source software that could be used by the state. In addition to the ETL Toolkit, the Chicago’s released a number of open source tools to make things easier for other government agencies.

Now, you still have to have the staff to install and implement these tools. However, the staff isn't starting from zero — they have something to work with.

OK, I also concede that staff is expensive. Given the budget restraints currently faced by state government, I understand that we might need to get creative…..Cook County creative.

Cook County needed somebody to open up their data, but they didn’t have the resources. So, they went halfsies with the Chicago Community Trust (though the Smart Chicago Collaborative) and hired consultant Josh Kalov to help open up data. Cook County gets their data open, saves taxpayer money, and as an added bonus — the city’s data team and the county data team are working closely together.

Given the size of state government, this would only work in the short term. Eventually, the state would need to hire a data staff that was fully funded by taxpayers. This would be a way to get everything organized and set up to make that process a little easier.

Illinois should also commit resources to Chicago’s SmartCity project.

The other thing that the City of Chicago is doing is working on a predictive analytics platform. When fully operational, this is going to allow the City of Chicago to harness their data to make city government more efficient. Currently, the city is using this platform to predict where rats are a problem. Instead of waiting for people to report rats, the city now sends two crews to lay bait out in advance before it becomes a bigger problem. The city is expanding their use of this platform to other services like restaurants and building inspections.

Imagine if the state had access to this platform. Imagine for a moment that when a particular neighborhood experienced an uptick in unemployment — that state agencies could send resources in to prevent foreclosure. The wonderful thing is that this platform is going to be open sourced as well. Not only will this benefit any city in Illinois that has done the work of harnessing their data, but there is potential for the state government to take advantage of this platform as well.

The SmartData platform is not a small project. It’s taking a significant amount of resources from the City of Chicago. Given it’s potential benefit not only to state government, but to cities across Illinois — the state should explore ways to support the project.

Remember the Healthcare.gov rollout disaster? Those kinds of disasters are normal at every level of government, but until Healthcare.gov not everyone was aware of it.

As somebody who was on the front line of a state agency as they rolled out a new software system, let me assure you that it’s not fun. There is no worse feeling than having a claimant sitting at your desk crying because she can’t make rent — and the only reason why you can’t fix the problem is that your brand spanking new software system has completely failed.

Well, there is the feeling of getting laid off by the state because they spent too much on the crappy system and can’t afford to pay you. However, I still count the feeling of powerlessness to solve the problem and do my job as being the lowest point in my service with the State of Illinois.

So, the way these conversations normally work is I always get asked. Christopher, if the software sucks so bad why does government keep buying software from the same people?

Simple. In an effort to cut down on people cheating the system, they introduced a system in which only those with a small army of lawyers could win an IT contract. Those handful of companies don’t have the same incentives that the normal marketplace does to innovate because they don't have to compete with the same talent that produces companies like Groupon, GrubHub, and Basecamp.

They don't have to open source their software. They don't have to take user experience design into account. They don't have to build a system knowing that they'll be expected to iterate and improve upon the software in the long term.

We're setting users up for failure when we procure this way.

Clay Johnson, former Presidential Innovation Fellow and CEO of the Department of Better Technology, put together presentation that describes what went so terribly wrong with Healthcare.gov. While state government is procurement rules are different from federal, there are enough similarities for the presentation to be instructive.

Procurement reform won’t come easy. There are perfectly reasonable and rational reasons why the system was set up the way it is. Years of fraud and corruption built a procurement system designed to make absolutely sure that no illicit activity would interfere with the way the state purchases items. However, the pendulum swung too far in one direction and it’s stifling innovation. Illinois must make a concentrated effort to reform the way it procures software so that we can take advantage of the innovative technology companies in our own backyard and not outsource our state government’s software development to companies headquartered in Dublin.

I like to brag about my city and my state. However, even I must admit that there is one state who is kicking our collective asses when it comes to innovation in state government: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Innovation Fellows (CMIF) Program, inspired by the White House’s Presidential Innovation Fellowship Program. Each fellow works for a one year term tackling a particular problem set in state government.

If Illinois can find the budget for it, then we should try and recruit civic minded tech talent to serve the state for one year helping to address some of state government’s biggest technology problems. This should be done in conjunction with procurement reform so that as the state gains the ability to shop for software that better suits the needs of agencies — the agencies themselves will be more familiar with what their options are.

Ideally, all state agencies would present possible projects for consideration under the program — but here are two possibilities just as examples:

A User Experience Study of Systems used by DCFS

The Department of Child and Family Services helps to protect our most vulnerable residents. Slammed by budget cuts, the agency has been understaffed and overworked.

Last year, word came out that DCFS had undercounted the number of children who had died from abuse in the last five years. DCFS officials blamed the software used to track cases. (And since the time of this post, reports have come out about even more problems at DCFS.)

You know what? As a technologist, I blame software too. Government is full of overpriced software that’s difficult to use. I completely believe the agency when they say that their software is bad. The civic technology community has seen it time and time again. What the community doesn't know is the details of how bad it is.

I'm proposing one of these Illinois Innovation Projects be a user experience study of the systems used by DCFS. We should see what the weaknesses of the system are so we can develop a plan to fix it. If possible, we should also open source the software so that it can be reviewed by other technologists.

Redeploying small apps that to improve experience of IDHS clients

Code for America, a non-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to making government work in the 21st century, has assembled an elite team of web developers, designers, and data scientists to help solve technology problems in our nation’s healthcare systems. Led by Dr. Rebecca Coelius, the team has built several small scale applications that make life easier for those receiving state aid. Check out this video about their work:

The incredible thing is that all of their work is open source and built for redeployment in other places. Mark this project down as low hanging fruit that would reap immediate benefits for Illinois residents.