EPISODE 223: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Ted Ross

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Ted Ross for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Ted and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Transitioning from finance to technology to enhance business and government functions.

2. Streamlining large-scale projects through communication and iterative approaches.

3. Balancing delegation, empowerment, and strategic vision for effective leadership.

4. Encouraging risk-taking and innovation within every department.

5. Addressing urban challenges with effective, human-centered technology.

6. Emphasizing IoT, 5G, and AI to revolutionize smart cities.

About our guest:

Ted Ross is the Chief Information Officer for the City of Los Angeles and General Manager of the Information Technology Agency (ITA). With over 27 years of technology experience, he has led the delivery of IT services to 50,000 employees across 45 City departments and digital services for over 4 million residents. He has received several accolades, including the Southern California CIO of the Year ORBIE and the Los Angeles CIO of the Year awards.

Big City, Big Data: CIO of Los Angeles City IT Agency Ted Ross on Leading the Market with Tech Vision

The Intro!

Host: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. And for this month we are going to interview Ted Ross, Chief Information Officer, City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency.

Ted Ross: Great to be here. Thank you.

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Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Ted Ross covered in the podcast.

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The Rapid Fire Round!

Host: At what age do you want to retire?

Ted Ross: Retire. I never wanna retire.

Host: That’s good. How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Ted Ross: It takes me about 30 minutes to get ready in the morning, but that includes making my wife coffee.

Host: Most embarrassing moment of your life.

Ted Ross: Most embarrassing moment of my life. I remember one time I had to fill out a card in the office. Yeah. I thought it was for someone’s birthday, but it turns out one of their family members passed away so it said Happy Birthday, that’s embarrassing. 

Host: That’s Bad. Okay.

Ted Ross: Always read the card before you sign it.

Host: Favorite color?

Ted Ross: Blue.

Host: We can see that. What time of day are you most inspired?

Ted Ross: Mornings.

Host: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Ted Ross: Probably five hours. I need my sleep.

Host: Pick one. Mark. Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

Ted Ross: Elon Musk.

Host: How do you relax?

Ted Ross: I try to get my mind on other things like riding a bicycle taking a walk or having a conversation with someone else.

Host: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Ted Ross: I don’t drink coffee, I drink tea Iced tea.

Host: A habit of yours that you hate?

Ted Ross: I used to have a habit. I hate it, I used to drink Diet Coke a lot. I stopped drinking it a few months ago.

Host: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life?

Ted Ross: The most valuable skill learned in life is probably the art of public speaking in interacting with people. 

Host: Your favorite Netflix show?

Ted Ross: I just watched Umbrella Academy. Oh, that was pretty good.

Host: One-word description of your leadership style.

Ted Ross: Responsive. You have to be responsive to people and what they need.

Host: Top priority in your daily schedule?

Ted Ross: The top priority is to be strategic. Every day there are all these things that come in that make you very tactical day by day. But my job, I need to be able to step back and be strategic. It’s not easy, but I have to take the time to be strategic. Okay.

Host: Ideal vacation spot for relaxation. 

Ted Ross: Mountain biking. Ride a bicycle up a steep mountain. I love it.

Host: You do that often?

Ted Ross: I try to do as often as I can. Okay.

Host: Key factor for maintaining work-life balance.

Ted Ross: It’s never easy I think. There’s nothing wrong with working hard. Yeah. But if you know what’s important in your personal life, it’s always making sure to spend time on what’s really important. It could be children, could be spouses. Always make the time for that.

The Big Questions!

Host: So, Ted Ross, that’s the end of the rapid-fire round of questions. The first question we have for you is, What inspired you to pursue a career in technology, and how did that journey lead you to become the CIO of Los Angeles?

Ted Ross: What inspired me to go into a job in technology when I was younger, I thought I’d be the black sheep of the family. My brothers were both in technology, so I went into accounting and finance. But very quickly after I went into accounting and finance, I ended up in financial systems and then financial systems. I ended up right into technology. I really enjoy technology because I think of it as the how of how business and government get things done. And I really enjoy emphasizing the how. So I know I work in the city of Los Angeles. I know we have politicians, who emphasize the what’s and the who, but technologists like myself take technology and we use it to help implement city initiatives, and city services to help benefit the public. And I’m very inspired by that and that’s what inspired me to get to this role as Chief Information Officer for the City of Los Angeles.

Host: Okay. So basically you switched from finance to tech.

Ted Ross: I did, yes. Okay. But you, yeah. So I start off in finance and accounting. I liked business management. I like the idea of how businesses run, but I end up back in business systems and financial systems and right back into technology.

Host: Accounting is something I despise from my heart.

Ted Ross: Everyone I talk to despises accounting, but I enjoy it. 

Host: Were there any pivotal moments or mentors that significantly influenced your career path?

Ted Ross: Yeah, several, moments I think had a big influence. So first of all, I, I got into accounting and finance ’cause I liked business management. I liked how businesses operate and I loved the language of business. But with time I starTed Ross to realize that while finance and money were very important, especially in this year, you know, in the last 20 years, technology has been even more important. So businesses or governments that operate with good technology, they’re completely different from ones who are suffering with bad technology. And so I think it has become a passion of mine to take modern technology. Here we are in GITEX, there’s so much technology. How do you take technology? Who are you as an organization? What are you trying to do? And how do you start to integrate it? And it’s very much a people conversation because technology doesn’t operate on itself. It’s people who use it, people who are relying on it. And so it becomes an integration of people and technology that you could do great things with.

Host: Can you describe a major project that your department has undertaken to improve digital services for Los Angeles residents?

Ted Ross: Absolutely. Yeah. In, the UniTed Ross States, we have a program called 3 1 1. And in Los Angeles, we have something called Maya, A 3 1 1. And 3 1 1 means any city you go to, you dial 3 1 1, you get the city and you can get city services, a pothole field graffiti removed, someone dumped a couch somewhere, you name it. At the city of Los Angeles, we implemenTed Ross what’s called my LA 3 1 1 and it’s an application where you have a mobile app, you’ve got a website, et cetera, plus a call center. Here we are about maybe eight or nine years after rolling that out and we have 2.5 million requests a year to show you how big of a system this is. That is 2.5 million requests for information for 66 different city services to get bills paid, and get issues resolved. That is the lifeblood between the people who live in LA and the government of LA. And in a few months, we’re about to actually modernize it with an entirely new system, with better customer experience, with more solutions. So it’s going to increase from 2.5 million to even more. And so that is I think, the type of technologies that make a dramatic effect on how government interacts with its people.

Host: What challenges did you face during the implementation, and how did you overcome them?

Ted Ross: Sure. Quite a few. We’re a very, very big organization. The Los, you know, city of Los Angeles, all total 44 different departments. It includes a utility and a police force and parks and everything. $12 billion a year revenue, which puts it in the Fortune 50, right? If you were to make it a corporation. And when you implement large projects for that, you’ve got differences of opinion, different requirements, different use cases. So among those challenges, the best thing you could do with software like that is come to a good clear understanding of what our North Star is, who are our customers, what are services we’re trying to implement, and what are our key critical needs versus our wants. Let’s get the needs and then we’ll start to build out the wants. and you overcome them with good communication, good project management and really demonstrating the solution over and over again. And taking an agile and iterative approach. Get good software first, iterate, improve, build on it, and then you can continue to deliver it. Large governments and large corporations usually want to create something very big and make it perfect the first time. Nothing’s perfect the first time. So the sooner you can deliver a minimum viable product and enhance it, the better off you’ll be. And that’s important for projects like that.

Host: How do you leverage data analytics to enhance the marketing strategies for the city of Los Angeles?

Ted Ross: Yes, I think quite often in government we complain about governments who waste money and waste resources everywhere across the world. We see examples where we’re frustraTed Ross because it seemed like the money could have been better spent elsewhere. I feel data analytics is critical to help identify where money should be spent. And what I mean by that is when you come up with a good understanding of the sentiment of your citizens, a good understanding of how people feel about different projects, where the value is in different projects, then you can go ahead and zero in on the projects that really matter, build them, communicate and deliver on it. So I feel like data analytics gives us like a dashboard, like a car. It gives us an understanding of how fast we are if there are any warning lights, et cetera. So data analysis becomes fundamentally important to decide where you build, what you build, and how you deliver it. And then you can get data analysis feedback from your customers so that you can then continue to improve.

Host: Can you provide an example of a specific campaign that was significantly improved through the data insights?

Ted Ross: Yes. I think a good example in Los Angeles is our 3 1 1 services. We deliver software, we deliver a mobile app, a web app, et cetera. And it’s highly utilized. But what we do is we could use data analysis tools on the website to identify where people click, what they use, what they don’t use, what they abandon from a website perspective, et cetera. On the mobile app, we can get feedback in a number of other ways, and by getting that understanding it, we start optimizing our services. Maybe there’s some services no one’s interesTed Ross in and we can get rid of ’em. Maybe there are services they’re very interesTed Ross in, but they take too long to process. So these are the types of things that data analysis tactically could do to help improve a service.

Host: As the General Manager of the ITA, what key skills do you believe are essential for managing a large team effectively?

Ted Ross: Yes. the, what I’ve learned in my career is the skills needed to manage six people is very different from manage 460 people. And I right now manage four 60 people. So I think first and foremost, you need to delegate and empower. I need a team under me that I can give authority. Here I am, I’m in Dubai and Los Angeles is very far away. I need a team who’s managing their areas, infrastructure, applications customer engagement where they understand and they can they’re empowered to be able to help manage those areas. I think another area is to understand the importance of strategy versus tactics. In a role like mine, I need to be strategic. Where are we gonna go in a year, five years, 10 years? Where are we trying to work towards? If I’m not strategic, no one else is, but at times I also need to get tactical. You need to get very specific on a very specific project. So as a leader, you need to know when to get involved in the details and when to take a step back and let the teams work on it. When you’re dealing with large organizations, that’s a very important expression. My brother served in the military and they have a phrase, that says that lieutenants focus on tactics. Colonels focus on strategy and generals focus on logistics. What is logistics? It’s literally figuring out how to get people to the war. Right. And so, but at every different rank and every different level, you find you’re exercising different skills.

Host: So managing a 6 people group and 400 people Group, but don’t you feel like the basic skills are the same for managing both? 

Ted Ross: Some, but it gets more when you’re managing six people, it’s about motivation. It’s about making sure tasks get assigned. It’s making sure the work gets done and the people working with each other. And it’s very important to manage a group of four, six people. But then when you’re managing 35 people, it’s about different teams, and how they integrate with each other. Part of it’s about the task, but a lot of it is about do they have the people, the resources, and the tools they need to get the job done. When you’re managing 460 people, are they teams working even on the right things? How are they working between different teams? How are they resourced? What are the logistics for it? And so you end up dealing with applying some of the same skills, but at a higher and higher level.

Host: How do you foster a collaborative and innovative culture within your department?

Ted Ross: Yes, that’s a, that’s a great question. Yeah. How do you foster collaboration and innovation? First and foremost, you have to set the tone with culture, right? And so you give speeches, you shake hands, you talk to people, you establish values. Here’s what we mean as a team. And what’s best is to actually survey the team as to what values they find important. What I find in my department is they care a lot about technical excellence. You need to be good at your job, but you also need to be someone who’s a team player and who doesn’t try to get into the limelight, right? Not someone who’s looking for attention. We want the attention to come to the team and not to the individual. That’s a part of the personality and the culture of my team. So then we help say, okay, that’s who we are. That’s what we represent. To be a part of my department means that these are the things we value, which means that if you misbehave in those areas, we’ll let you know, listen, that’s not who we are. That’s not how we support. So creates collaboration because we come to an agreement on what’s important when it comes to innovation. I’m a firm believer that you don’t hire an innovation team. You put innovation into every team. I need my data center team to be innovative. I need my social media team to be innovative, which means that we’re not looking for innovation from the outside. We want to build it on the inside, which means I need to promote risk-taking, I need to promote people getting out, going to events like Tex, understanding what people are doing, taking the risk of applying things, and seeing whether it works or not. So I think there are a lot of aspects we could do to build innovation.

Host: You’ve received numerous awards, including the #1 Digital City in America. What do you attribute this success to?

Ted Ross: Yeah, I’m very fortunate and very blessed to have received these awards and for my group to receive those awards. I think what a lot of it comes down to is taking the best of the private sector and bringing it to the government. When I work in government, it’s not so much about applying government tools and government techniques. The private sector does fantastic work with technology. Not everything’s perfect, but they’ve invenTed Ross some of the very best, not just technological innovations, but also how technology gets applied. Agile software development, and lean Six Sigma, are all concepts that starTed Ross in the private sector. So learning the best of the private sector and figuring out how to translate that to government and trying to execute it. I think that’s really been the secret of our success. We’re a private sector company that is government.

Host:  What role do you see technology playing in enhancing the quality of life for city residents?

Ted Ross: Yes, I see technology playing a fundamental role in enhancing the quality of life for city residents. Increasingly, if you look at the UniTed Ross Nations, increasingly the world is becoming urban. People are moving into cities, right? All sorts of types of cities. This means that if cities can succeed, if we can create a good quality of life that’s environmentally sustainable, that’s safe, that’s secure, that promotes economic development, then we are gonna help really society as a whole regardless of the nation that you live in. And so technology plays a fundamental role because when we look at the types of urban challenges from traffic and safety and health, you name it, and environmental technology, every year is getting better. It’s one of the only tools that actually is increasing in how much better it gets every year. So when you take those technologies and figure out how to integrate them with society, how to integrate them with the solutions that you provide, you can substantially improve quality of life, economic livelihood, so many different things through the effective use of technology and emphasize effective, just putting technology out there doesn’t necessarily solve things, but human-centered, effective technology that really helps move the needle improves metrics. That’s the kind of investment you want to make.

Host: What role does social media play in your marketing efforts for the city’s digital services? 

Ted Ross: Social Media is such a powerful tool ’cause it’s where the people are exactly. The government often puts out a message, but no one wants to go to the government’s message. They’re going to Facebook and they’re going to X and they’re going to Instagram and they’re going to the tools that they use to get their information. So if the government can come to social media and not just publish information but engage, that’s a very powerful thing. Quite often I work with governments in which they take the social out of social media, they just want to talk and they never wanna listen. But social media is about communication. That’s two directions. And so you can actually engage people of various generations but it requires people who get it right, social media get it. So we’re providing good content, meaningful content, and engaging with people when they respond. Social media is such a powerful tool to creating engagement. I live in a democratic society. In a democracy, you have to have engagement between governments and the people. If people start to lose confidence or they start to disengage, you start to undermine democracy as a whole. Okay.

Host: What strategies have you found most effective in increasing social media engagements among diverse community groups?

Ted Ross: Yes, that’s great. That’s a really great question. Promoting social media engagement across diverse communities. I live in Los Angeles, and over 115 languages are spoken in Los Angeles. So we represent very different groups of people in very different communities. And so number one is to start to think about inclusive culture as we’re communicating. Think about some of the different stakeholders and the different groups, the backgrounds they come from, what they’re looking to do, what their hopes and dreams are, and start to tailor your messages that way. Another one is that have good meaningful content, right? And, you know, some people have children in which libraries and parks can deliver really good meaningful content. And there are others who don’t have children, they’re looking for nightlife. And so you can start to help push maybe going to downtown LA at LA Live or other kinds of events, find meaningful content. ’cause Really what people are looking for on social media is value. So give them value. We’re sometimes we talk too much about trying to be viral, so things will be viral, but we don’t need to chase after being viral. We need to chase after being relevant. And so I think relevant social media is important. Quality content that’s right. Good quality content, and then people will connect to it.

Host: Digital Strategy and Smart Cities are key areas of your expertise. What trends do you see shaping the future of urban technology?

Ted Ross: Yeah, another really good question. I think smart cities, you know, smart cities aren’t entirely new. If you go back to the 1990s, cities were using technology, although it was 1990s technology. When you fast forward today, the amount of technology you have available has exponentially increased. And so I think the real trend that we see now for example Los Angeles is hosting the 2028 Olympics. So for us, the preparations for technology are very important. But number one, the Internet of Things, sensors, give you an understanding of what’s happening in your landscape. So you can detect noise and pollution and crime and a variety of different things and you can sense them. Traffic management requires IOT sensors. The second one is around 5G. Wires are very expensive. This may sound funny, but laying wires in the city is very difficult. But wireless communications like 5G is, you can get ultra-high speed, ultra-precise, ultra-low latency communication and you can do it wirelessly, which means it’s substantially cheaper than having to lay cable and connect everything to it. So 5G is extremely important. Los Angeles was actually the first big 5G city in the UniTed Ross States. We’re at a point now where we have something like 4,000 plus access points. We’ll have about 12,000 by the 2028 Olympics. So we are rapidly growing as a 5G GI, you know, 5G City. I think the third one of course is AI, right? You can’t have a conversation without artificial intelligence. And the reason why is that you actually have to redesign smart cities around what artificial intelligence can provide. Traditionally we used to think of humans as doing the thinking and machines as doing the number crunching, but now we’re starting to see machines able to do some of the thinking. And what I said is both a powerful idea and a very dangerous one. You can’t just let any machine start thinking and doing because you’ll actually negatively impact people. You’ll have unintended consequences. It could show up in bias, it could show up in, in mistakes machines make because they’re machines. But on the flip side, they can think rapidly faster. They’re already beating humans at the chest and that go and all these other games, right? And so if you can get it to think now you can automate certain facets of how you run a city of managing traffic, et cetera. You can automate and take advantage of the power of what AI can provide. Of course, you have to do it in a very smart, transparent, and ethical way because AI is kinda like nuclear power. It could be used for really good things, it could be used for really bad things. So it’s up to human beings to help determine and effectively use AI. Okay.

Host: What advice would you give to other cities looking to adopt smart city initiatives?

Ted Ross: Number one, technology is not as expensive as you think. Sometimes we think you have to spend large amounts of money to use technology. There are so many inexpensive low-cost, no-cost technologies that you could actually adopt to be a part of a smart city. Secondly, you need to really understand who your constituents are and really what it is that they want. I’m reminded of a really great example. You know, I’m in Los Angeles. We’re the second largest city in the UniTed Ross States, but one of my favorite cities is Ville, Massachusetts. Small. It’s a hundred thousand people. I have 4 million people in my city a hundred thousand people. But they use tablets, they use Box, they use Dropbox, they use Gmail. They use all these lightweight tools to connect with the people so that when they make a decision, everyone gets the chance to engage with them. So you’d be amazed at what you can do, even in a small city with relatively inexpensive technology. But it really comes down to understanding really fundamentally what the people want. If you truly understand what they want, that means everything you’re doing builds value.

Host: In your experience, what are the key challenges in marketing public sector services compared to the private sector?

Ted Ross: So marketing, public sector services, number one. Value add is usually an important issue. Quite often I’ve seen governments build it because they thought there’s, there’s an old expression. If you build it, they will come. That’s entirely not true in government. Just because you built it doesn’t mean anyone will come. In fact, too often governments build technologies or build solutions that no one wants in the first place. So no one uses it. So it’s better to understand what people want and build that, right? I’d rather build a less expensive, less fancy solution that everyone really wanTed Ross than a very supreme solution that no one wanTed Ross. In the UniTed Ross States, you’d say I’d rather buy a Honda Civic that everyone likes than to buy the Ferrari that no one wants, right? Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so delivering and really understanding what people want becomes, I think, critical in the conversation and then delivering it to them. And it’s a mistake that I think often people make. And when it comes to the marketing side of it, that value helps sell itself. Good valuable services market themselves. You don’t have to spend large amounts of money. If you were spending a lot of money and energy trying to market something, it’s probably ’cause it wasn’t very compelling in the first place. So I think build it right and then the marketing usually starts to sell itself.

Host: How do you overcome resistance to change when introducing new digital services to residents?

Ted Ross: Sure. first and foremost, good quality services built with residents in mind are usually not hard, usually not strong change issues. However, there can be change issues and it usually come from different groups, right? It may be the elderly, it may be the young, it may be the conservative, it may be the liberal. So sometimes it breaks down into aspects like that. And so usually one of the best things is transparency. When you’re transparent with people, they know how you got there. Here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it. Here are the inputs we had to build it. Here’s opportunities for you to provide feedback. And so it’s an opportunity to show real transparency. The government should be transparent. Secondly is to really start to emphasize the benefits as well as some of the issues. If we’re trying to solve a problem, let’s really be clear about what that problem is. Let’s have everyone understand why it’s such a big problem and then they can understand why this is a solution for that problem. These can be very compelling. Sometimes you don’t win everybody over. And for that situation, you always keep an open communication channel. There’s always a chance for them to ask questions and even eventually come around. What I’ve usually found is that good ideas, everyone usually embraces good ideas after some time. They may not seem like good ideas in the beginning, but eventually, it all ends up there. And so if it’s a really good idea, then it’ll start to win people over with time.

Host: Our Last question for you is of a personal kind, what would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Ted Ross: I’d probably work for the FBI. I thought that was really cool. When I was younger, I didn’t know what it was like. I don’t work for the FBI, but I always thought it could be nice, could be noble to try to help do work like that. But I don’t know. I ended up here and I’m glad I ended up here.

Let’s Conclude!

Host: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Ted Ross Ross, Chief Information Officer, City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency.

Ted Ross: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Host: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.