Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews Kip Harkness, the deputy city manager for San Jose, California, about how San Jose prioritized equity when expanding broadband access.
In this episode, Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews Kip Harkness, the deputy city manager for San Jose, California. Harkness is in charge of the city’s IT and innovation portfolios; despite being in the middle of Silicon Valley, many low-income residents don’t have access to broadband internet. Thanks to efficient digital permits, a partnership with national telecommunications providers, and a dedicated Digital Inclusion Fund, San Jose is connecting residents across the city and providing online access across households.
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New from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the Data-Smart City Pod brings on top innovators and leading industry, academic, and government officials to discuss data, innovation, and government. This podcast serves as a central resource for cities and individuals interested in the intersection of government and innovations, the adoption of data projects on the local government level, and how to become data smart. Hosted by Stephen Goldsmith, former Deputy Mayor of New York, Mayor of Indianapolis, and current Professor at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Steve Goldsmith: Hello. This is Steve Goldsmith, Professor of Urban Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. And you're listening to Data-Smart City Pod, where we bring on top innovators and experts to discuss the future of cities and how to become data smart.
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Steve Goldsmith: This is Steve Goldsmith, and today I'm with Kip Harkness, who's Deputy City Manager in San Jose. Interesting background, coming from private enterprise and now having the portfolio of innovation and technology for the city manager in the heart of innovation, Silicon Valley. Kip, nice to have you with us today.
Kip Harkness: Great to be here.
Steve Goldsmith: I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes first about your background because I think it is relevant. Innovating in the private sector, I would say, is actually easier than innovating in the public sector, but lessons learned across. And then I want to think forward with you on two issues. One, cities are place-based, so how do you connect your geographic information systems, the spatial analytics to innovation, A. And B, I'll talk to you a little bit about solving equity problems as we move forward with smart sensors and platforms. But first, a note or two about you. How did you get to this job, and where were you before?
Kip Harkness: I've gone in and out of public and private sector, and my last swing, before I came into this role, was with PayPal and eBay before they split. I was working for the CTO, and my job was as their Director of Technology Engagement, where I was responsible for thinking about the 5,000 engineers that they had in 38 sites across the globe. And how do you spin those folks up to being both the best engineers and, specifically, the best technology leaders? Cultivating that next generation of technology leaders within PayPal, who would understand the trends in mobile, the trends in crypto, and also the global market and the perspective of the customer.
Steve Goldsmith: I want to, at the end of the interview, get you to tell us a little bit what the future will be. But how about just the present, first of all? You've got a terrific mayor, a great city manager, and a terrific platform for innovation. That doesn't make you immune from issues of equity and fairness, however. How are you thinking about using GIS's spatial analytics and new innovative technologies to improve services for your community, including how you're thinking even about broadband access?
Kip Harkness: Well, cities, all cities are at their heart place-based. And when I describe the city of San Jose, I remind people that we're what I call an A-to-Z city. We have an airport, we have a zoo, we have everything in between. And part of what GIS gives us, geographic information approach, gives us is a way of spatially organizing and understanding that, which I think is extremely important on the public sector city side.
To be more specific, we had a flood a couple of years back, and we realized we had no visibility on what was going on in the field. We had no understanding of what was happening in the neighborhoods that were being affected. I happened to be at the emergency operations center at the time and was getting texts from people in the field with pictures. And that was as sophisticated as we got. I literally remember drawing out, on a PDF that somebody had printed, out an evacuation area and trying to get that out to police by texting it to them in the field.
That was a wake-up call for us. We really connected him with our GIS team, and they've just been phenomenal, done everything from boring things, like build out our master address database so we know where people actually are and corrected 174,000 addresses that were either absent or wrong, so that we know exactly where people are, to building out, in the case of the flood, situational awareness tools that connect our mapping capability, IoT gauges in the stream, field assessment teams, able to crowdsource information, so that the last time we had a near flood event, the emergency operations center, we had real-time information or near-real-time, updated every 15 minutes, that told us exact levels, information from the field, and status of what was going on in a way that we were able to get literally ahead of the event and notice and warn people well before they were in danger, which was complete opposite of what we had done before. Very, very powerful for us.
And we found, similarly, that while we believe we understand the neighborhoods that are dealing with poverty and dealing with equity issues, that when we actually dig into the data, we learn a lot. And then we connect that data to action. It is much, much more powerful.
An example on that has been our work around connectivity with our partners, in particular with Verizon and AT&T, where, when the pandemic hit, we realized that this was no longer a homework gap. There was no longer just the need to connect to watch Netflix, but for vital reasons, people and all of our neighbors need to be connected. We sat down, mapped out the areas where we had pockets of poverty, lots of free school lunch, other areas like that and said, "This is where we want to focus creating connectivity." AT&T and Verizon were right there with us and built out their small-cell network based on that mapping so that we radically and comprehensively increased connectivity for just those neighborhoods that had been most disconnected as a result of the pandemic.
Steve Goldsmith: Tell us a little bit about that. Did you map neighborhoods? Did you map poverty rates? How did you identify A, the most-in need neighborhoods? B, how could you evaluate where there was or was not connectivity potential?
Kip Harkness: We used about 12 different factors to create an index scale, looking at everything from census data on poverty to racial distribution to free lunch numbers, which are really useful actually because they get down to individual schools and give a good rule of thumb. And then we built that into an index that gave us a sense that the census track level of the neighborhoods that were having the most issues.
There's a lot that is proprietary about connectivity and networks that is not something that any of the telcos legitimately want to publicly share. Basically, what we did is we slid that across the table to them and say, "Hey, use this. Take a look at your network coverage maps. You don't have to share them with us, but where you see gaps, we'd like to see you accelerate the build-out." And then what we did to keep track of that is we mapped the percentage of the build-out that was taking place in high-need areas versus non-high-need areas. And what we saw was a correlation with increase in the amount of build-out taking place in those high-need areas because we could monitor where they were built, even though we don't have an in-depth understanding of what the next network coverage actually looks like,
Steve Goldsmith: How are you doing now compared to your goals? You're halfway through? You're a quarter way through? Your three quarters through? Where is it?
Kip Harkness: In terms of the overall build-out, which is expected to be a 10-year build-out, we're about two-and-a-half years in, and we're about halfway done. So that's pretty good. We've got 2000 small cells permitted. Most of those are in construction or completed at this point. There's another 2000 remaining.
In terms of the equity focus, we saw a rapid acceleration over the last 10 months that we've been focusing on this. And at this point, the majority of the small cells that have been built and come online are in the high-need or need areas, which is a dramatic shift from the normal pattern of building out first in the high-traffic, which are often high-income areas.
Steve Goldsmith: That's terrific. Kip, let me just shift a little bit here. None of us will be sure how the infrastructure money from the federal government will be spent, but as you think about smart infrastructure and platforms, what would you hope that you might accomplish? We can even make this more interesting. If price is no object, how would you make infrastructure smarter?
Kip Harkness: I'm not even sure my brain is capable of absorbing that last part of the sentence as a good bureaucrat. But I would say, as a bit of an armchair historian, the analogy that's come up to me is what happened with electricity around a hundred years ago or maybe a little bit closer to the turn of the century. It's analogous to what's happening now with IoT and smart sensors is that it's an emerging technology. There are lots of competing standards. It's clearly something important, here to stay, but we haven't figured out how to build it into our routine process. I think, just like people now don't bat an eye about wiring, a building for electricity in 20 years, they're not going to bat an eye about where the sensors go and how they're coordinated in the IoT. But at this point, we haven't quite figured it out.
I think the challenge is, and if price were no object or even if it were, is how do you build out that infrastructure with the anticipation that you're going to want it censored, you're going to want it connected, and to make sure that however you build it, you, at the very least, don't block opportunities to do that and ideally enable them as you build it out, even though I don't think we know enough to know what the standard is or build and fix things that are going to be there for longer than five years.
I think that's the other truth about infrastructure is that the capital planning-programming perspective, where I've got a 5-year build-out and a 30-year life, is too long for the cycles in technology right now. And so we've got to figure out a way to allow us to do with infrastructure what Elon Musk has done with the car, make it iterative. I splashed out a little while, and I got myself a Tesla. And one of the things I love about it is that every month or so, it realizes there's something that I didn't know about it, that it needs, it upgrades itself, and it gives that to me. Our infrastructure needs to be more like the Tesla than a fixed car that I'm going to have to bring in an overhaul every time I need a change. If money were no object, I would think about building iterative infrastructure, where I can flash software updates to it, rather than being stuck with it as a fixed quantity.
Steve Goldsmith: That was such a good answer. I intend to totally steal that Tesla analogy and use it over and over again.
Kip Harkness: You're welcome to it.
Steve Goldsmith: Thanks. Last question. Your public environment is a little messy. You've got multiple quasi-government agencies. You've got a city manager and a mayor. Dual systems are one place, airport is another. How do you think about your role in advancing technology-driven innovation across such a messy environment? How do you lead without authority in places that require multiple agencies to be involved?
Kip Harkness: Well, I think the first answer is you don't start that way. And what I mean by that is, if you kind of go back to Covey, and the Covey's surprisingly useful in a lot of things, if you've ever worked in public sector. He talks about circle of control versus circle of influence versus circle of concern. And circle of concern, you can't do a damn thing about. Circle of influence, you can guide a little bit. Circle of control, well, you control it.
What we found with innovation in San Jose is it's best to start in your circle of control. Rather than having to convince 12 partners to standardize on something, what's the thing that you 100% control? We started out with hiring. We control hiring absolutely in the city, and we did a customer-driven innovation piece on it, where we actually talked to two people that were being hired and hiring managers. We found out we had about a 45-step process, which required about 45 approvals and took forever. So we changed it to a 15-step process that required two approvals, one in the front end, one in the back end. And we got a 275% lift in how fast and how many people we're able to hire without anything other than those process changes.
Once we did that, other departments started to pay attention to us, and said, "Hey, maybe that innovation thing matters. Do you want to come work with us?" And then once we got traction with the departments, outside agencies, like the school districts, started to come in and say, "Hey, that seems to be working. Do you want to partner with us on connectivity for our students?"
I think it's the you attract more flies with honey than vinegar approach. The way to collaboration in private sector is to have people come begging you to collaborate with you because you don't have power over them. Maybe that's a cop-out, but if you're at the local government level, that's really the lever that you have is make it such an exciting opportunity that they can't say no.
Steve Goldsmith: Okay, Kip Harkness, San Jose is a fortunate place. It has one of the country's best mayors in Sam Liccardo, a highly competent city manager in Kip Harkness. Thanks for spending time with us today.
Kip Harkness: Absolutely delighted. Thank you so much, Stephen.
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Steve Goldsmith: If you liked this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org or follow us @DataSmartCities on Twitter. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This podcast was produced by Betsy Gardner and hosted by me, Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to serve as a central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.
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