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Sean Totten

Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Fishers, Indiana, and a GovAI Podcast guest on municipal AI governance.

Sep 30, 2026

12:48
So as you think about someone that's in your seat right now, ultimately, what is the thought process you're going through as you determine what is okay and what is not okay? And I know it starts with visibility, but then there's always, what comes next?
13:02
Yeah, it's a really complicated calculus that goes into that because you put this visibility in place and all of a sudden you see not 10, 20, but 80, 100 tool sets out there that are being utilized, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
13:18
You know, so part of it, you have to look at the risk, which it's good to have a tool that does analyze the risk of different software that's out there.
13:26
Is this software that's in place at least implemented safely? Are they following proper safeguards? Have they gone through proper audits? Where are they storing their data? How are they handling the data? How are they sharing the data? Is it a small add-on to an existing platform that, you know, if I take it away, it's going to fundamentally break the use of that platform now? Because one big thing that's happened in a lot of your SaaS tool sets is they've embedded some type of chatbot agent or something like that.
13:56
But it is actually critical to the workflow of that product now.
14:01
And I cannot block that, especially if it's a tool that hundreds of our staff are utilizing regularly, right? You have to be cognizant that you have to accept that risk of if it looks like it's at least implemented safely and you know what kind of data is going into it, it's okay.
14:19
We can let that one go.
18:50
And so I'm curious, what's your take on it?

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