New County Official to Tackle a Tangled Bureaucratic Web of Technology

Picture a $12-billion, Fortune 500 corporation whose five leaders--and its second tier of three dozen managers--don’t communicate very well with each other, or with the outside world.

Over the years, each of them goes out and buys the latest telecommunications and information technology so they can finally talk with each other, share information and do their jobs.

After a while, however, they figure out that their fancy technology has only made things worse. The reason: none of it is compatible. Instead, everyone is at the mercy of their technology, hamstrung by their inability to talk to each other or share information. They’re even more isolated, inefficient and confused than ever.

Welcome to Los Angeles County government, which has five county supervisors, a chief administrative officer and 38 major departments that have influence over nearly every aspect of the lives of the county’s 9 million residents.

In an effort to drag themselves into the modern age, the county’s departments have all gone their separate ways when purchasing expensive computers and telecommunications and information systems. The county, in fact, spends about $400 million a year on such technology, but no one is there to coordinate or even oversee the entire process.

E-mail someone in another department? Forget it.

Pull the health records of someone who has entered the criminal justice or mental health system? Not a chance.

Allow members of the public to use their computers to access information from the county’s vast databanks? Sorry. Just like in the days of the Model T, you have to get in your car, drive to the agency and wait in the long line at the counter.

Even the county’s largest departments, such as health services and the sheriff, have such disparate information and communications systems that they can’t get them to even talk to each other. The result has been the mistaken release of prisoners and other law enforcement nightmares, and a public hospital system that can’t tell if a patient has been seen by doctors in other county facilities.

One recent study concluded that virtually dozens of county agencies have influence over children’s issues, yet they rarely, if ever, talk with each other to develop a cohesive strategy for protecting kids from abuse and other problems.

“The county, like government in general, has been caught in a time warp between an old way of doing things and a new technological revolution which is sweeping the world,” Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky said. “The problem the county has had in the past is that every department and every agency had the desire for its own system, and it was not important for them to have the systems talk to each other.”

“What we need is somebody to pull the systems together so they can act as one system. We need to transform ourselves into a technologically relevant organization, which most governments are not. We want to be well-prepared and well-positioned to take advantage of the technological opportunities that are out there,” Yaroslavsky said.

Enter Jon W. Fullinwider, the county’s first information and technology czar.

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After years of hand-wringing over what to do about their growing technology problems, the county supervisors voted about a year ago to create the position of chief information officer.

So important was the task, they said at the time, that they overrode the recommendations of their advisors, and made the position report directly to them.

Fullinwider, who got the job after another high-tech expert turned it down, doesn’t start until Jan. 21. He will be responsible for coordinating the hundreds of computer systems within the county to get them to work together, and for making sure there is one comprehensive information and telecommunications strategy rather than dozens of individual ones.

Los Angeles County already has a Web site that residents can access for information, and help, and some of the supervisors and departments also have their own. as well. But Fullinwider and others say they could be upgraded significantly.

From his resume and interviews, Fullinwider appears to be just what the county needs. Since 1988, he has been the director of information services for San Diego County, where he turned a large municipal government system with problems similar to those in Los Angeles into a national model of how to harness technology for the benefit of government.

One of the first things Fullinwider did in San Diego was to decentralize much of the information systems, to foster better interdepartmental communication. Then he moved to make county records available in electronic form so that people could access them via computer.

Soon, San Diego residents will be able to look up (and pay) traffic citations via computer, check to see if someone is in jail and when they were booked, pay their taxes and even file civil complaints via computer, Fullinwider said.

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“If your objective is to reduce pollution and reduce traffic, why would you make people jump into a car and drive to county offices when they can do something online?” Fullinwinder asked.

“I’ve got my work cut out for me in Los Angeles, clearly,” Fullinwider said. “But it is achievable. It needs to be done.”

The supervisors couldn’t agree more. Tired of the embarrassments wrought by the lack of information technology, they already have mentioned a handful of things they want Fullinwider to tackle as soon as he gets here.

At one recent board meeting, for example, the supervisors and sheriff’s officials clashed at length about significant problems within the patchwork of computer networks in the criminal justice system.

“We want a coordinated system, a system we have confidence in,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina, adding that she can’t wait for Fullinwider to get here and get to work. “We have to have technology that we can trust. We need [him] to come in and give us a plan.”

Yaroslavsky seconded that desire. But, he added, Fullinwider is going to need a lot more than technical skills to get the job done, especially when dealing with department heads not used to taking orders from anyone but the themselves.

“What he’s really going to need,” Yaroslavsky said, “is to be a diplomat.”