Discussing "Dirty Dozen" Problems in IT Projects with Robert Peterson

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Narrator

We're in an era of rapid change where resilience is vital. The Davood for Thought podcast dives into the most important topics in government and technology today. Our host, Davood Ghods, sits down with his vast network of colleagues to dish on the tech challenges that affect us all. Follow this podcast on your favorite platform and join the conversation by sharing it on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.

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Davood Ghods

Hello everyone. Welcome to Direct Technologies, Davood for Thought. I'm Davood Ghods and I will be your host today. The way I stay up with the pressing topics of tech and government of today is to tap into the panel of experts. I've had the honor of connecting with over the years. Today we have Rob Peterson on the podcast.

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Davood Ghods

Rob is currently the Agency Information officer for California Department of Food and Agriculture, a role that I held between 2007 and 2009. Rob has over 22 years of experience with the federal government, Department of Defense and others performing advanced engineering, research, development, acquisitions and the program or project and staff management. Rob transitioned to an independent consultant role, providing similar services to the state of California and private entities.

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Davood Ghods

He joined the state of California to assist in resolving dirty dozen problems experienced by challenged IT projects, then served as the CIO for the Department of Food and Agriculture. And as I mentioned earlier, he is now the EO. Rob, you and I have known each other for many years, but you have a very interesting background and we want to learn more.

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Davood Ghods

I am happy to welcome you to this episode of our podcast and ask you to tell us more about your professional experience, what you have done and what exactly are dirty dozen problems. Welcome.  

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Robert Peterson

Thank you very much. A lot of my background started with the Department of Defense. I worked in most of the test centers within the Department of Defense. Edward Vandenburg, a number of different test centers within the D.O.D. and the Air Force as well as some other commands. My background is primarily as an engineer. I did a lot of designing of circuit boards systems. I've even done down to designing applications specific processes, chip level design within the Department of Defense. I was one of the one of the early recruits to be part of the Department of Defense Acquisition or Acquisition Corps was established by Congress and the significant criteria to be selected to be part of the acquisition or my specialty was in the project management strategy around high risk, high technology risk project.

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Robert Peterson

Most of my projects, the technology needed for the project didn't even exist. So a lot of my first efforts to develop the technology and then went through a similar model as the spiral model for development of project was iterate through cycles, lower the risk, eventually creating a workable solution for whatever the problem was primarily. Again, Department of Defense.

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Robert Peterson

I did some work for the US State Department. I ran a $3.4 billion project for the government of Saudi Arabia. Primarily, it was country wide infrastructure upgrade for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Work with the Israelis for some of their aircraft problems that they had and some software development efforts that they were doing. But mostly, again, I continue to focus on engineering. Still, one of my passions and things I still do even as of today.

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Davood Ghods

So very good, very impressive and interesting. So you were involved with ARPA and with Tripoli also, I understand, is that correct?  

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Robert Peterson

Correct. Actually, I started back with ARPA back when I was getting my first master's degree, and that's when the ARPANET just being developed. And so a lot of my work was as new technologies were being developed. I was brought in to figure out ways to defeat it and break into it like the, you know, ARPANET was the precursor to the Internet. And so my job was to figure out how I can tap into the networks and pull information off without anybody knowing that I was pulling information out. That's when I started to work our way back in 1987.

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Davood Ghods

Wow. One of the pioneers, then. So you want to tell us about the dirty dozen problems and the experience that you have with the challenged IT projects and how they relate?  

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Robert Peterson

Sure. Back in 2014, the Assembly bill was passed that identified and actually identified 13 problems, reoccurring problems that they achieved. Project said one of them as more administratively. But 12 of them were really due to more around the project management aspects of executing projects. So they include things like data conversion, governance, my area, environment testing, you know, these areas as well as the rest of them were were not well done by the state I.T. project per the assembly bill, the now CDC created a division called Consulting and Planning Division.

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Robert Peterson

So I was one myself and three other people were one of the first ones to be recruited into that new division. And we would go out to different projects and different departments and try to assist in whatever problems they were having that helped them get through either developing a better set of requirements or planning the data conversion more appropriately for the risks that were there or whatever the problem was.

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Robert Peterson

A lot of them had governance issues and we would go in there and help them set up a governance plan and tutor the governance committee on what they're supposed to do. So again, our our role was to try to help the Department project overcome the challenges that they were having. A lot of them were due to either lack of knowledge on what they should be doing, and some of them were were probably more attributable attributed to the timeframe or the rush of the project.

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Davood Ghods

And so they were skipping steps that were vital and they would pay for it on the back end, especially in data conversion. Thank you. So with that extensive background, not only from D.O.D. but also from CDC, makes you great asset to see the FAA and what the California Department of Food and Agriculture is trying to do with their animal health project.

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Davood Ghods

The next one, can you talk a little bit about that or any other efforts that your work currently working on outside the FAA? Please? Our audience would love to hear about that.  

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Robert Peterson

Sure. Animal Health Project. That's one of our bigger projects. The existing system is a core database that has about 60 applications sitting around it that all transmits data to this core database. Some of the applications are web application. Some or mobile applications. The iOS iPad. Right now, we're in the process of doing the stages of our process. There's a process to replace this system with when the system was developed. I've grown tremendously over the past 15, 15 years and as it grew, the biggest problems that were encountered were inconsistent business rules on different applications.

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Robert Peterson

So a lot of data problems crept into the system, inconsistent or incomplete or incorrect data and reports were run. And this really became a problem. When we have animal outbreaks, such as disease outbreaks. We had a very severe one a couple of years ago, essentially a poultry disease in trying to pull information out of that system to combat the disease and plan our strategy and how we're going to reduce the spread of the disease throughout the state.

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Robert Peterson

We came, the stigma challenged. And so we're trying to upgrade the system to really focus on good, clean data that we can rely on for report reporting. It's a very large project with a lot of stakeholders, a lot of users up and down the state, and it's a significant facility. I was there during the first version of this project and I know how significant it can be for supply of food and animal health, not only in the state of California, but for all of those who receive agricultural products of the state of California throughout the world.

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Davood Ghods

So your customer base could be global in this case? Definitely. Yes. Yeah. Rob, with your experience, what emerging trends are you seeing in the I.T. and business fields that we should all be paying more attention to?  

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Robert Peterson

I would say, though, you're looking at a number of the technical and business magazines and publications, and there is a tremendous focus right now on a lot of the artificial intelligence and to say process automation versus robotic process automation, because they are very two different things now. There's just a lot of focus in that, and it's a right fit for some businesses or some state departments that I'm going to call them businesses. But others are not. I know within CDP, a, a lot of these technologies are not the right fit. They don't match what we need within CDP. A Just our business doesn't work that way.

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Robert Peterson  

You know, departments like it or a lot of departments that get a lot of forms in from people that need to get processed quickly. So it's a wise move within city of there, I could tell you. We're really focused on trying to get a lot more of our applications in commerce and into a cloud based solution. We are a little bit behind, but there is not there's not a lot of legacy systems or currently built systems that exist out there.

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Robert Peterson

Well, CFA is not unique in our business. We are unique in the way this department is formed to compare to the department in other states, and other states do not have the consolidation and culture type of state of California does. And so we're dealing with, you know, states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Colorado, number of states that I've been in communications with, And they don't have the same departmental structure, you know, CDP area will be spread across three or four departments in some of these other states.

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Robert Peterson

So they don't have solutions that would be necessarily compatible with the state of California, obviously. Obviously, there are no businesses out there. There's no private industry out there that do the same thing that CFA does. So we're being further states and they're just different. It's absolutely a unique way of structuring an agency because your entity is headed by a secretary, you are the agency information officer and each division really isn't a department within the agency.

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Davood Ghods

Rob I think you would agree that adjusting to the pandemic was challenging for many organizations, and now everyone is thinking of what the next major disruption like the pandemic is going to be. How can we better be prepared for it? So resiliency, which is a service that we offer direct technology, is a big topic of conversation these days. What are some examples of resilience you've seen in the past year and what is the one thing organizations should be doing to improve resilience? In your opinion?

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Robert Peterson

Well, when COVID hit, you know, creative was way behind from a technology perspective, CFA has some unique financial constraints, especially around I.T., that other departments don't have as specifically identified in statute, those constraints.

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Robert Peterson

And so it's not something that we can necessarily work with a Department of Finance or so on. So when when COVID hit, we had some major infrastructure problems that really slowed us from being able to support more of a wider scale remote working or teleworking. As of right now, we were able to get some funding and we were able to upgrade some systems.

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Robert Peterson

And right now the Department of is totally committed to on high level, you know, 75 80% teller work full time and we are consolidating all of our buildings and moving a lot of people back into headquarters. Right now, we're starting to look to the future and again, promote resilience perspective. We don't really know what's going to happen in the future.

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Robert Peterson

All we know is where are those key points where whatever happens that people can come in or work remotely or it really is transparent, where they're where they're working from. We are moving to get rid of a lot of wired networking and start using wireless for multiple reasons. One security, one I can better identify who's connecting to our networks.

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Robert Peterson

But but our whole core is built around, you know, allowing people to be able to communicate and connect and work regardless of where they're at or what they need to connect to. We are changing a lot of our infrastructure to that. And right now, the city of our headquarters is a primary hub for all of the remote sites.

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Robert Peterson

We are shifting that over to the state data center over a gold county just because, again, even our headquarters do go away. And so we are starting to look at that future and trying to, you know, plan our long term roadmap to to be as flexible as possible or whatever the future may bring. Right. I agree with you that we don't know what could happen, but some of the things that most organizations get prepared for are some type of a power outage that could be regional and the region could be a county, a state or more than that that organizations like the Gold Camp facility have prepared for.

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Robert Peterson

And the organizations do. It could be a some type of other natural disaster. It could be some civil unrest that we know this January of this year. So those are the kinds of things the organizations can do a better job in preparing for. And that means that it's not just a disaster recovery plan that's sitting on a shelf that gets tested and it gets really used.

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Davood Ghods

So thank you for your answer on that question. My next question is really about motivation. Draw a direct technology. We always talk about how you're going to get a project done, but we also ask ourselves, why are we doing what we are doing? What is your why in other words, what motivates you in your work?  

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Robert Peterson

One of the reasons I really like food and agriculture is growing up is my grandfather was a farmer. Nice land in Williams area. A lot of my uncles owned farms down in Ireland. I grew up with horses, cattle and all sorts of different animals. And so when I look out and I do a lot of farming myself, I a couple thousand square feet of garden care well and greenhouses. But now I see that they really attract me from just my background and seeing what they are doing for the agricultural community.

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Robert Peterson

Just look at this year and see if DFA got an increase of around 500 million or grants to help farmers get ready for or drought resistant or climate change or carbon sequestration in soils. So, you know, it really comes down to my wife is now I understand what they're trying to do. I used to live here or I seen my family or members of my family live through their own cultural businesses.

00;21;04;14 - 00;21;51;01

Robert Peterson

I really am passionate about what they're trying to do with all the divisions and trying to do. And what they're trying to achieve is not just their job. I've I've had other opportunities that I really like what the department does from a business perspective and I can really connect to. That's what really drives me. Very nice. I'm glad you gave me that lead because you know, when I was the Iowa Food and AG, it was one of the most rewarding jobs that I had because no matter how indirectly I saw the results of my work every night at the dinner table.

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Robert Peterson

And, you know, not saying that I was responsible for the food on the table, but the safety of the food. I remember going through a E coli problem somewhere around Monterrey area, and that was really satisfying to see the farm to fork process and be part of that process. So that's a great motivator. Rob What inspires innovation on your team?

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Robert Peterson

From my team, it's a lot of freedom to more freedom to, I don't know, create or define things without the risk of necessarily any type of penalty of failure. Our team has in the past has gone through a lot of iterations, of a lot of different managers or aios or CEOs over the years. And a lot of the decisions were very risk averse that way.

00;23;05;22 - 00;24;10;03

Robert Peterson

And the team did not have an opportunity to explore new ideas and new ways of doing things because essentially, you know, there was that no penalty of failure and you just wasted a lot of effort for nothing and, you know, allowing them the freedom to try different ideas and see what works. That's really paid off, especially, I mean, very recently with the with COVID, we had a major problem within our headquarters data center, and we could not support any type of VPN or we had very limited capability for any type of virtual desktop infrastructure type connections.

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Robert Peterson

But by allowing the team to explore options and ideas and potential solutions, they were able to come up with a very quick solution using existing equipment that allowed us to implement VPN within probably three months where it was projected to take a year to do. As soon as we got that up and running. Pretty much all the departments were able to work from home or work remotely in different facilities.

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Robert Peterson

And so again, some of that freedom to for ideas and to try things without any, you know, any risk of failure, I think that really helps to expand their creativity. I know from my experience in working in various labs in the nation that we do the same thing within our laboratory environments because again, a lot of the things we were creating didn't exist.

00;25;27;16 - 00;26;05;23

Robert Peterson

And so trying to create a a new way of doing some image processing or some other other technology solutions. Yeah, we ran into failure quite a bit, but we also ran with success. So we need to have that ability to for ideas and that inspires innovation from my perspective. Very true. Creating things without penalty of failure absolutely will inspire innovation.

00;26;05;25 - 00;26;45;13

Davood Ghods

Thank you and thank you for even providing an example of that. What is something that would surprise people about your background, Rob, or your interests?  

00;26;45;16 - 00;27;18;18

Robert Peterson

As I stated, I worked in a lot of labs. I've done a lot of very high end technology research, a lot of stuff, a lot of technologies that likely won't won't get released to the public or private sector for probably decades from now. I've done a lot of most of my research is resulted in the publishing of various dissertations. I have four dissertations that I publish I've written, but they are not releasable yet. They likely won't be releasable for decades, even though the first one I wrote back in 1998 is still not releasable. I do a lot of technical research, even on my own.

00;27;18;20 - 00;27;51;15

Robert Peterson

I see. That's pretty interesting. Does that mean you have four PhDs? You're four degrees, or can you elaborate on that? As soon as they become releasable. I can sit there and claim or be a serious wow and tell the truth. I'm not even allowed to redact them so they could be published. Okay. Well, I tried last year and they still won't allow me to make any changes with regards to publishing.

00;27;51;17 - 00;28;27;09

Robert Peterson/Davood Ghods

Wow. Interesting. Well, hopefully on future podcasts, you can talk more about that. Yeah. So, Rob, where can people find you and keep tabs on what you're working on and how can they support your work? Thanks. In far better than the best to see that people email my CD4 count and I generally respond to them and it's a lot easier than people calling me emails or calling me on the phone.

00;28;27;11 - 00;29;02;26

Robert Peterson/Davood Ghods

I'm in quite a few meetings nowadays. Yes, I bet. Well, thank you for offering those channels of communication. This concludes my questions. Thank you for joining us on this podcast today, Rob. Thank you to all the listeners out there also for joining us. We will see you in the next episode of The World for Thought, where we will shed more light on the human side of that.

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