Could FI$Cal someday become the state government's largest provider of Software as a Service?
Those leading the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) have talked about that possibility as the $910 million project modernizing California's budgeting and accounting systems continues to mature and evolve.
The vision among internal staff and executives is that FI$Cal itself isn't just a tech project — it's a multi-tenant SaaS offering that could eventually become a centralized services platform for functions beyond finance, FI$Cal CIO Subbarao Mupparaju during his presentation at the Techwire Industry Briefing this week.
FI$Cal officially became a state department of its own in July. Sixty state departments are now using FI$Cal for accounting, and dozens more will be onboarding during the next two years. All state departments are now using FI$Cal for budgeting.
"We have the infrastructure, we have the staff, we have a reach to all the [other] state departments, and that's the unique strength that we have. How do we build upon that? Do we have to limit ourselves to accounting, procurement and budgeting solutions as Software as a Service? Can we expand on this?" Mupparaju said about the ideas FI$Cal is considering.
If a service is beneficial to the state, FI$Cal would want to provide it, Mupparaju said.
FI$Cal has projects in the planning stage that Mupparaju said other departments possibly could use as a service. One is a public transparency website that FI$Cal will use to present financial data; it will be designed as a multi-tenant platform so that other departments could use it. FI$Cal also is building a repository to store data from legacy systems, which departments potentially could use to store other types of data.
And now that the Department of FI$Cal officially formed last month, the department needs IT solutions for human resources, labor and time. Those solutions also could become shared solutions, Mupparaju said.
There are no concrete plans at this time for extending SaaS or shared services, but that's the vision, he said.
"Enterprise thinking is a big thing in FI$Cal. Pretty much anything that we do we are looking from a statewide point of view," Mupparaju said.
