This episode of the Tyler Tech Podcast features Mike Cook, IT director for the city of Redondo Beach, California, discussing how his organization is approaching modernization as a foundational shift from aging infrastructure and manual processes to a more stable, scalable environment. He shares Redondo Beach’s journey from legacy, on-premises systems to a modern cloud solution, which helped reduce downtime, improve security, and ease the burden on a constrained IT team. The conversation also highlights how the city is now streamlining long-standing workflows through automation and digitization, taking a phased, practical approach to modernization while preparing for future technologies like AI.
In this Tyler Tech Podcast episode, Mike Cook, IT director for the city of Redondo Beach, California, shares how his organization is approaching modernization as a foundational shift from aging infrastructure and manual processes to a more stable, automated, and scalable environment. Recorded live at Tyler Connect 2026 in Las Vegas, the conversation highlights Redondo Beach’s journey from legacy, on-premises ERP systems to a modern cloud solution, earning the city a Tyler Excellence Award along the way.
Like many local governments, Redondo Beach was operating with a highly constrained IT team, aging servers, and outdated software across its technology stack. Frequent downtime, mounting cybersecurity risks, and resource limitations made it increasingly difficult to maintain core systems, let alone improve them. Moving to the cloud helped stabilize the environment, reduce operational risk, and eliminate much of the ongoing maintenance burden that had previously consumed the team’s time.
With that foundation in place, the city has shifted its focus to modernizing long-standing workflows that remained largely unchanged for nearly two decades. From manual invoice processing and paper-based approvals to broader document digitization efforts, Redondo Beach is now working to streamline operations, introduce automation, and prepare for emerging AI capabilities in a more intentional and strategic way. Throughout the conversation, Mike offers a pragmatic perspective on modernization — emphasizing the importance of aligning technology decisions with business needs, taking a phased approach, and building toward long-term transformation without losing sight of day-to-day service delivery.
This episode also highlights the 2026 State CIO Priorities Playbook, designed to help government leaders turn strategy into action. The playbook provides practical insights, real-world examples, and actionable guidance across top priorities like AI, cybersecurity, modernization, accessibility, and digital services.
And learn more about the topics discussed in this episode with these resources:
Listen to other episodes of the podcast.
Let us know what you think about the Tyler Tech Podcast in this survey!
Mike Cook: Modernization for my organization in a lot of cases is going to mean the movement from legacy processes, paper based processes, manual processes to automation, things that happen on their own, electronic processes, processes that are available online.
Josh Henderson: From Tyler Technologies, this is the Tyler Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Henderson. Today’s episode explores how cities are modernizing core systems not just by upgrading technology, but by fundamentally rethinking infrastructure, workflows, and the role of automation in day to day government operations.
Recorded live at Tyler Connect 2026 in Las Vegas, I’m joined by Mike Cook, IT director for the city of Redondo Beach, California, an organization honored this year with a Tyler Excellence Award. Mike shares how Redondo Beach moved from aging on-premises infrastructure and highly manual workflows to a modern cloud environment, unlocking greater stability, stronger security, and the ability for a small IT team to shift focus from maintenance to meaningful modernization.
We also dig into what transformation looks like in practice from eliminating downtime risk to preparing for AI enabled workflows and automation. Let’s get right into it.
Well, Mike, welcome to the podcast. It’s so great to have you here, and congratulations on your TEA win, you and the team.
Mike Cook: Yeah. Thank you.
Josh Henderson: Very, very well deserved. So, yeah, it’s great to have you here on the podcast. Wanted to kind of start with the context with Redondo Beach. Being a medium sized city with a with complex operations and a very small IT department, what were the biggest challenges you were facing with your ERP environment before modernization kicked in?
Mike Cook: So, the city of Redondo Beach was in a very interesting predicament when it came to ERP. The city had been Tyler ERP customer since 2005. We went live in 2006 initially. And, throughout the years we did kind of the mandatory upgrades that we needed to do to keep the system going.
But when I came to the city in 2023, were literally on the oldest supported version that Tyler had available.
And we were coming up against deadlines where the current version that we were on wasn’t even going to get the tax updates for the following year. Gotcha. At the same time, we had some interesting, you know, nontechnical things happening behind the scenes. We did have COVID have a pretty significant impact on the city.
The city only has an eight person IT department, and nobody is dedicated to ERP. So, the ERP is handled primarily by a single individual who also has other duties that that are assigned to her. Yeah. So, you know, she was just kind of treading water with the application, and then we had a number of key separations with the with the city.
We had my predecessor, the IT director, had had retired after 40 years with the city, and then we had a very sudden departure of the individual who was responsible for our server infrastructure, and it left us in a position where we had a very aging infrastructure.
Our server infrastructure, the actual physical servers, were running at about seven to eight years old, and that’s what the Tyler environment was sitting on. So, there was you know, there were concerns there about the longevity of the physical servers.
We were also running not only the oldest possible version of Tyler but also running old server operating systems. We were running old virtualization software, and we were running old SQL Server software. So, we were really, really concerned about the cybersecurity aspect of it as we knew we were on versions The, you know, updates hadn’t been sent out for years, and we were just getting by.
So, you know, we looked at it holistically, and the timing just worked out perfect. The Tyler’s cloud offering was, you know, becoming to the level of maturity that we could trust it with our ERP system. The ERP system arguably is the most critical system that we have from an administrative perspective within a city.
So, you know, really, really important for the infrastructure to be robust, stable, trustworthy before we make a move like that, and it just so happened that the stars aligned for us, and we were able to make that move. So we’ve been live for a little over a year now, but we were ultimately able to take our entire Tyler environment, move it to the cloud, get it to the latest versions, and get to a place where we are confident, stable, secure, and no longer having to do all of those manual updates and, you know, how but we used to have to work very closely with the Tyler support team on an almost daily basis for patches and fixes and server outages that were nobody’s fault but the age of the devices. Yeah. And now we’re in a place where none that happens anymore. Things are just taken care of for us.
Josh Henderson: That’s why we’re big advocates for the cloud, obviously.
But, you know, and you basically outlined it there as to why we are such big advocates for it. So, thank you for outlining that. As you kind of looked deeper into your processes, though, how were manual workflows, legacy infrastructure, and limited staff impacting efficiency, risk, service delivery, and things like that?
Mike Cook: So, you know, it’s one of the challenges that we’re still struggling a little bit with today. I mentioned that we implemented in 2005 and went live in 2006, and I almost feel like there are certain workflows, certain departments, certain things that even we’re still doing in the system today are the same workflow that we did so long ago. So, I suppose what I’m getting at here is that as Tyler matured, the city did not adopt those newer workflows along with it. So, we are doing entirely paper based invoice processing and payment processing right now.
You can email us an invoice. You can physically mail us an invoice. A human will then scan that manual into the system and then manually enter the data in off of that. We then, you know, go through an approval process and we physically print and mail a check.
And, you know, those are the sorts of processes that we are still continuing to modernize now that now that we’ve got the back end infrastructure in a place where it needs to be. We’re now taking a look at those day-to-day processes that are our customers. My IT customers, you know my payroll department, my finance department, HR department can now take advantage of. So, a lot of manual processes that we have since modernized and we’re really looking forward to some of the other Tyler products that are now coming out.
Things like vendor self-service that are that are now available, vendor access that now have AI built in that can actually, you know, do the screen scrape on the invoices and pull the data off of it for you so we’re no longer doing that manually.
Those are the sorts of things that we’re looking forward to implementing very soon here.
Josh Henderson: That’s great. And now, you know, from an IT perspective, we hear often about, you know, security, reliability, compliance, you know, stuff like that as being very critical elements of it all. How has the cloud migration improved cybersecurity and system stability in your in your view?
Mike Cook: So, we definitely had some nail biters in our in our old environment. So, it wasn’t uncommon for us to have a relatively significant, you know, servers down or application is down issue once a month, I would say.
And part of the challenge with that is it would always happen on a weekend. It would always be Tyler’s support team for on-premises implementations. It opens at five o’clock in the morning. It would always be my one ERP person waking up at five AM to call the folks on the East Coast to get in the queue to have somebody jump under our environment.
It was cumbersome. It was tiring. You know, there are multiple days where, you know, the city’s kind of at a standstill from an administrative perspective when your ERP is down. So, you know, there are multiple days where we are working into the late morning, early afternoon doing resolutions, and it, you know, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was, you know, the age of the software we had, the age of the servers that we had. And so, with us now being on the cloud, the reliability is there.
And, you know, to speak from a cybersecurity perspective, as I mentioned before, we were relying on not just a dated legacy version of the Tyler application, but a day dated version of Windows Server that the servers were running on. We were on a dated version of our antivirus because they couldn’t, you know, run the most modern things. We were on a dated version of SQL Server. And because all that got lifted and shifted, you know, the responsibility for maintaining that is no longer on the city. It’s the Tyler folks doing it.
And thus, those updates come automatically, and that’s just a concern we don’t have anymore.
Josh Henderson: Sounds like weekends are more restful now than they once were.
Mike Cook: I’ve got other things that I bite my nails about on Sunday nights.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. The Sunday scaries are real. We can’t avoid those. So, let’s talk about, you know, the limited staff at Redondo Beach within the IT department at least and a single ERP administrator. How has modernization allowed your team to focus on process improvement instead of sort of make doing that maintenance work nonstop?
Mike Cook: So, the time that was spent, you know, doing troubleshooting on, you know, unplanned outages that we had in the old environment is, you know, purely now available for us to modernize things. We’ve been PACE customers for a very long time, and we have also taken advantage of the Tyler investment assessments that are available to us. Right. So, we recently completed our finance investment assessment just a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got our HR investment assessment scheduled, and we are really looking forward to walking out with a concrete list of these are the ten major workflow and system changes that we want to do to modernize things for all of our customers.
And we’re going to start taking a look at prioritizing those and starting to do implementation projects on everything. So, the time that was spent keeping the old system alive and going and, you know, testing updates and just, you know, making it work for our basic needs is now being spent on modernizing and really analyzing where we want to go from a from an automation and workflow perspective.
Josh Henderson: We love to hear we love to hear that because those assessments, I think, are a real big pride point here at Tyler. So that’s great to hear that you’re undergoing those. Looking at the broader picture, how is the phased approach that Rodano Beach took? So, this idea of walk before running, right, where it’s like you’re not overnight flipping a switch, but it’s a phased out approach.
How has that prepared, Redondo Beach, for future process automation or AI enabled capabilities in your view?
Mike Cook: So, I feel like that’s a very natural progression. Now we you absolutely need to walk before you run.
We were in a state where our current environment was no longer sustainable, so fixing the infrastructure piece of it was key. The fact that we also did the version upgrade to current as part of it really put us in a place where we can start looking at implementing some more of these more modern workflows. Some of these workflows that I’m talking about are features that have been in the product for years that we had simply not implemented at our city. So now we’ve got the door open for that, and I feel like that’s our current we need to we need to walk before we run gate is, you know, we need to get the automation that’s currently available to us in place so that as Tyler adds more and more AI features into platform, we can start taking advantage of them.
At the moment, several of the proposed AI features are just simply not available to us because we’re not using that particular module or feature. So Sure. We are working with our departments to take that next step to get their workflows current now that the environment is current so that we can then look forward to AI.
Josh Henderson: Stay tuned. We’ll be right back with more of the Tyler Tech Podcast.
The National Association of State CIOs – or NASCIO – has released its top ten priorities for 2026, and they’re as relevant as ever. AI at number one for the first time, cybersecurity is holding strong, and the focus doesn’t stop there. Cloud, modernization, accessibility, data, and more are all top of mind for state CIOs.
Jade Champion: And Tyler has a companion to that list, the state CIO 2026 Priorities Playbook, to help agencies take the next step from strategy to execution.
Josh Henderson: You’ll find real case studies, honest insight into where progress stalls, and practical first steps across all ten priorities.
Jade Champion: It’s free, it’s actionable, and it’s ready for you right now in the show notes.
Josh Henderson: Go download the State CIO 2026 Priorities Playbook and start turning priorities into progress.
Jade Champion: Now let’s get back to the Tyler Tech Podcast.
Josh Henderson: I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the community and culture, being such an important aspect of Redondo Beach as well. But how has modernization helped the city maintain its unique character while still improving that operational performance?
Mike Cook: If you’re unfamiliar with it, you should go to Redondo Beach. It’s really cool. Redondo Beach you know, if when you think about the beach cities in Southern California, you think about Santa Monica, it’s, you know, very, very affluent, you know, tons of money have been put into the waterfront.
They have, you know, they have the nostalgic pier that’s down there. You look at Manhattan Beach; Manhattan Beach is on the beach covered in fifteen to twenty million dollar houses. That’s what lines the beach. Redondo Beach has completely and totally preserved its charm from fifty, sixty years ago.
So, our waterfront has our iconic pier. It is a triangular shaped pier that you can literally walk circles on if you like. We have our international boardwalk, which is down at the waterfront. We have an artificial seaside lagoon, which is a great place for families to go.
We’ve got, you know, the King Harbor Yacht Club. We’ve got the King Harbor down there. We, you know, we are it. The other thing that’s very cool about the city is that we actually have a harbor patrol facility that is integrated with the city’s fire department that that runs out of Renato Beach Harbor as well.
Okay. So, you know, it’s not lined with mega mansions. It’s got its charm. It’s got its nostalgia.
And, you know, that well, that’s, you know, that’s a physical thing that you see when you drive around the city. It’s like that is preserved in the people that work for the city, and our elected officials have a very strong sense of ownership and home and historical preservation that translates into the work that we do. It’s very interesting. So, we are in the midst of doing a large document digitization project, an electronic workflow modernization process for bigger than just Tyler to cross all of our departments.
We’re going down to our old vaults, and we’ve got building permits from nineteen o eight, handwritten on index cards. We’ve got cutouts of newspapers of mayoral proclamations that happened in the in the fifties. Wow. We have all these cool, nostalgic things preserved that we are now developing modern workflows and digitization methods to preserve and keep around and keep available for the public for years to come.
Josh Henderson: Yeah. Sounds like a bit of a domino effect Yeah. Happening. You see that modernization happening, and it kind of works its way across the board.
Really, really cool. I’m going to have to find my way to Redondo Beach at some point in the future. Now to wrap things up, for other municipalities managing complex operations, limited resources, what advice would you give them when thinking about cloud migration and modernizing critical systems?
Mike Cook: That’s an interesting one. So, one thing that I’ve I’m being very cautious about is with AI becoming the buzzword that it is in the last couple of years, the thing that I’m being very cautious about is you don’t just want to go get some of that AI stuff. You need to have concrete business deliverables, tasks, goals that you are trying to accomplish and then go try to take a look at the technologies that are out there. I mean, you can walk around a conference like this.
Every single booth that you stop at is going to have some form of AI that they’re looking to sell you. Yeah, and it’s really important to come up with your strategy based on your business needs as opposed to allowing the tools wag the dog. Yeah, my counterparts, the department heads in other areas, they’re attending similar conferences as well. They’re relative to their own environment, and they’ve got their vendor fairs that have twenty different vendors that have technologies that you’re trying to sell you, and it’s very easy to fall down the path of falling in love with a single technology that, you know, performs a single purpose or task without thinking about the big picture.
So, you know the Tyler’s got a building and planning permit module that is available to us. We have a third party software that that does that. Yeah, and while you’re likely never going to get all of your counterparts to agree to have everything live in one ecosystem, a conscious decision needs to be discussed and made when you are looking at software products of do the benefits of going down another path outweigh the benefits of having something that’s native and integrated into your ERP platform? And I find that a lot of the things that we are troubleshooting, especially on the financial side, are typically going to be integrations with third party products. Oftentimes, party products where Tyler has a solution available that we don’t have implemented.
Josh Henderson: So, kind of understanding where you’re at, assessing and understanding, do we need that connected system in place? How do we modernize this thoughtfully?
Mike Cook: And just thinking about how it’s going to work in the big picture with the rest of your enterprise systems.
Josh Henderson: Yep. That’s great advice. Mike, thank you so much for being here, and, again, congrats on the TEA win. Thank you. So well deserved. And, yeah, was so great to hear a little bit more about Redondo Beach and the and the work being done there.
Mike Cook: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Josh Henderson: As we heard today, modernization in government isn’t just about moving to the cloud. It’s about creating the foundation that allows everything else to improve. For the city of Redondo Beach, California, that meant shifting from aging infrastructure and heavily manual processes to a stable, secure cloud environment that reduces downtime risk and frees up a small IT team to focus on innovation instead of maintenance.
Mike shared how that change has already improved reliability and opened the door for rethinking long standing workflows, many of which are now being modernized for the first time in years. With that foundation in place, the city is now better positioned to take advantage of automation, investment assessments, and emerging AI capabilities in a more intentional way.
If you’d like to learn more about the solutions discussed in this episode, check out the show notes for additional resources. We’d also love to hear your feedback. Fill out the listener survey linked in the notes or reach out anytime at podcast@tylertech.com. And be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show so you never miss an episode. For Tyler Technologies, I’m Josh Henderson. Thanks for listening to the Tyler Tech Podcast.