Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:08

Welcome to the Public Works Nerds podcast, a Public Works podcast of the nerds for the nerds and by the nerds. I'm your host, mark Culver. Today we're going to dive into a familiar topic and one that should be on the mind of every public works department professional at some time, pretty much every day asset management. Early on in this podcast journey, I would ask my guests what piece of technology or software has transformed their workplace, and almost every guest mentioned GIS or asset management, and usually both in the same breath. With our guest today, john Kramer from OpenGov, we're going to talk more about the current state of asset management and the future of asset management. So welcome, john. Thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Yeah, mark, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yeah, me too Glad to have you here. Why don't you just take a few minutes and, as I've started to say, now give us your origin story, introduce yourself and let us know where you came from.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Yeah, so yeah, like I said, glad to be here. I'm born and raised in the Midwest, live in Dubuque, iowa, so like a lot of the I know Mark, just like you up North, have family up there too, but Hawkeye fan here, so maybe we got a little rivalry there Go Gophers on this side.

Speaker 1: 1:32

But just kind of growing up I've always had a passion for technology, so that was kind of I was a geek squad agent for a while, so kind of become a public works nerd, I guess, from geek to nerd. But yeah, I had an opportunity, went to school here in Iowa University of Northern Iowa. Then after college had an opportunity to join Cartograph, which is a company that was based in Dubuque, iowa, and I've had the fortunate, I guess, luxury to be working for Cartograph and now OpenGov for 15 years, for Cartograph and now OpenGov for 15 years. So yeah, it was, you know, when I first started at Cartograph I had the opportunity to be an implementation consultant, so that's where I got my start. So that was working with, you know, local governments across the United States.

Speaker 1: 2:17

You know I got to travel a lot, which was cool from a young you know young person. I had the opportunity to do that. But more importantly, I got to really meet you know, all the great work that's being done across our country and understand our customers, understand, obviously, learn about the product and the technology, but just, most importantly, understand the asset management space. So I was able to take a couple of years of working on that. I got married. Travel wasn't, as you know, maybe as attractive as you know in the primary exchange.

Speaker 1: 2:47

But I had the opportunity to take all that experience and move into the product management space, and that's where I would say I truly found my calling. I've loved every minute of it since then, still working with technology, but also working with our engineers and our UX team to actually build the next iterations of features and capabilities that can make an impact. So I love doing that. But now with OpenGov, I lead up the product management group for the enterprise asset management suite, formerly known as Cartograph.

Speaker 2: 3:25

Awesome, yeah that's, and what a cool role to move into, and we'll get into more about what that actually means here in a minute. Before and before we started this podcast, john, I admitted that we'd probably end up on some tangents. So first tangent we're going to take is you said you did a lot of travel. What was your favorite place Like we're thinking back to it what was like one of your favorite places that you, that you were, that you traveled to?

Speaker 1: 3:47

Yeah, so I spent a ton of time down in Texas. We have a longtime customer, a bear County, texas. They're a County that surrounds the San Antonio area and, yeah, I had an opportunity there at the time. They were one of our largest customers still a great customer of ours, but I was. It was, uh, we have a program where we would actually come down every month and do implementation. So I was basically a, I would say, almost a secondary residency down in uh in texas. So, um, I got to really enjoy riverwalk in that area. So I really enjoyed, you know, san antonio area. Um spent a lot of time in florida. Usually florida trips in the winter were the nice trips.

Speaker 2: 4:25

Yeah, you're smart enough to maybe coordinate that, but yeah yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:29

So if I could do that. You know Florida, arizona. In the wintertime, you know California, any time of the year was usually pretty good. So you know, try to. You know where we could was able to take advantage of some of those get away from the cold weather here in the Midwest could was able to take advantage of some of those get away from the cold weather here in the Midwest.

Speaker 2: 4:46

Yeah yeah, just another tangent on my side my first real job out of college. I was working for a video detection company based out of St Paul, minnesota the Autoscope and I just I got so lucky to get this job and I literally traveled around the world training distributors on how to use the product and going to some trade shows and things like that just just had a blast. But, like you said, I got married. Um, my wife was in school at the time. Once she got out it, you know we're buying a house and that it got to the point where I I don't want to be traveling anymore.

Speaker 2: 5:17

I'm in italy trying to buy a house and that sounds cool, uh, but not so cool when you're actually, you know, trying to trying to get something done back home. But but yeah, some travel is is both a blessing and a curse. I mean, it's an amazing thing, but it can be real draining too. So, well, awesome. Well, you know, we kind of have a little bit of a script here and I'm already going to go off script a little bit, but talk a little bit more about your this product management role that you're in. I mean, it just sounds so cool to me and you know how does that work and how do you influence, like new features and and things like that, you know.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Yeah, no, that's a great question and you know it's not something you go to school for. No-transcript. Make sure that you know we go from. You know a problem.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Really, what I do, if you boil it down to, is we solve problems, right. So those problems happen to be problems about, you know, trying to solve a new regulation. How do we make sure we have a product or a solution to do that? And that's a problem, right? So then, working with really smart people a lot of smarter people than I am most of the time, right, engineers we've got a lot of great UX designers we kind of come together to you know, see how we can solve it. But that's where the fun part is. And then it's now that we kind of know the problem. Let's actually build it. And then how do we actually get it out to the market, make sure it actually meets the needs that we actually landed or not?

Speaker 1: 7:14

And you know, a big thing I always say is my job ultimately boils down to are we building the right things at the right time? You know, if, if our customers are finding value on these things, if they're, obviously, if they're buying it, if they're solving their problems, that's great. But if we do it two years too late. That's not good either, right? So when's the right time we can do it? So, um, but it's uh, I think being a natural, just being curious is a, is a big, a big skillset, and just solving problems is, I think, the easiest way to describe it.

Speaker 2: 7:46

Yeah, no, that sounds like a great role and I love that title pseudo title there the CEO of the product. Well, let's jump into asset management. I've been throughout my career. I've been I guess lucky enough I'm using air quotes for those that aren't watching the video to actually implement an asset management system three times. Now I'm on the third try here. Maybe one of these times we'll get it right here in Brooklyn Park.

Speaker 2: 8:21

But you know, many, many moons ago, I implemented Cartograph at Maple Grove. That was probably back in 2010, 2011. Then, when I went to Roseville, they were using a more simpler system. We ended up implementing a different product, a more UI-based product, graphical user interface and more tied into GIS, not Cartograph. And then, now that I'm in Brooklyn Park, we are implementing Cartograph here and it's kind of just interesting to see, you know, it happening at three different agencies at three different agencies and you know it is what's what's really interesting about it is it's so dependent on the people. You know in in the agencies how it goes and and they ultimately there have been, and I have no doubt that the one in brooklyn park we're in the implementation phase right now will be successful. Uh, but it's ultimately they are successful.

Speaker 2: 9:21

But it's just interesting how you know the different people, the different personalities and that gravitate towards it, and how the experience is just different based on that. But get into that I guess I wanted to ask you. You know, and one thing that I've noticed is that even though I've done this three different times over the last 15 plus years and the systems have changed dramatically I mean they're you know, they're on the cloud now and you know, have a lot more features in that, but they're also very similar to what I initially implemented in Maple Grove. As far as you know, just data, you know, in fields, a database, look. So you know, I guess you know, maybe talk a little bit about what you've seen in changes for asset management over time and you know, and how that's improved the system.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Yeah, for sure, and I think I touched on something you said I thought was really interesting about the people. And one thing that we say you know, there is a lot of products out there. Totally right, there's a lot of great products out there that can solve this problem, which is good. Competition is a good thing, right. But we always say it's not just the products, it's the people in the process as well. It's kind of this like three legged stool, right, you have to have the right people and the right processes. It's kind of this like three-legged stool, right, you have to have the right people and the right processes. If you don't have, if you just have a product and you don't have the right people or processes to actually make it successful, then the product's probably not good. Even if it's the best product in the world, it's probably not actually going to be that successful for you.

Speaker 1: 10:57

So that's, you know, a big part of our professional services team and you know the, you know the partnership approach of it's. We're not just we're selling software to people, right, it's just a personal business, right. We're not just taking it off a shelf, right, and we're just here install it and you're done. Right. When we work with local governments, right. It is more than that, right. It is something that we have to be really plugged in with. So I think that's just an interesting thing you brought up, so I agree with that a hundred percent, you know. As far as change, I would say I think the with technology right, the only, the only constant is change, I think that's you know kind of the joke, right, that's kind of what.

Speaker 1: 11:36

The only constant is change. But I look back. You know, when I first started at Cartograph we were still using a product called Navigator. If you've been a customer for a while that had used it. It was a very client server based. It was access database behind you know, very older school which, again, you're right, the data we're collecting hasn't necessarily changed. You know, if you're collecting a sign, it still has an MUTCD code, it still has a direct like those data elements haven't changed. It's just more, how are we interfacing and accessing that data? I think is the key there, because when we, when we had the old school Navigator product, that was really built for a paper-based workflow, you know it was kind of you think about like you know there was some people in the office had access to it on you know one or two computers, right, and a lot of times we print out paperwork, orders or tasks to have people go out and fill out their time.

Speaker 2: 12:29

But it was really designed. That's how we did it at Maple Grove, yeah.

Speaker 1: 12:32

Yeah, I mean, that was just how it was designed to work and I think we've, over the years, the way that technology has provided opportunities to make that process a lot more streamlined, right, we're actually bringing in mobile devices having, like you know, 15 years ago people would laugh at you if there was a tablet, right, even when the iPads first came out, we always joked. We kind of put our stake down pretty early on in the carding website, which I think was a great idea. Like, this is actually going to be the way people work. And at the time some people laughed at us, right, they said, well, these are toys. People are just going to, you know, break them or lose them, or they're just going to play games or watch YouTube on them.

Speaker 1: 13:12

But now, you know, you look at it and people can't live without them, right, you know, it's even got to the point where we're actually seeing a trend where I would say the phone has taken over. Right, people would say like, oh, phone's too small, but now we're hearing feedback. Just, it's easier to have the phone in my pocket. I know, I always have it, I'm used to using that screen size. So even the concept of even having a tablet is kind of moved into more. How can we make sure everything works on a phone and support that so?

Speaker 2: 13:42

yeah, I think yeah, it's kind of interesting. It's kind of interesting, it's kind of a similar path as, like social media, you know um, we're like you know facebook, and that was all computer-based and and the interface um was designed, you know, with, with probably bigger windows and more text and the set and the other, and and now everybody wants to interface uh with that through their phone. They want to interface with uh their parking phone, they want to interface with their parking tickets or bill payment and bank accounts and everything through their phone instead of the computer. Yeah, and asset management has followed that same trend of make it as simple as you can. As a product manager, how has that been challenging for you to? Because it is a different real estate, you know, it's a different screen size and there's only so much you can display at a time. So how has that been challenging for you and how, maybe, what have you done to maybe overcome that as far as delivering that information on that smaller screen?

Speaker 1: 14:41

Yeah, it's, it's totally a challenge and you're right. Yeah, you can't put the same tools in front of someone that you would put on a desktop and expect it to work exactly the same way on a phone. I think everyone's probably used, I would say, an unoptimized experience either a website or an app where it just feels like it was just kind of copy pasted onto a mobile device and you know the buttons don't work or they're not touch friendly. So you got to think about these things that, hey, if I'm on a phone and this is where I'll actually give you know total kudos to our fantastic user experience and design team. This is where they've done a lot of research, right? Hey, if I'm on a smaller screen real estate the button sizes have to change. We have to think about maybe not showing too many things, because part of it is sometimes it can get too busy, right, like if there's too many things on the screen.

Speaker 1: 15:33

This is where we've had a lot of thought around personalizing the experience depending on the persona. So if it's someone that's just out in the field, that just needs to get their work done maybe they're filling potholes, replacing signs they don't need a lot of the advanced tools that maybe a supervisor needs or more of an asset manager needs in the field. So what we don't want to do is overload their experience and put too many buttons and options and actions to users that just don't need it right? So if we keep the experience simple while still we have the feedback that, hey, I'm an asset manager, I'm in the field too, I want to have access to do these advanced tools, while still kind of balancing the need to provide those tools, because, again, we have a lot of customers that they don't go to the office anymore, they don't even have a computer, right no-transcript.

Speaker 2: 16:54

Do you get pushback from users about like I really want to do more and you kind of got to tell them well, no, it's just not going to work well on a phone.

Speaker 1: 17:03

We get it both ways. I mean, I would say we get the feedback that they want to. We definitely get the feedback. They want to do more, you know, and we get that. We've like, hey, I want to be able to do these features and these features and so. But vice versa, recently we've been adding a lot of new capabilities. It's been a focus so that it can be supported on the device, but then we kind of also got the kind of the pendulum swung all the way over to the other side, I guess, where we're like oh wait, now there's too much. So we actually ended up implementing capabilities where you could hide certain things or turn off certain things, so you could kind of greater control as an admin. These people get these features and these people don't. So I would say we've gotten it both ways.

Speaker 1: 17:43

But there's certain things right that probably will never be on a mobile device. I would say never. That's always a hard thing to say, but you know there's like if I'm building new structure or I'm maybe building a really complex report, it's probably not the right tool to do that on the phone. It's probably something that would be better when you have a large screen at an office. But um, but yeah, you never know, right? I saying never, is you know?

Speaker 2: 18:07

the tools become yeah. You're, you're doing things now. You, you thought you'd never do 10 years ago.

Speaker 1: 18:13

Sure, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 18:14

Yeah, yeah, well, well, cool, um, I don't know. Let's try to pull us back on track here, but maybe talk a little bit more about some your implementations. You know, I know you've done a lot of implementations. You're not in that realm now, right now, but you know, you've been to Texas, you've been to Florida, been to California. Talk about some of those implementations and even you know the different sizes of those implementations.

Speaker 1: 18:50

Sure, yeah, absolutely, and I think you know you mentioned, obviously you know, working at Maple Grove and being part mark of that, and I think our paths must have just like crossed or not like just missed each other. It sounds like because I think we were talking beforehand that I had one of my earlier implementations was working with the city of Maple Grove, and I think it was either after we just missed each other.

Speaker 2: 19:11

It sounds like Right, right when that goes, probably when Maple Grove was moving to the OMS system or whatever. Right, I think they were on the old Navigator.

Speaker 1: 19:20

And then they moved to, yeah, the more web-based OMS product, for sure, yep, yep, so yeah, so yeah. I worked with a lot of customers, big and small. You know, I will say I guess I'll give a personal story Like one of my first times I did an implementation this was I did an implementation. This was like literally my first implementation. It was a small town in Georgia, you know, maybe less than 30,000 population, and I think you know, when you come into a new job, right, you have imposter syndrome, right, like how?

Speaker 1: 19:50

am I going to actually you know how am I going to like make these guys successful? Like you know, I'm coming out of college, I'm pretty new, you know. I probably know just a little bit more than they do on the product you know, than they do on the product you know, and so, but I think you know what we found out is or I found out, I guess, and this is the problems we see is that, you know, everyone's on a different maturity level, right, you know, when I was working with this, this customer in Georgia they're still a customer today actually, which is great and they're doing great but you know, they were trying to answer questions and problems like just what do we have, where are my assets at? You know, they were coming from paper, right, I, just how do we actually just optimize our workflows and so, but you know, you think that this is a small town, but then I also, then we're working with bigger organizations, you know, like a Bexar County I mentioned, or we work with City of LA now as one of our large customers. They still have, they can still have the same issues, right, the scale is different, but the core problems of what we're trying to solve haven't really changed too much. That was a myth I guess I had going into it of like, hey, if this is a really large city with a large budget and that they're going to just have so much more mature processes and procedures, and that's just not the reality. I know you, your lab, because you get it, and I think you know that over the years, but it's it's, it's just not the reality.

Speaker 1: 21:08

And we work with we've got some amazing customers. A lot of them, I guess I would actually call out, are in the Twin Cities area. One of the ones we work with, carver County, you know, not too far from where you're at, is you know they're, they're, you know they're a great customer. They're not the obviously the largest County that we have, but they, they've embraced it Right. They've put the time in, they've put the investment in and they're doing some really, really cool things.

Speaker 1: 21:34

And and I kind of mentioned, like this maturity, we kind of had this concept that we kind of created this maturity model Right.

Speaker 1: 21:41

So like the far left of the maturity model is kind of like I'm just getting started, I just want to know where my assets are at.

Speaker 1: 21:48

I'm just trying to get the 20 or 30 years of data out of the head of the, you know, really tenured staff right, so that it doesn't just go out the door like some of those just really important problems.

Speaker 1: 21:58

But just you know, starting out with the asset management journey and then the far right side where, hey, I'm actually running scenarios, I'm doing predictive analysis, I'm understanding things like risk and level of service and I'm actually making really good data-driven decisions, and I think you'll find out that everyone's on a different part of that phase and that journey and it's the best customers I've found and the best customers we've worked with have kind of understood that but also have invested into always being better. It's kind of that growth mindset that we talk about a lot being better tomorrow versus yesterday. Right, and we've seen that and they have, you know, whether it's just one person that's focused on that or it's a team working on that, you know that's that's where we've seen a lot of success of customers being able to to really again take the product. The product is the product, but then in putting the product in the hands of a team that's got great processes and great people can make that asset management journey.

Speaker 2: 23:01

You know, move to the right can make that asset management journey, you know, move to the right, yeah, yeah, and I would say, even based on on my experiences, um, and I would say, pretty similar. You could probably say this about all three organizations that I that I worked in, um, you know, you, you talk about some organizations, just, uh, have those processes and things like that. And I would say, even drilling down a little further, and I would imagine at LA it's even more pronounced, you know you can have one division within that organization that is really well organized, has those processes developed maybe, is using some technology, has bought into you know, gis, has been using that in some capacity, and then they become your champion for implementing asset management across the entire organization, or at least across the entire department. And then those champions and like Tim Brandon in Maple Grove was our champion there and he was our sign guy and our GIS guy, jay Kaposinski was there and Tim and Jay really pushed the rest of the public works department there to embrace this and use it and parks as well. And then, like we had and I just feel the need to call these people out cause they're going to get mad at me if I don't like Sally Ricard in at Roseard, at Roseville was our champion and she was a database specialist, she was our software person and we were so lucky we had somebody like that that became that champion. And now in Brooklyn Park we're looking for that. We're waiting for somebody to step up. We've got Russ and Mallory here who are kind of our admin people and they're just trying to figure it out. We're pushing them. We're pushing them right now and we're waiting for those champions to show up in those, those divisions to to push the rest of us.

Speaker 2: 24:54

But it's it's interesting just to kind of watch that evolution. And I'm a little bit more of an outsider here at Brooklyn park than I was at Roseville and Maple Grove, but it's just it's really interesting to watch the evolution of the staff and the divisions to embrace it. And we've got Aki is our tree guy, our forester, and he's like just all in on it. And Taylor in our facilities group is starting to populate a bunch of data and they're not even exactly sure how they're going to use it yet, but they're just like they can see that the potential in it and so it's fun to watch that and I'm really interested that and I'm really interested, I'm really anxious and eager to see that evolve and populate and kind of like spread almost like a, like a virus, in a positive way to the, to the other team members here. But yeah, it's just interesting to hear you talk about that. That it's really, it's very similar across all those organizations.

Speaker 2: 26:00

And what I love about asset management all those organizations, and what I love about asset management is it, yeah, it's a lot easier when there are some developed processes and workflows and things like that. But what I've seen is you can, as long as you've got that champion, you've got that commitment at the leadership level, you can use asset management to develop those work processes. You know it forces it a little bit, it's a little bit, you run into a little bit more friction, but you can use that to develop the work process. And I'm thinking out loud here as we're going on, I'm rambling a little bit perhaps. But the other interesting thing about asset management when people think about asset management they think about the assets, they think about tracking the assets and the history of them and install dates and life cycles and this, that and the other.

Speaker 2: 26:51

But I would say really, on your day-to-day level, it's really more about work management. No-transcript or gal shows up to work and they open their phone up and there's six work orders for them and they know what they're doing in the day and I think that's the really transformative component that people see on a day-to-day basis. Obviously it's huge from the long-term management of the assets and budgeting and capital planning and things like that as well. But that was kind of the surprising thing for me. I guess when I started implementing asset management at Maple Grove, I didn't think about the work management side of it as much.

Speaker 1: 28:08

But that's such a huge component. Yeah, we always say I a hundred percent agree with you, mark, and we always have this. It's an internal terminology of, like, building this data pyramid. And if you think about this, like everyone, when you buy these types of softwares and you're trying to build your processes for asset management right, you're usually thinking at the beginning kind of the tip of the pyramid, right, like I want to be able to, you know, decide when I need to repair, replace these assets, and I want to make these really data-driven decisions. Well, I agree with that. That's really important.

Speaker 1: 28:32

But if you don't have the base of the pyramid solid, which is, you know, your day in, day out field staff putting in great data with the work management, you'll never be able to actually go to the top of the pyramid right and actually make those. So this is really like building something that people want to use, right. If people aren't using the product and they go back to a paper workflow, well, what's the impact of that? Well, the data is not going to be in there in real time. There'll be more mistakes. Can we trust the data, you know? So, making sure that the work is getting entered in, it's getting entered into. The accuracy that you want is driving ultimately a lot of these processes and data.

Speaker 1: 29:10

And you know it takes time to build that Right. And and this is where I a hundred percent we've had to tell customers, you know, a lot of times people that haven't been, you know they maybe don't have as much experience, right, you know, implementing these types of asset management solutions. They want to just kind of eat the elephant at once, right, where they're just going to go in and let's just implement every department across the city. Well, we kind of tell them to slow down a little bit because it's better to build successes in certain divisions. Right, like you know it's. Let's say, hey, we're going to really focus on the park side because they've got a very good process, let's build some wins, let's build a strong champion, and that's just going to kind of help parlay that into the other departments that actually want to implement. So, yeah, having that kind of phased approach we've always seen has been really successful with our customers too.

Speaker 2: 29:59

Yeah, and that's what we're doing at Brooklyn Park right now. You know of the domains, as you call it, that you have. We're implementing four of them, which surprised me when I came in because a lot of those decisions had been made, but I've only been with Brooklyn Park since July of last year, 2024. Sorry, it's now April of 2026, if you're listening to this in 2030, you understand the timeline, but I hope people are still listening to my podcast in 2030. You know, when I came in, I was surprised at the domains that they picked. And they picked fleet, they picked parks, they picked water treatment that was a real surprise for me and facilities, and you know I was like why would they do that? Because we do have, you know, we've we've got GIS data for streets, we have GIS data for our water lines and sewer lines and things like that.

Speaker 2: 30:51

But there was some method to the madness and you know, part of that was, I think, recognizing uh, where they had some potential champions as as staff members within that, and it has been really good for us to implement a smaller set of the total assets in the city and then get that buy-in, you know, and really to make sure that it works, before you then bring in the other 100,000 asset points or whatever. And I'm I mean, I threw that number out and it's probably not too far from that, um, when you consider all the water and sewer and streets and everything else. Um, but yeah, so I think ultimately it'll, it'll be good. It's just a, you know, a matter of, uh, there there might be a little bit of burnout from an implementation perspective if we pick up the next domains as soon as we're done with these. But uh, but, but yeah, it's been.

Speaker 2: 31:48

I think it's that was smart to, to do that and we'll do that that way um do you see communities like the size of brooklyn park you know, I guess not looking at an la, but because those are la is pretty siloed. I imagine you're probably working more specifically with individual divisions within a city like that, but but like you know, a community like the size of brooklyn park across the country. Do you see them implementing in stages or are they trying to take it all in one bite, you think?

Speaker 1: 32:19

um, it's mostly stages, and again we kind of we try to drive people to that, I think too, just because over the years we've done enough of these where we've seen successes and failures when we try to do too much. But again, I think, everyone's maturity level are they coming from an existing system or are they coming from paper? And that answer might be different between, like you said, between the parks department versus the utilities department or the transportation group. So I think it's I don't know if there's a one size fits all, but I do think that you know you want to just find ways to keep momentum right and I think if you're lumping everything together, you know everything just takes longer versus if you can at least say we got a. Really you know we have a big need in our parks department. Let's get them up and running. Great Okay, Facilities, you're next. Okay, Now we can move on to, let's say, the transportation group or the sign management group yeah Um.

Speaker 2: 33:24

I guess I'm. I want to move on to the future. I was trying to look through to make sure we didn't miss anything in the present. But let's talk about the future. What is the future of asset management and where does OpenGov think they're going to take the cartograph asset management system? What comes to mind, like the first things that come to your mind when you think about the future, john?

Speaker 1: 33:54

Yeah, I mean a big one that I would say I think is really, really important is this concept of really having connected systems and complementary business systems. I think we still see a lot, you know. You know again, not just talking about asset management like complimentary, like permitting and licensing, utility billing, finance, 311 systems, like really thinking about more of kind of what we call the full ERP kind of solution. And today you know a lot of those. A lot of those processes and solutions are very siloed, right, like I don't want to talk with finance. They're over there, the budgeting team is over here and asset management is here, and certainly you can build successes within each group. But I do feel like there's so much value and so much, you know, synergy that can be driven by having these systems truly talk to each other and work kind of cohesively together.

Speaker 1: 34:48

I think that's the beauty of kind of the vision of OpenGov is to kind of be this cloud provider of these solutions for government, to kind of be the ERP right. When we were just Cartograph, we had a really strong asset management system, but we always wanted a permitting system, because we saw so many people kept asking us like, hey, what do you guys do for permitting, and there's a lot of workflows, right, that a permit generates tasks for the, for the asset group and the work group. So now we kind of have this vision and so we're trying to build, like how do we then make it not feel like it's all separate systems, right? Like how can we make the experience where you can switch from one to the other? Data is flowing between those? So I think that just what we call kind of this connected government is really really powerful. One of the stories that we kind of talk about Mark is this concept of a wrench to wallet. It's kind of a funny terminology, but it's a yeah, it's kind of this.

Speaker 1: 35:44

One of the solutions we have at OpenGov is a budgeting and planning. So it's with the budgeting office and you know a lot of the budgeting is never fun, Right, and it's hard. How do we get the?

Speaker 1: 35:53

data and the information, but the information that we're storing in the asset management side obviously is really important when it comes to budget season of you know what are we going to invest our time in and money in, right, and so being able to share that data and not just going and saying, you know what, this is what we budgeted last year, let's give us 5% more, or you know what I mean Actually taking real data and vice versa, sharing that between those systems is, we think, a really powerful story and really a problem that's not solved very well in the industry today.

Speaker 2: 36:28

Yeah, and it's interesting you brought that up, john, because we are actually talking about that here. We've been using a CIP planning tool for a while and our license is running out on it, and it was interesting because we had conversations. Greg Hoag, who is the current director for operations and maintenance, you know he's been having these conversations with finance about, well, who owns this, who owns the CIP software?

Speaker 2: 36:59

You know who gets to pick it and finance is like well, this is your guys Like we don't, and we're like, well, this is a finance thing, we don't, and we're like, well, this is a finance thing. But obviously there are strong connections between the two, and so we are going to be looking at OpenGov's budgeting and CIP tool to see how that integration can help us. But yeah, it is. It's you know when you can go in and select, know, over the next five years. Here are the water mains that we plan on replacing or rehabilitating. Here are the streets that we're going to mill and overlay or reconstruct, um, and then just import that into your uh budget system because it's you know, you've got the square footage so you can estimate costs based on that and blah, blah. It's just, it's a lot simpler and it's a heck of a lot more accurate than you know some of the other. Like you said, you know, oh, we've got a million dollars, okay, so we'll figure out how we're going to spend a million dollars.

Speaker 1: 37:56

But is that really the right number?

Speaker 2: 37:57

Yeah, yep.

Speaker 1: 37:59

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:59

I mean it goes back to.

Speaker 1: 38:00

We're all citizens too right all citizens too right and we want to know where our tax dollars are going and being able to have more data to back up that. This is why we're doing this right. There's always a reason, but actually being able to see the data, I think, is super impactful that we can help with.

Speaker 2: 38:18

Yeah, well, it's interesting that you brought up the connected systems I'm kind of also interested in, because no one software company can be everything to everyone. You know what are some of the partnerships that you leverage or that you have with some other companies for, because I think some of the biggest improvements or some of the future, the greatest potential in the future for asset management, is data collection and data management. But you're not going to be able to do all of the data collection. So maybe talk a little bit about some of the partnerships that you have now or that you're working on for that data collection side.

Speaker 1: 38:59

Yeah, that's a great topic and I agree with you. I think our stance has been and we've been lucky, I think, over the years of being a company and I agree with you, I think our stance has been and we've been lucky, I think, over the years of being a company Cartograph's been around for 30 years where we've been able to build a really good partner ecosystem and a lot of relationships with these other vendors, because we definitely believe we're not a CCTV event. We don't provide cameras for trucks to go in and we don't do the pavement, distresses and PCI collection. Do the pavement you know distresses, and OCI, you know PCI collection. So, but that data is really important and it makes our system hum right, like the better the data that can come in from those systems, the better our customers can use our system to make decisions right. So having that data is almost the it's really the lifeblood of making the system work really well. So we see CCTV is a big one. We work with a lot of vendors there. It pipes is one that we work with quite a bit 311, obviously I think everyone's got a 311 system at this point and we've worked with a lot of them. You know it's a necessary thing, right, you know, to get to the citizen. 811, though, is actually one that we have put a lot of and seen a lot of success with lately in the call before you dig, because we found that there's a big problem there. Right, it's like those 8-1-1 tickets are coming in and someone at the organization needs to actually send someone out right to actually mark it out, and that that workflow isn't always, you know, you don't want to have a separate workflow for the same group that might be doing other types of work, so being able to have that feed into the work management system that they're already using, really, really impactful.

Speaker 1: 40:32

But I think you know to your point about, you know, how can we make asset management better as well. It's, you know, flow direction sensor, like the, the, the kind of the. I'm kind of still, I would say, waiting for, like the, the tsunami to kind finally come over the wave, to crash over a little bit. We've been talking about like Internet of Things for a lot of years. Yeah, yeah, sensors, and you know they've gotten cheaper, but they still haven't like fully hit kind of mass use, I guess, across the industry.

Speaker 1: 41:00

But I mean, you know you see a lot of treatment plants, like SCADA systems have been around for a lot, a long time, right to track you know what's the runtime hours and the pump hours and drive preventative maintenance based on that alarms. But I do think that's, you know, from the future standpoint. That's an area where I think there's just so much. There's still a lot of room for growth, because I think those are just tools that are going to make just things so much quicker and easier and more efficient, just by having that data without having to go out to the field.

Speaker 2: 41:29

Um yeah, that's that's. Yeah, that's, that's one of my future podcast episodes and I gotta find the right person to talk to. So if you've got a uh reference, let me know. But and I was just talking to, uh, my utilities manager, uh, rick luco, about this yesterday, because we were talking about a new water tower that we're building in Brooklyn Park here and I was like, okay, so what can we do technology-wise? How can we push ourselves?

Speaker 2: 41:56

Because I'm all about internet things, I want to implement internet things, but I also don't want to do it just to do it. And when we're talking about public dollars, you can't just do something to do it. You've got to have a reason and a purpose and you've got to get some benefit out of it to justify the cost. But yeah, I see a future where you know the problem with SCADA is it is a closed loop system by definition or by need. It needs to be isolated and secure, and so you're not going to just, you know, pop it up on your desktop computer in your cartograph dashboard, because it's a separate system and sensors and just sensors without the control. That just lets us know what's going on in that system, and it's kind of a backup to SCADA, but then it's also providing a bunch of data for our asset management system, data that we don't even know what we might do with it yet.

Speaker 2: 43:06

You know, as we talk about artificial intelligence we're going to move into that here in a minute. You know, as we talk about AI, and if we've got five years of data of like flow and pressure data in our water distribution system and we can correlate water main breaks to that pressure and flow data, can an AI system go in and find the common factors so that we can predict or we can notify our maintenance staff when a break is like literally happening in the moment versus waiting for somebody to call it in? A break is like literally happening in the moment versus waiting for somebody to call it in. I mean, those are the kind of things that I think ahead. And is that predictive and instant notification type of system, um, that we can do with, with something that can analyze large amounts of data?

Speaker 1: 43:58

uh, that a human can't, you know that's the kind of stuff that gives you goosebumps, right like that's like those types of scenarios are like oh man, like that's, that's the kind of stuff that gives you goosebumps, right, like that's.

Speaker 2: 44:07

Like. Those types of scenarios are like, oh man, like that's, that's the nerds anyway.

Speaker 1: 44:08

Yeah, yeah. So I want to get to it, right. Yeah, you think about just the you know, the quality of life here, you know, and the dollars you could save by having that predictive analysis like that's. That's where the secret sauce, I think, is going to be, you know, being able to, to get that information, but then feeding it into a system that actually allows you to take action. Right, like, what are we going to do with, like your point, like it's great that we've got, like you know, years of data, but what is that data telling us? Is it just noise? Where's the signal and the noise? Right? And then, what are we going to do with that? I think, is the always that, that piece that still needs work? Right, that we need to get to?

Speaker 2: 44:47

right that we need to get to. So what, what is? What conversations have you guys had maybe internally, you know, thinking, you know out in the future about data management? You know even like, how long do you keep some of this data? Um, where are you storing it, how are you getting it? Things like that. What, maybe? What conversations have you had about that?

Speaker 1: 45:04

Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think, as our customers, we've had the benefit of having customers for sometimes 15, 20 years, and over that time they build up a lot of data, and that's good. Customers grow and we've had to think about it from a technology standpoint of how do we make sure the system can scale and optimize. You have the scalability that, hey, we're supporting not only your data today when you first implement right, you might be pulling it from a different system but also what does your data look like five years, 10 years from now? Certainly, yeah, we've had some conversations with customers about data retention, like how long do I actually need to keep this data, and it seems like that's not always consistent. You know it depends on you know different, I think, cities and rules and regulations on that, but we have had conversations recently about thinking about archiving the data, right it's like do you really need to look at all a million tasks for things that were done 30 years ago?

Speaker 1: 46:01

Probably not. You're probably looking at, maybe once every year or two, maybe if you wanted to run a report, but most of the time you're looking at data that's probably within the last year, year or two years. Right, that's the type of data that's probably actually important to make decisions. So not you know where it's necessary.

Speaker 2: 46:37

Yeah, yeah, that and that it is, and what happens when you archive the data and how easy is it to get to it, and some things like that. But that's, I mean, I think that's really going to be one of the largest challenges we have. Is that data management piece? I mean, we also have data practices. You know laws that we have to worry about and this, that and the other, but there is definitely I think we're going to it's going to take us a while and some of us already kind of see it the value in historic data, depending on what that data is, how granular it is, things like that that we may be able to extract things out of that data in the future that we can't do yet. We don't know what we want to know about that data yet, but it might still be useful to us, you know, as historical data looking back. So I don't know. I mean again.

Speaker 1: 47:40

It's hard because it's a lot easier. Like you know, back in the paper days, right, like it was very visible, we got all these filing cabinets with all these these papers and things like. But now it's, you know, it's all in the cloud, right, it's all stored, and so you, it's easy just to store it, to store it, but also, you know how, how easy is it going to get, get back to it and what are we going to use it for? And yeah, there's kind of this hoarder mentality and I have got that too of like, why would I ever delete something as long as you're, I guess, managing it in a way that actually you could find it back again.

Speaker 1: 48:21

We talked about AI as a tool where that's answering those questions you mentioned, like what can we do with the data AI is going to feed on? It? Know, ai, that's that's what you know drives. The success of AI is ultimately data right, the better the data and information we have can, can, you know, drive that forward? So, and we don't, we don't know the questions yet, you know, maybe we don't know what we're trying to solve yet you know we don't yeah.

Speaker 1: 48:42

Yeah, it could, probably is. If we try to predict that here today, we'll probably not be right, but you know. But yeah, we're not collecting that. If we have the data, though, I guess we have the flexibility, you know, long term to be able to answer those questions if we need to.

Speaker 2: 48:59

Right.

Speaker 1: 49:15

Yeah, I mean I would say, you know we can talk a lot about AI. I think the you know, at OpenGov it's we've got really, we're really kind of all in right. We do think it's it's just, it's this kind of this tsunami, right, or this wave coming through. It's either you're you're going to ride the wave or you're going to kind of have a crash over you. You know, I think it's it's, it's truly a piece of it, and I think we've had the luxury of at least I've had the luxury of like building, we've had we've actually have an AI feature in our product today. That's been out there for several years kind of before. Ai, I guess, was maybe as buzzwordy and kind of as high of focus.

Speaker 2: 49:54

Before AI went viral.

Speaker 1: 49:56

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't know if you've used it, but it's kind of a cool little feature that if you take a picture of an asset, just using your phone, it automatically recognizes what the asset is, it grabs a location and it actually identifies the asset. So, like, a good example of that is like for a sign so you can take a picture of, let's say, a stop sign. Just by taking the picture, it recognizes obviously it's a sign, it grabs the GPS location, it also knows what the MUTCD code is, as well as any text on that sign, and it just does it all for you, right? And so that feature has been out there for you know, three or four years. The cool thing is is that because the technology and the AI has gotten better, the accuracy has gotten better with that, the amount of assets that we can collect and the confidence we have with that has gotten better. So that's just one of those features that you know we were pretty early on. It worked okay, and now the last year or so, it's like okay, this thing is actually really really good, it's learning right and it's getting better. You know, I think we've got a lot of things on our roadmap. You know, like there's. I think this is exciting, right, we've got you know, just one of the areas that we're really looking at is around a lot of problems around scheduling work and balancing work. That's like a problem we've been dealing with. Like you talked about work management being a big need and the process of making sure that we actually balance the work. Like how do we know that you know Mark needs, you know, this many tasks and how much hours he's going to work? You know how can we balance that? Today it's a lot of manual processes. People are using spreadsheets or whiteboards or whatever the case might be. And how can we use AI to filter that data in? Understand skill sets, workloads, even things like weather, like hey, if we're going to do mowing tomorrow and it's got a higher percent of chance of rain, why don't we move that to the next day? Right? Like actually taking in that information? What equipment is available? So that's some really, really cool things I think we're looking at investigating.

Speaker 1: 51:54

And then I think you know, from an AI standpoint, just how we interact with our systems is going to change, right? So you know, instead of you know, how we are using smartphones. Obviously it's kind of manual. We're using, you know keyboard and mouse, but Obviously it's kind of manual. We're using.

Speaker 1: 52:07

You know keyboard and mouse, but just the advent of all these agents and assistants, right, you know, when someone goes and is wants to, let's say, you know, get some data for a dashboard, they don't really want to build a dashboard, they just want to get their answer, you know. So if we can actually create assistants where they can ask their question more in a natural language way, the output might be a dashboard, gadget or a layer or a filter. But thinking of it in a different way, right, it's like, hey, I might just be able to ask my question more in a natural language and then the system can output actually how I want to visualize it and get that data. Because instead of, like today, you kind of I have to know how to build a gadget, I got to build a reformer.

Speaker 2: 52:49

Yeah, I was going to say we would sign up for that tomorrow, because that's one of the largest issues we're facing, even after going through the training that we went through a few weeks ago Mark Groom dropped that name, he did a great job. Yeah, a lot of questions like well, I don't know what I want on my dashboard, what do I want? What's even available? And I love the concept of just being able to say, okay, well, I want to know how many work orders are open and the system just popping up the gadget, rather than you having to go dig for it and then populate it. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, go, go, john go.

Speaker 1: 53:32

I think the cool thing is, I think these have been things people have thought. We've thought about these things for a while and the technology just wasn't quite mature enough, I think, to actually make it happen. But that's rapidly changed, which that's. The exciting part is, I think, now the and it's and it's changing every day. Right, it's, it's a, you know, it is the. The rapid is. The rapid pace of acceleration on the AI side is pretty crazy.

Speaker 1: 53:52

But, yeah, those are a few things and yeah, those are the fun projects, right, because it's just things that you would never have thought about before that could make some really, really big impacts. That, again, I don't think our customers are even thinking about a lot of times too. Right, we're kind of having to take the next, not just what they're asking for, but what's the things that they're going to ask for two years from now or one or two, you know, like, what's the things that they're going to need in the future. And part of the yeah, part of the job of the product manager, right, is how can we think a few steps ahead, right?

Speaker 2: 54:29

And make sure that we can lead to that, not just kind of be reactive to those types of things, but also, how do you prioritize? I mean, you know you have a hundred ideas in your head or you've got a hundred ideas for your, your customers. How do you, how do you prioritize those two? So it's not easy. Yeah it's, we want to do it all. We want to do it all.

Speaker 1: 54:43

We can't. Yeah, there's always time, materials. You know there's always some restraints there, but that's part of the job for sure.

Speaker 2: 54:53

Well, awesome.

Speaker 2: 54:54

Hey this has been great, john. I love this conversation. I don't know what it is about asset management that I love talking about so much, but I do, and so this has been great. I really look forward to and I hope that maybe I can ask you back on, maybe in six months or so, and maybe we can highlight a couple of newer features that you guys have got in the software or talk a little bit more about where you're using AI, because I love that you know, highlighting what you've already been doing for a few years with the recognition of the science and other assets through the pictures. But we'd love to talk about some more things as you get more comfortable talking about.

Speaker 1: 55:35

So I'd love to do that and, yeah, I think, because things have changed so much, I think in six months or so it's, we'll have a lot to talk about. I think there'll be a lot of really really cool changes, so yeah, good, good, a lot of really, really cool changes.

Speaker 2: 55:48

Good, good, you. Actually there was one other thing that you mentioned in your script, and maybe we'll just kind of close on it, and that was a recent acquisition of your guys' what was the name of the company?

Speaker 1: 56:00

Yeah, so the company was called Ignatius. We've now rebranded that in the OpenGov kind of platform to what we're calling the government app builder, and this is a really really powerful tool. So it allows basically you know ourselves, but also our customers to really create these experiences very quickly. So things like we have a grants management application that we're going to be rolling out, that, hey, being able to take a form or take a kind of more of a paper process and actually automate that, and AI is built, it's actually really really cool. Being able to take a form or take a kind of more of a paper process and actually automate that, and AI is built, it's actually really really cool.

Speaker 1: 56:32

I'm learning a lot myself on this tool. It's pretty new, but being able to then, like I said, instead of having to manually create a form and create the fields, just use AI to describe what is your workflow, how does this need to work, and have it build it for you, and so the benefit is is we can get kind of get value a lot quicker, get these solutions and it's kind of these kind of underserved areas right that don't really have like people are just kind of putting together their own processes for some of these kind of very specific use cases. And yeah, so it's. It's very, very early stages, I would say, but it's when you talk about, kind of where AI is impacting things.

Speaker 2: 57:10

I'm really excited about the some of the things that we're going to be able to use it for Well, cool, well, I, maybe in six months we'll talk more about how you guys are rolling that out and what cool things you bring Mark on my team.

Speaker 1: 57:22

He's maybe you can bring him along too, and he he's working with that product as well. So yeah, for sure, mr Groom. Uh no, this is a a different yeah different market.

Speaker 2: 57:39

Well, hey, you know I and I just want to close, first of all, thank you, john. I also want to you know, um follow out James Shepard and uh Anna. You know I mentioned Mark Groom um, uh, Ryan, who helped us buy this system to begin with, and Christina Espinoza, who's now carrying the torch for Ryan as we look to expand it. But all great members of this OpenGov team that have helped Brooklyn Park move into the future, or even the present, with asset management. So just wanted to do a shout out to them for a great team so well, hey, thank you, john, appreciate your time and love the conversation and look forward to future conversations in the not too distant future.

Speaker 1: 58:27

Yeah, mark, yeah, I appreciate you having me on and yeah, really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2: 58:32

Yeah, and one last thing before we go. We're on our. This is our third season and I say it after every episode. We would love to see our audience grow. So if you're listening to this, if you're listening to it for the first time, we would love if you would go on our LinkedIn page. Just look for the Public Works Nerds on LinkedIn. You know, repost it or put a comment on the episode and just help spread the word, get your colleagues listening to it. If you've got an episode idea, use that same format. It's the best way to get a hold of us on LinkedIn. But, you know, let me know what your episode idea is, with the topic or even the person. Or, if you want to, you've got a passion for something. You want to talk about it. Let me know and we'll talk about it. But thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you next time. Nerds out.