When David Bray joined the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, it had had roughly nine CIOs in eight years. Clearly something new needed to happen. Though Bray was still in his 30s, he had been in government for more than half his life, as his government service began at the age of 15. The IT department had a significant need to modernize. Bray recognized that cloud computing and “as-a-service” technology represented a significant opportunity to modernize the FCC’s technology portfolio.
At the same time, in less than two years, he has gone from zero to more than 142,000 Twitter followers. He has creatively leveraged that and other networks he has created for inspiration for new ideas, to test ideas, and to help others. In this interview, he shares the details of his career journey, the transformation he has led at the FCC, the way in which he sees his job as part venture capitalist, the benefits of being social, and a variety of other topics.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 27th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To listen to the prior 26 with the CIOs of Intel, J. Crew, GE, CVS Caremark, and Ecolab among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link to the upper left-hand part of this page.)
Peter High: Most people are probably familiar with the FCC, but perhaps not the inner workings of it, and certainly not the inner workings of the CIO's role. Could you take a few moments to introduce your role within the organization?
David Bray: Sure. I parachuted into my role as CIO of the FCC about 20 months ago. When I arrived, there had been about nine CIOs in eight years prior to my arrival. The FCC itself is about 18 different bureaus and offices with about 1,750 government employees. Our scope is anything involving wired or wireless across the United States.
My role as CIO was focused on the fact that when I arrived, I assessed that they had about 207 different IT systems - again, for only 1,750 people. I sometimes joke that I'm Oprah Winfrey - "Look under your chair, everyone is going to go home today and you get an IT system. Take it, it's free!" I think we got there because over the last 20 years, whenever there was a new request, either from the administration, or from Congress, or whether it was a new law, the FCC would roll out a new IT system. That works for the first five or ten years, but over time you accumulate so many different IT systems that at least 80% of our IT budget was spent merely sustaining what we already had. That limited what I could do in terms of new development. While I am sure I could spend the next five or ten years updating each one of those 207 systems - and I should note that more than half of them are over ten years old - I think by the time I did that I would have to do it all over again.
We decided to do a new shift technology-wise to move to a common data platform that would be cloud based. We take the data from legacy systems and build a thin user interface with reusable code because there may be elements that are common across these different systems like user authentication, export to PDF, and map production that we do not have to produce 207 different times. Instead, we could reuse that code as part of a service catalog and that way we can be more effective and efficient in what we are doing. We have had some early successes.
We have also addressed the human element. The team was at half strength and while we are probably not going to bring it back to historical strength size-wise, we are trying to bring in new people and integrate them with the existing staff.
High: Both those sound like quite daunting and complex tasks. I'm wondering, from a technology perspective, how did you determine where to begin? How did you prioritize?
Bray: The first three to four months of my role was trying to listen to and understand as many people as I could meet. Since the FCC is small, it makes it easy to meet people here at our headquarters location, as well as in Gettysburg. What I tried to do in that sense was meet as many people as possible.
What you find out is that the 18 different bureaus and offices, in some respects, are all unique in their different requirements. Any technology solution will have to allow for that diversity. You cannot do a single system that is going to solve everybody's issues. The other thing is that some of these systems were defined by law, even to the level of naming the IT system itself. Any update, in some respects, might take an act of Congress, literally.
After the three or four month period, my team focused on the systems that were most likely to leak. The belief is that you do not wait until 20 years to replace your roof. You try to replace it as soon as possible, even if it has not leaked yet.
In February 2014, we embarked on a strategy of updating our consumer help desk, which was about 15 years old and was public-facing, and we knew that was going to be our front door to our users.
At the same time, on the human capital side, we started reaching out for people that I would say are non-traditional public servants. These were creative people. One had his own startup, but was willing to start off initially one or two days per week working at the FCC. Another was someone who was about to do a PhD, but was willing to defer it for a year or two to help out at the FCC as well. We brought them in to integrate with the team. I often say that there will never be an IPO in government. We will have a reverse IPO, which I call an "Opportunity for Positive Impact", and I basically gave them autonomy. They ran with it, and one of these change agents made a proposal of doing software-as-a-service, instead of doing "Big Iron" for the help desk. That allowed us to do it in less than six months, and instead of being $3.2 million, it was only $450,000.
High: For the stereotype of government being inefficient, this is a nice story of government efficiency. You talked about the human element in both of your responses, for good reason. What makes up the modern skill-set for the IT department of the future?
Bray: There are three core values that we endorse here at the FCC in terms of IT. One is benevolence, which often makes people wonder, but I say we are a public service, and that is first and foremost what we should do. Second is competence. Third is integrity. Part of the reason I picked those is that there is strong research that shows if you believe that somebody is benevolent, competent, and has integrity you're willing to trust them. It is about rebuilding trust, both within the FCC and with the public as well.
There are studies that show that if you give people autonomy and metrics to track progress, it is a motivator for them to do extraordinary things. Give them a meaningful mission that will motivate people more than anything else. I am trying to adopt that philosophy, that's what I try to do as a leader, and if I see people that respond well to that and are creative problem solvers it helps with what we're trying to do here. It's not unique to just IT. I think our biggest successes come when there's an IT person who is willing to take the time to sit alongside the bureaus and offices, understand their workflows, and build those relationships. That way two or three weeks in you have that trust relationship where you can say "I know you have historically done it this way, but what if we simplified the process and took out four of these steps to make it much faster". You have to have that relationship.
High: You have also talked about your vision of becoming almost entirely cloud-based. How have you planned for this, and what plans have you laid to mitigate issues related to security?
Bray: We thought it would probably be better for FCC to look at public cloud, because the different large corporations of the world that provide cloud services will have a much bigger security staff than what we have. Remember our total staff is 50 people. Our vendor partner takes care of patching and many layers of security. I often say we should not be in the business of trying to maintain the IT, we should be in the business of working with the mission partners to make sure we are delivering services to the public and the private sector.
I do not necessarily think that in all cases, cloud is necessarily cheaper. Obviously, we can see some efficiencies if it's an old system that we are investing in, but what it does is buys us both agility, in terms of being able to deliver things much faster, and it gives us resiliency. There may still be events that are adverse, but the ability to rapidly detect that and respond to it would be much better than if we used a client server on site.
High: I recently had an article on Forbes about the 20 most social CIOs - a list that you were at the head of. You have more than 142,000 followers on Twitter, for example, and you are a prolific tweeter in addition to using other social media. What are the benefits you get from being so active in social media?
Bray: It was an intentional part when I arrived here. I'd not been on social media prior to my arrival, and I wanted to create an FCC_CIO account.
High: To be clear, you had zero followers two years ago?
Bray: Exactly. The only thing I had been on was LinkedIn. Maybe I had a following on LinkedIn, because it was a personal bio, but nothing on Twitter. I arrived and talked to public affairs about creating an FCC_CIO account. It was launched, probably around November of 2013. The goal was to start the conversation, not just within the FCC, but with the public about what we were trying to do, because a lot of our systems are public facing. I fully admit several of them are 12 or 13 years old and could be better. I don't have an unlimited budget, nor do I have unlimited staff, so we have to triage what we do. Social media is good at that. It also allowed me to have individual conversations.
There's a wonderful article, I think in 2007's Harvard Business Review, titled "In Praise of the Incomplete Leader." The best leaders admit that they do not know everything, but instead provide a safe space in which people can provide input. So, I do that internally here. In fact, my team knows that I reward people that bring alternative ideas. I ask that they bring data. It's not just an opinion, but show some data to support it. If you bring a better solution and bring the data to support it, I will invest in it. Often, in some respects, my role is like being a venture capitalist on the inside. The same thing is true in social media.
High: Your Twitter followers have grown from zero to roughly 142,000. How have you gained that kind of a followership in less than two years?
Bray: First, I started following topics of interest early. Then I started engaging in conversations. I was open to other people's ideas, but I would also share my thoughts, too. That led to an interesting connection to a group called CXO Talk, they invited me to do some videos. The other thing that I do in a personal capacity, which is outside work, I host what I call non-attribution creative brainstorm sessions. It is a place to get together across sectors and have conversations. Anyone is invited and anyone can invite anyone else. It's almost like real-life social media. That led to other connections as well.
I believe my job is two-fold. First, I need to take care of FCC's IT. The other thing is have a conversation with the public that says "I know lots of people feel that government is slow, government is inefficient, and government is broken,” and I respect and listen to that. And then I turn back and say "At the same time, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to provide checks and balances.” So, yes, you may want the extremely effective, efficient, and speedy government, but that may be one without any checks and balances, and I do not want a dictatorship. I think that has been an ok tension up until now, before the pace of technology acceleration that we're seeing.
How do we continue to do representative democracy with checks and balances, and yet deal with the speed of technology change that is going on? I do not pretend to have all the answers, but if I can have a conversation with the public about that, I think that's an important thing to have. Otherwise, we lose public trust, and it is going to be a greater divide between the public sector and the private sector. That could be an existential threat to our nation.
High: How do you work with your peers in other agencies and departments of the government?
Bray: Social media is part of the equation. In fact, the good news is that I am seeing more public sector, not just CIOs, but even individuals showing up online and having conversations online. One is talking online, it's when we're commuting in the morning on the train, or when I take the train back home, or tweeting back and forth.
Second, is through the informal meetup. That's a good way to have conversations. Conferences as well. I have increasingly tried to encourage people that organize conferences that it's more valuable to me to have my team meet with other team members as opposed to just CIO to CIO. One, because CIO to CIO is great, but is top-down. I'm a big believer that if we only do top-down, top-down will increasingly not work in rapidly changing environments. We have to do bottom-up.
The way I operate here is that if I see opportunities for somebody from my team to interact with somebody from another organization at the federal level, state level, local level, or even with the private sector I encourage it because then that helps elevate ideas that they may pitch internally, like the venture capitalists on the inside. I ask them for three reasons why they think it won't work, and then three reasons why they may be able to mitigate it. If they have those three reasons, then I know it's good to go. If they are not sure as to how they are going to mitigate it, or they don't know why things might fail, then I say spend a little bit more time, and talk to people, about why it might fail and come back to me. Then we invest.
High: You spent time either studying and/or lecturing at Emory, Oxford University, MIT, and Harvard. Can you talk a bit about this quest for learning, and the quest for teaching as well, and collaborating in an academic setting, and the way in which you see that balancing against your work professionally?
Bray: On September 11, 2001 at 9:00 a.m. eastern time, I was supposed to brief the CIA and the FBI as to what we would do if a bio-terrorism event happened. I did not get that briefing. Due to the terrorist attacks, the priority was to pile computers in the cars and set them up some place else. We had people go to New York and DC to deal with the response, and we did not sleep for three weeks. It slowed down on October 1st, and we briefed the CIA and the FBI on October 3rd, and of course the first case of anthrax showed up 24 hours later. We were very busy.
A boss of mine at the time suggested that I consider getting a PhD. I applied to about 15 different places, and it worked out that Emory made a great offer, and it was right next to the CDC, so I could use some of my data when I was with the Bioterrorism Program to complete the PhD.
I did that, and then was lucky enough to do postdocs at MIT and Harvard. I also connected with the University of Oxford, and I think this is important because the world is changing so fast that if we rely on any one sector to have the answers, whether it be private, public, academic, or even non-profits we are going to miss how we are going to work together. I think we need to build bridges between the private sector, academia, and the public sector.
High: You began your government service at the age of 15. What was your path to the public sector?
Bray: It started in 1993; Google wasn't around yet. My path was that I did computer simulations. When I was 15, I had been building computer simulations of natural events. It was a combination between the US Navy and the Department of Energy that approached me. The Navy approached me and asked if I would like to do a research expedition with Dr. Robert Ballard, who had found the Titanic. This was with the Jason Project. As a freshman in high school, I spent two weeks in the Sea of Cortez doing computer simulations and working with him. The same thing happened that summer at a Department of Energy facility; they had an electron beam accelerator facility, and they needed some computer simulations built. That got me exposed to the world of research and government, and it was fun. It was also the early days. Netscape Navigator hadn't even come out yet.
I guess that got me hooked on making a positive difference. Later on in my path, I did spend some time in the private sector, and I enjoyed that as well. But the sense of a hard compelling mission there is tricky, I am sure there are places in the private sector where you can find it, but the public sector has it in spades. Right now, I know we are the underdog, and, in some respects, I like being the underdog.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT.
