Episode 11: Best of Season One

2025 is drawing to a close, and at this time of year, many of us are reflecting on how we got to this moment in time. What did we set out to do? What have we accomplished? What does the future hold?

In the spirit of reflection, on this special episode of the IT’S a Tech Podcast, we will look back at some of our favorite moments from the first 10 episodes. We are all busy, and finding time to watch or listen to a favorite show can be challenging, so if you’ve missed an episode or two, then we have you covered! Some may call it a clip show; I call it a curated retrospective. Kind of like the Criterion collection, but for our podcast.

Thank you for listening to the IT’S a Tech Podcast. For more information about ITS, visit our website at its.ny.gov. Follow us on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Transcript

0:01
 You're listening to the It's a Tech podcast, an engaging conversation about the game-changing technology solutions being advanced by the state's Office of Information Technology Services.

 0:12
 Learn how ITS makes IT happen for more than 50 state agencies and over 20 million New Yorkers.

 0:21
 2025 is drawing to a close and at this time of year, many of us are reflecting on how we got to this moment in time.

 0:28
 What did we set out to do?

 0:30
 What have we accomplished?

 0:31
 What does the future hold?

 0:33
 In the spirit of reflection, 

 0:35
 on this special episode of the It's a Tech Podcast, we will look back at some of our favorite moments from the first 10 episodes.

 0:41
 We're all busy and finding time to watch or listen to a favorite show can be challenging.

 0:46
 So if you've missed an episode or two, then we have you covered.

 0:50
 Some may call it a clip show.

 0:51
 I call it a curated retrospective, kind of like the Criterion Collection

 0:56
 but for our podcast. Our very first episode hosted by Chief Information Officer Dru Rai was a strong start, highlighting the award-winning Chief Information Security Office Red Team featuring Mark Bilanski and Jared Hoffman.

 1:10
 Really that that's really cool.

 1:12
 So what a typical day, you know, typical day being the keyword looks like for this teams.

 1:17
 Like what are you guys think and plan and do?

 1:20
 So really, you know, it's a kind of a cliche to say every day is different, right?

 1:25
 It's like it's coming new, but with the cadence that we get new engagements, new targets, new systems, new application.

 1:31
 There might be some general underlining themes that are the same, but you know, it's always something new and fresh.

 1:37
 And really when I walk into the office every day, at any point of the engagement, I'm at some point of the attack kill chain.

 1:45
 You know, I'm doing some level of hacking, be it I'm researching, doing discovery and numeration, or maybe I'm doing full on exploitation and doing some custom tool development and stuff like that.

 1:55
 So it's really hands-on in terms of offensive security testing, primarily on a daily basis.

 2:02
 You know, we have our admin days where we have, you know, stakeholder meetings, we report out and report development and things like that.

 2:09
 But the majority of it is that hands on hacking and I think another big piece of Red Team is maintaining that competitive edge, right?

 2:19
 We got to make sure that the service that we're providing in terms of offensive security emulation is matching the kind of adversaries that we're seeing, you know, attacking New York State.

 2:28
 So, we're constantly sharpening the blade, hitting trainings up (be it commercial or on our own research), just to make sure that we're, you know, staying staying up.

 2:38
 And there's something I'm sure it's in a lot of fields, but there's something that I struggle with a lot.

 2:41
 It's called imposter syndrome, where it's like, no matter how hard I work, it's always in my head that somebody's working harder.

 2:48
 So that kind of drive just kind of keeps it going to be like, "Hey, let's make sure that this Red Team is top notch." Good.

 2:55
 So, Mark, you know, again, it's hard to justify to the taxpayer.

 3:01
 You know, it's like, oh, we have "bad guys" on our team.

 3:04
 Full-time job is to do the, you know, what an illegal person will do.

 3:09
 So, I mean, what...I can't even think of the mindset you come up with.

 3:13
 You know, I don't have that mindset.

 3:15
 We have to all do stuff within the law.

 3:18
 How do you guys prepare yourself?

 3:20
 What do you think?

 3:21
 It's like, you know, what are you going to go do a bank heist or, or, or how do you think when you think about red teams?

 3:31
 Like what, what does it?

 3:32
 What is the thinking pattern for your team and and team members?

 3:37
 Well, the bad guys don't follow any rules or laws.

 3:40
 So you really have to think outside the box.

 3:42
 And when you're going, you know, testing systems, you want to leverage them in any way possible.

 3:48
 We sometimes, you know, not not what they were intended to do, and you just use them in any way you can to obtain your objective, which is usually money or data or both.

 4:02
 One of our favorite episodes highlighted the important and timely work being done by the Human-Centered Design team, and I was privileged to discuss their efforts with Jesse Gardner, Director of User Research, and Eric Steinborn, Design System Lead.

 4:17
 If I could summarize it this way, it's like when we talk to the people who actually use the services that we create, what sort of experiences do they have and how do we improve that user experience across hundreds of sites and applications?

 4:32
 I mean, this is a complicated problem and there are tons of solutions out there for it.

 4:38
 And there's tons of different teams working on different versions of a problem like a button.

 4:43
 Imagine creating a button, you have to create a button.

 4:46
 It's a non-trivial task to create a button on on a website.

 4:49
 And if you have 20 different teams working on 20 different buttons, you've now multiplied that effort 20 times.

 4:57
 And so, so data and legal are currently are working hard to make sure that users don't enter data multiple times.

 5:02
 And we have operations that those teams that are keeping our systems up and we, we need, we needed a solution at scale.

 5:09
 And one of the solutions to building out those applications and sites more efficiently is, and consistently is, a design system. That's fantastic.

 5:19
 So how will this approach change the way agencies work and ultimately impact New Yorkers?

 5:25
 Are there any obstacles that are preventing New York State and similar government entities from making real customer experience gains? To, to kind of further elaborate on what Eric was talking about, one of the first things we did when we started the team was conduct an audit of the front end.

 5:42
 That's really the, the in the browser experience that people have of various New York/ny.gov sites and applications.

 5:49
 And probably would not surprise you or anyone that the experience was fragmented.

 5:54
 There was just just different.

 5:55
 And there's no, no villain, no bad intentions here.

 5:58
 It's just, you know, everyone was solving similar problems, just in different ways because they're kind of operating in slightly different contexts in there.

 6:07
 And, and the button is a good example of this.

 6:11
 I we use that one because we put a slide together where I think, what was it, 50 buttons or so from different ny.gov sites.

 6:18
 And you just it, it's a snapshot of this fragmented experience as people go from site to site and they just feel wildly different.

 6:27
 And so, you know, really that kind of leads into we should probably talk a little bit about what a design system is.

 6:34
 I'll put a little bit more structure around it and, and kind of how it addresses this issue.

 6:38
 So Eric, maybe you could share a little bit of like, what do we mean when you talk about design system?

 6:42
 Yeah, I mean, we can go into the dictionary definition of design system if we if we wanted to.

 6:47
 But I think what we're going to do is talk about the three pillars that we have for for the design system.

 6:52
 It really helps elaborate on what what we're what those different pieces are.

 6:58
 So the first piece is that we have a library of code components.

 7:01
 And that's where we talked about things like buttons, but we also have things like headers and form fields.

 7:06
 And that's all code that can be used to create the different parts of applications and sites that our users are going to interact with.

 7:14
 Then we have in it that is a curated library of user interface components, though we also include well-researched design patterns.

 7:23
 They've, they've also been tested.

 7:24
 They have accessibility standards baked in and not, not to mention that they, they also include New York State branding standards.

 7:32
 We have to meet branding standards no matter where we are, no matter what application or site that we're using.

 7:36
 And this, this has it baked in.

 7:39
 July 2025 was the one year anniversary of the global IT outage, which led to widespread disruption across multiple sectors of the worldwide economy, including right here in New York.

 7:51
 We talked to a number of professionals who had boots on the ground that day as ITS got systems back up and running within 24 hours, defeating the "blue screen of death" one workstation at a time.

 8:03
 Joe Miller, Deputy Director of Workplace Services, talked about how he helped coordinate the ITS response.

 8:10
 So on Saturday morning I got a phone call that I needed to jump on an emergency call.

 8:17
 At that time, we determined that the Crowdstrike issue was a viable issue throughout the state and at that time we decided it was about 25,000 machines that were incapacitated due to this to the Crowdstrike issue.

 8:33
 I am responsible for all workplace services staff across the state, about 300, 350 individuals.

 8:40
 But on a Saturday and into Sunday, it's hard to get all the staff, but I was able to get a hold of quite a few of them and we started doing some emergency calls once we had the procedures in place in order to get this remediation.

 8:54
 Fortunately, this was something that I have never seen before that we actually had to go to each machine physically and touch it.

 9:02
 We couldn't do things remote.

 9:04
 It was very difficult to do it over a phone call or anything like that.

 9:09
 So we had to dispatch staff out to hundreds if not thousands of locations in order to remediate a lot of these machines.

 9:18
 Once I realized how big this task was, I started a Teams channel for information gathering and information dissemination.

 9:29
 As the hours built throughout Saturday and into Sunday, we started getting more data for staff to access.

 9:37
 We started to determining emergency locations, hospitals, medical facilities, OMH, DOH, OPWDD, areas that had a very heavy medical presence and wanted to address those first and get those out for priority sites across the state.

 9:59
 As time went on through Sunday, we realized that, you know, we needed more people.

 10:04
 So we started doing more calls, trying to reach out, e-mail, phone messages, text messages, whatever we could do and started having daily cadences.

 10:15
 I had two cadences a day.

 10:17
 I had one at 12:00 and I had one at 4:00.

 10:20
 The first cadence had about 50...45,50, 60 people on it at noon on Monday.

 10:27
 At 4 o'clock on Tuesday, that grew to about 150 people, 200 people.

 10:33
 All of a sudden I'm getting phone calls, I'm getting emails.

 10:37
 How can I help?

 10:38
 Didn't matter who it was.

 10:40
 I had grade fourteens, grade eighteens.

 10:43
 I had people from network, customer relation managers, their teams, executives.

 10:51
 At the time, Jenn Lorenz called me and said, "Where do you need me?

 10:55
 What do you need me to do?"

 10:56
 So, this progressed over the couple days that we were dealing with this.

 11:02
 Once we kind of got a cadence and the cadence was great because everybody knew you jumped on the call at noon or you jumped on the call at 4:00, you got direction.

 11:14
 We had a team site with all the machines and all the locations that we knew of that people could visit and see and kind of strategize out in the field.

 11:25
 Hey, I'm going to go here, here and here and somebody else would say, "OK, I'm going to go, you know, these locations." Some of these locations, a lot of windshield time, 30 minutes in the car to go into a location and fix one machine.

 11:39
 Luckily not all machines were affected.

 11:41
 So we had about 25,000 we had to deal with.

 11:46
 The Teams channel was probably the most important thing we did.

 11:52
 That is what prompted chats, ideas, communication.

 11:58
 Where are we going?

 11:59
 Who's going where? Where we at?

 12:02
 What's our percentages?

 12:04
 How close are we?

 12:05
 Because of course, I was being asked quite a bit by Jenn and the CIO and Chamber, where are we?

 12:15
 So that was something that we had to track quite a bit.

 12:18
 And the only way we could do that was through a shared communication channel.

 12:22
 And we did Teams.

 12:23
 That Team site's actually still up.

 12:26
 Non-WPS staff, workplace services staff started coming on board.

 12:31
 Everybody wanted to be a part of this, which was pretty incredible.

 12:36
 People really wanted to help.

 12:38
 What do I need to do?

 12:39
 Where do I need to go?

 12:41
 Some of the things that we had to do, which I worked with finance, I worked with some of the other leadership team, we had to get some of the roadblocks out of the way.

 12:52
 You know, people were worried about, "Hey, am I going to get overtime?"

 12:55
 Yes, I got overtime approved right there in the spot.

 12:57
 "Hey, am I going to get mileage?"

 12:59
 Because everybody was using their own vehicles to drive all over the place.

 13:02
 Unfortunately, OGS has these rules that if you drive over X amount of miles, like I think it's 60 or whatever it is a day, you, you have to rent a car.

 13:11
 Well, people aren't going out and rent cars to go to all these locations.

 13:14
 So, you know, part of my job was to try to run block for a lot of these individuals and clear the roads for them.

 13:20
 So I did that on the back end, which had, you know, a good accountability for the, the, the back-end people that you didn't see: finance, management.

 13:32
 That kind of cleared the way for a lot of these things that I, I spearheaded.

 13:38
 Everyone was involved.

 13:40
 Everybody got into the office.

 13:43
 I cancelled telecommuting for I think that whole week for all 350+ staff across the state for WPS and nobody balked about it.

 13:52
 Everybody was a team player.

 13:54
 And this is where I was actually very, very impressed that the ITS staff, they all stepped up.

 14:03
 Everybody stepped up to rectify this problem, and they took kind of like a personal gain in it.

 14:11
 Like I'm doing something really good here.

 14:13
 I'm helping people.

 14:15
 A lot of people never get out into the field.

 14:17
 A lot of people don't go to the users.

 14:19
 A lot of people didn't know.

 14:21
 We have over 2,000 locations in New York State, whether it be residential facilities for OPWDD, halfway houses for OMH, whatever.

 14:31
 Nobody knew about a lot of these locations, so it was very interesting for them to understand how big the state of New York is and how big the population of users we really support on a daily basis.

 14:47
 So it was kind of a, you know, wake up call for a lot of them.

 14:51
 Like wow, we really do a lot for a lot of people.

 14:56
 We...for remediation.

 14:59
 Once we, as we went through this process, we were learning hour by hour by hour.

 15:06
 What can we do better?

 15:07
 How can we get these people resolved quicker?

 15:10
 We started standing up walk-up sites.

 15:14
 We did it here in the Plaza.

 15:16
 We did it in Buffalo.

 15:17
 We did it in Rochester to where's, you know, we, we got e-mail blasts out to all state users.

 15:22
 Hey, if you're having a problem, you can go here, you can go there.

 15:26
 Just walk in with your laptop.

 15:28
 They'll fix it and you can leave.

 15:30
 Worked out great.

 15:32
 We never focused on a single approach.

 15:35
 We tried to diversify and get as many approaches as possible in order to rectify this situation as soon as possible.

 15:45
 And like I said, as we move forward, we found new ways of remediation, found out that hey, if somebody reboots their machine 8 times, it's going to grab the new package and it's going to be fine.

 15:57
 We actually don't have to go there, but still staff have to be on the phone talking to users, calling users, tracking down users.

 16:05
 So that that itself for 25,000 people is is a challenge.

 16:11
 But I can't think of a time that I've seen more people come together on the same page all at once with the same goal of getting as many New York State employees back up and running sooner than later.

 16:28
 And that to me was very impressive.

 16:34
 You know, I don't use that word lightly or, or or often, but this is where it is.

 16:40
 Great team, great effort and impressed.

 16:44
 One area of technology that people don't often consider is how new tools and software affect the legal profession.

 16:50
 Scott Geer, Deputy Chief Legal Technology Officer, and Lauren Holupko, Director of eDiscovery, sat down with me to chat about how these tools will help make their processes even more efficient and effective.

 17:03
 And they even dropped a few exclusive announcements about new ITS offerings.

 17:07
 Yeah, so when I joined the eDiscovery team, I've heard of this product that's going to help us review both e-mail and non-e-mail related things.

 17:17
 After quite a few years, you know, COVID and and some other things, we finally were able to purchase that product and then, you know, make it our own.

 17:28
 It is our legal document review platform, which is also going through its own rebrand.

 17:35
 So today we're proud to announce that this product will be known as the eDiscovery Ecosystem or EDex for short.

 17:44
 I love it.

 17:45
 So that product is going to allow agency legal teams to import, index, search, review, redact and produce any documents that are directly associated with their cases, as well.

 17:57
 It's going to take a lot of the manual effort out of things.

 18:00
 It's going to do automatic de-duplication and and some redaction and really kind of significantly reduce any additional effort that was going to be taken from a manual perspective in the past.

 18:16
 Our overall suite of products in addition to Edex, we're starting to refer to as our legal tech Law Boost because it is boosting the practice of law for a lot of the things that we support as well. Clever.

 18:31
 So some of the other things that we're kind of working on a little bit is a premium legal hold offering.

 18:37
 So you can place your holds, but it's also going to streamline notifications.

 18:41
 And we have a couple other products coming soon as well that that Lauren will touch on.

 18:45
 Yeah, I'd also like to add that our legal team has used Edex and it is awesome.

 18:52
 Nice. Cuts review time in half, probably more.

 18:56
 So again, like these products we're offering really let attorneys and their staff and whoever else, you know, anyone working Labor Relations investigations, really focus on their mission and their power zone instead of, you know, manually reviewing these documents and reviewing the data and producing the data from say, you know, older products, say Adobe, whatever.

 19:20
 It's just, it's really creating more of an automated workflow that's just getting things done at a faster speed.

 19:27
 Brilliant, wonderful. Evolution.

 19:30
 Love it.

 19:31
 Yeah.

 19:31
 So, I'd like to introduce our new legal case management platform, which we are calling BriefCase.

 19:39
 Cute.

 19:39
 Yeah.

 19:40
 It's one platform where you can put all of your cases and it provides automated workflows.

 19:48
 It can sync with your calendar, with Outlook.

 19:51
 It can generate automated letters.

 19:54
 So if you have a template letter you use over and over again, it'll generate that letter for you.

 19:59
 You can leave comments for other attorneys or other staff that may be working in the platform.

 20:04
 So that's in the pipeline.

 20:08
 Anyone out there listening from the state certainly get a hold of us if that's something you're interested in.

 20:12
 We're really excited to get that rolled out across New York State.

 20:15
 Fantastic, great things on the horizon.

 20:18
 In our most recent episode, Director of Training Ariel Shatsoff and Training Specialist Heather Cook reminded listeners that learning doesn't stop when school ends, and professional development is crucial to helping our workforce give their best to serving New Yorkers.

 20:34
 I think one of the things that people may not realize that's really unique about our program is its flexibility.

 20:40
 So we intentionally keep the program unstructured and we allow participants to really design and work the program, however best meets both their needs and their goals.

 20:53
 Make it their own. Yeah, exactly.

 20:55
 So we don't have structured "you have to meet every week at this time" or X amount of times a month.

 21:01
 Participants can decide how often they meet, when they meet, and the format in which they have those conversations, whether it be in person, over Webex, teams, whatever best meets their needs.

 21:13
 We also have a matching preferences section on the application.

 21:17
 So this really allows participants to personalize the program to what they hope to get out of it, and it really allows us to match people with someone who will best guide them on that journey.

 21:30
 We include a section where they can rank their desired skill and knowledge preferences for the program, whether it be things like career planning, navigating supervisor peer relationships, developing leadership skills, communication skills.

 21:46
 There's really something for everyone to get the most out of the mentoring relationship.

 21:51
 And since relaunching, we've really seen it grow not just in numbers, but in the depth of the relationships that are being formed.

 21:59
 And we find it really exciting to get to kind of just sit back and watch these relationships form and to continue to allow participants to shape the program to fit their own developmental journey to grow both professionally and personally.

 22:15
 Absolutely.

 22:16
 I personally can attest that the mentorship program was very helpful for me, both as a mentor and as a mentee, especially I came from the private sector and having a mentor during my first year really helped me find my feet, so to speak, in state government.

 22:34
 And I agree with you, the flexibility of the program, like we were able to, you know, meet at our on our own time and, you know, we developed a relationship that lasts to this day.

 22:42
 So you know, I have slight bias in bringing you on today, but so besides mine, do you have any specific success stories that came out of the mentorship program that you can share?

 22:54
 Yeah, I'm really glad to hear that you got meaningful, lasting relationships out of the program.

 23:00
 And I think one of the main things that we've seen that you just mentioned is that it really can help people to find their feet, so to speak, whether it be with state service, if they're brand new to New York State or with ITS as an agency.

 23:13
 We've had a lot of participants talk about how valuable it is just to have someone that they can go to for guidance.

 23:19
 It's not this formal sitting down and speaking with a supervisor or, you know, someone higher up or necessarily even talking about work, but getting to have someone there as a guide to go through different challenges, whether it be in the workplace or personally with that work-life balance that most people struggle with.

 23:40
 Amen. Yeah, we've really just had a lot of different good stories come out of it.

 23:46
 Like I said, if they're navigating something new, whether it be a different role, a new team or just learning how things work in state government.

 23:54
 And we've had mentors tell us that they benefit just as much.

 23:58
 Some mentors have talked about at our end-of-program celebration that we have, they've talked about that it helps them to kind of, you know, stay current, especially if you've been in your role for really long time.

 24:11
 I think you might forget what it's like to be a newer employee or just newer to state service in general.

 24:18
 It can be really rewarding to help employees navigate their first few months and helping them to become a part of the ITS community.

 24:26
 And others have talked about supporting mentees with their career goals, whether it be preparing for a leadership role or like I mentioned earlier, things like even just strengthening their communication skills can really help people in numerous ways.

 24:42
 And I think you also mentioned a lot of these relationships continue to grow after the program.

 24:49
 And so people keep in touch, they check in on each other's progress, and it really allows them to celebrate their wins together.

 24:56
 And for us, it's just encouraging to see how these partnerships can spark both personal and professional growth.

 25:03
 Absolutely.

 25:04
 I think for us also it's the mentoring program and all of our trainings.

 25:07
 Talking to people is helpful because we're always looking to expand our catalog of trainings, help people meet their needs.

 25:14
 So we hear about those things like communication or writing or reporting or even technologies people want to get into, whether it's like cloud or AI or cybersecurity.

 25:24
 And we have to find those resources continue to develop our training catalog to help meet those needs and the mentoring program and our in person trainings, especially I think help us, you know, find find those new opportunities.

 25:39
 And we do have some, you know, things in the pipeline to come down.

 25:43
 Hopefully that will help develop, continue to develop people's what I like to call essential skills.

 25:49
 People call them other things, but I call them essential skills 'cause we all need to be able to communicate and provide feedback and learn from each other, which the mentoring program helps do certainly.

 26:00
 But also some of the, you know, those more technical skills, like I said, like the cloud computing or AI or cybersecurity, those kinds of things.

 26:08
 While these were definitely some highlights, they are by no means the only gems to come out of the It's a Tech Podcast first season.

 26:15
 As the year winds down, if you have a quiet afternoon, consider making a cozy cup of tea and throwing on a previous episode that you've missed.

 26:23
 We wish all our listeners a safe and fun holiday season and a happy New year.

 26:28
 We cannot wait to share even more ITS stories and successes in 2026.

 26:34
 Thank you for listening to It's a Tech Podcast.

 26:37
 For more information about ITS, visit ourwebsite@its.ny.gov.