Reimagining Government Sector through Technology

Stephen Pereira, Chief Information Officer, Calvert County Government

Stephen Pereira, Chief Information Officer, Calvert County Government

As a CIO at Calvert County Government, Stephen Pereira helps their community resources department, which might have an issue with case management software in the office. Over his 21-year of career, Pereira has overseen and implemented business technology change in the government and private sector especially serving customers in different markets. He started his career with an e-commerce business in the UK and expanded it across Europe.

In light of your experience, what are your strategies to deal with your client to fulfill their demands?

Currently, we are focusing on Retail and e-commerce, which is all about customer service. Every client comes with different needs, and we need to understand that so that we can enable them to do their job and be more productive in the space in which we work. There is a saying that one unhappy client will share with 25 more people about their bad experience. Our major goal is to always be updated and gather information since if we don’t know about people’s complaints about our systems, we won’t be able to address them or improve them.

What are the challenges that you have observed prevailing in terms of technology in the government sector?

The biggest problem I’ve encountered is when someone approaches us with a problem and depending on who they approach; they may find a slightly different solution. That is not to say that the problems are not being resolved; each client has a unique strategy. Because of this, my greatest efforts have been documenting what we are doing for the landscape review.

"Our major goal is to always be updated and gather information since if we don’t know about people’s complaints about our systems, we won’t be able to address them or improve them "

To ensure that it’s more of a rinse-and-repeat situation, we are working to provide stronger documentation, SLAs, and SOPs. Additionally, we are working to become an IT organization to codify our governance structure and make our organization more modular so that people can simply slip in and out.

What are some of the technological or process elements that you have leveraged to make the project more successful?

We are currently trying to enter the lowcode, no-code space. The democratization of software is something about which we are quite enthusiastic. It will empower citizen developers in a significant way. I believe it will also benefit us because our organization’s conglomerate nature makes it nearly impossible for a single person to fully understand the needs and requirements of all of the business units within our system. This will also allow people to begin creating apps that are tailored to their own needs. I believe it will result in significant efficiencies for us, and we are undoubtedly excited about it.

What advice would you offer brand-new professionals in the emerging sector?

Collaboration is the major piece of advice I have. I’ve always loved that people in the government sector are always willing to assist and share their ideas with you. For example, we are now installing Workday, a new ERP and HCM solution. Before we did that, we got in touch with a few other counties and talked to them to find out their problems and what they had learned. This was incredibly helpful to us. We greatly benefited from hearing from someone who has already gone through the process in terms of preparation, learning from mistakes, and getting advice. Therefore, if I were to give any advice, it would simply be to communicate, get in touch with your coworkers, and see what knowledge they can provide.