Look Who’s MeriTalking: Greg Godbout

MeriTalk: With the Smart Cities, what aspect is the EPA focused on?

GG: In this case, we’re building it around air sensors, and we’re working with the Office of Air on that, to do it. We’re narrowly picking one form of Internet of Things, which would be sensors measuring air quality, without defining exactly which sensors are used. We wanted to see what the communities come up with and where is the value proposition for the communities in how they’re installing these things. And what does that look like, when you go from a single air sensor in a city to 10,000 or something like that. We’re not going to quite ask them to do 10,000, but I think that’s the future, and that’s a dramatically different world.

MeriTalk: What does the day to day of your job look like?

GG: Right now it is a constant state of change management and managing standing up services to work alongside our programs, to help with coaching and moving in toward a 21st-century environmental protection, from a technology standpoint. And then really just a constant involvement of the changes and forces in the whole organization and what we change. And the exciting thing here is the whole organization is committed to it. It’s not just in the CIO’s office, and we’re just doing something to fix the CIO’s office. It’s not that at all. It’s actually, we’re working together to fix all the functions, to fix the whole ecosystem, or modernize the whole ecosystem, so that we can work and be more agile and adaptive in the future.

MeriTalk: For those that want to become a CTO, what advice do you have?

GG: There’s multiple different types of CTOs in the Federal government; it’s very interesting. My advice to someone who’s going to be a CTO would be: embrace mission IT. Think about how you can use technology to actually drive mission value and not just enable it. It would be great to get to an enabling standpoint, but really seek to drive mission value with IT. There’s a very fuzzy line, now, between products and services that government delivers and IT. It’s very hard to figure out where IT stops and the mission begins. And that will increasingly get blurred, so I think really embracing the mission and being part of that team is where I’d like to see CTOs go.

MeriTalk: What was a defining moment in your career that led you to be a CTO?

GG: I read an article many years ago about a pizza company that was expanding at a rate that was unheard of. They went from one store to, I think, 2,000 franchises just overnight. And I thought, “This is crazy. Just from a business standpoint, how did this happen?” And the owner of the pizza store, everyone kept asking him questions and asking, “Is it your ingredients? Is it the pizza?” And he said, “Well I think what you need to understand is we’re a social media company, not a pizza company.” And I didn’t understand what he meant. I knew enough to know I didn’t understand it. Having an IT background and also being an entrepreneur, many, many years ago, that article started me on an investigation, which was the world of Web 2.0, and what does that mean for the world, and how does it change organizations? I think where that’s leading is: think about how different the world is in the Internet of Things, where everything is IT and a sensor. We aren’t in the business you think we’re in anymore; we’re actually in some sort of software version, or electronic version of that business, even if it’s pizza. That article and sort of the journey that started me [on] led me to where I am today. You can see these distinct steps where one evolved into the next.

MeriTalk: How has your experience at 18F affected the work you’re doing here?

GG: It’s really all part of the same movement. As we were standing up specific services at 18F–and I was the executive director–we started talking about, as a team, how actually wouldn’t it be great if we brought all of the services to one agency at one time, and how transformative could that be? You could show value immediately and help with IT hiring and help with IT agile acquisitions and help with, not just building something, but literally all the things you touch around. Going to a cloud so you can get to a DevOps environment and actually having an agile deployment process. You pull all these things together, and it’s massively transformative, or it could be. That was the theory. We started thinking about: How would we test that? I couldn’t let that thought go, and that’s when I went looking for an agency that would be willing to try this transformation across all the different functions and stuff. [18F is] very tied to it. The services that we use to prove value here and stand up our own services are 18F services, and now they can back out as we’re standing [the services] up on our own. That was the plan, and it’s working out. It’s pretty exciting. It was a big test and a big hypothesis to see if it could be transformative. And the short answer right now is yes. We just need to scale it now.

MeriTalk: What do you look for in an IT leader?

GG: I think that, in a world that’s always changing, we need a culture of learning. To have a culture of learning, you really need to have people that are OK changing their mind and not being tied to an agenda. What I’m looking for is someone who’s just totally committed to learning. And there’s humbleness about that. There’s sort of this idea that when the world’s always changing, you’re never really an expert. You can’t be, because the expert today, in just a year or two, has outdated information. It’s dramatically changed. I like to work with people that are just so hungry to keep learning and can sort-of know the limitations of what they know right now. Good leaders in this ever-changing environment world are like coaches. And I think you’re just continuously improving, not like “we made it, high-five, it’s over, we got to some platform.” It just doesn’t happen that way.

MeriTalk: Is there anything else that you or EPA are working on that you really want people to know about?

GG: I think that it’s the fact that our policies in governance are changing, and not just in the IT department or in the CIO’s office. They’re aligned directly with the CFO, the administrator’s office–which would be the Office of Policy here. And Acquisitions is aligning around strategic sources and category management to align it with our agile acquisitions services that we’re standing up. All of these groups are making it so wherever you go, you’re going to get common policies, because we all worked on them together. It was by design of making sure we were all aligned. People can talk about FITARA and all these different things, but all that matters is that, at the end of the day, if you’re not aligned with each of the other business units, and you’re all not fiercely dedicated, not to your function but to the mission, you’re going to have trouble no matter what you do. But if you get everyone aligned around a mission, and that your function is just your table stakes–what got you to the table–then massive changes are capable in government. To me that’s very exciting. I wasn’t so sure about that coming into government, but it’s thrilling to see happen. To know that it can happen is pretty exciting.

Jessie Bur
About Jessie Bur
Jessie Bur is a Staff Reporter for MeriTalk covering Cybersecurity, FedRAMP, GSA, Congress, Treasury, DOJ, NIST and Cloud Computing.