At convention centers and conference rooms around California, technology entrepreneurs and state officials are imagining a government that functions better, works faster and feels friendlier to those who depend on it.
Open data fests, hackathons and “government transformation” forums have become ripe spawning grounds for a new kind of thinking about how California delivers services and information, and protects and interacts with its constituents. Can digital technologies that drive businesses like Uber, Amazon and Groupon be used to streamline state services? Innovators buzz with ideas — wearable devices that use “augmented reality” to put essential information at the fingertips of state workers in the field; sensors that automatically tell transit workers about road hazards; data portals that give open access to statistics on everything from potential health epidemics to county-by-county highway traffic congestion delays.
But while opportunities for innovation abound in California state government, their implementation is fraught with challenges. Experts cite funding constraints, aging technology infrastructure, an unprepared and under-resourced workforce, and a lack of political will as obstacles.
“The digital revolution is the biggest challenge facing government because it is a fundamentally different way of organizing government and of delivering government,” said Bill Eggers, public-sector research director at Deloitte and an internationally known authority on government reform. “It’s a different way of procuring services and delivering services that requires different sorts of people with different mindsets.”
Add to the mix California’s large size and a Legislature that has been slow to respond to the need for more functional, nimble government and the technology that needs to drive it, and the challenges are compounded.
Alex Castro, CEO at M Corp., a Sacramento-based technology solutions company that has done business with the state, said government needs to adapt to the pace of change in the marketplace to meet consumers’ expectations. And that, he said, will require fewer restrictions on what innovators can do and how they do it.
“Until the Legislature changes how government can behave from a functional perspective — and can give you more latitude in how you solve a problem — government will continue to be challenged in meeting the needs,” Castro said.
A Legislature slow to ease restrictions, however, has not stopped several state agencies and departments from making progress toward meeting those needs through the creative use of data and data analytics.
During the measles outbreak that started at Disneyland, for example, news reporters were able to access public immunization data from the state Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS)’s open data portal to produce stories about vaccination rates in California, allowing for independent analysis and providing clues as to how the outbreak occurred. The Fresno Bee similarly used CHHS data to chronicle high rates of asthma in the Central Valley as part of a series on chronic illness in 2015.
“If the data is out there at the beginning, and media are using it, the stories they write are more nuanced,” said Mike Wilkening, CHHS undersecretary and an enthusiastic supporter of open data portals. “It’s a better-informed dialog.”
Open data efforts also are underway at the Government Operations Agency, which recently made public data sets on water, transportation, the economy and demographics. Officials hope the portal fosters greater collaboration on efforts to preserve and enhance water, for example, or that it helps in the planning and management of California’s transportation systems.|
The State Controller’s Office, Franchise Tax Board, State Treasurer’s Office, Board of Equalization and Justice Department also have open data portals, and new data sets are being added to them as they become available.
To better combat fraud and abuse of the state’s Medi-Cal system — and save taxpayers money — the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is using data in a new way to track down providers who may be fraudulently billing the state for services they have not actually provided to beneficiaries.
Karen Johnson, DHCS chief deputy director, said the technology “gives us insight in terms of whether these providers are outliers, and that allows us to start doing development of cases before we actually go out in the field [to investigate further].”
In the past, the department analyzed paid claims data focusing on aberrant trends, looking for billing spikes or other unusual practices.
Today, using predictive analytics tools, the state can examine several data sets at a time including, for example, claims, business incorporation documents, incarceration records and billing practices, which may point to possible illegal activity such as money laundering, Johnson said.
“Our new analysis strives to identify networks, relationships,” said Bruce Lim, deputy director for the Audits and Investigations Division. “Once you look at everything holistically, the big picture, it can tell us we may have a bigger issue.”
The ability to catch bad actors with the intent to harm the public is also a top priority for the DMV. In March, the department announced plans to use data analytics software to catch car sellers and buyers who are trying to cheat the government by underreporting the sale price of a vehicle so that they pay less tax.
The DMV, which collects vast amounts of personal information from Californians every time they register a vehicle or apply for a driver’s license, also recently set up a Security Operations Center. The 24/7 operation utilizes big data and data mining tools to proactively monitor for trends and drill down to specific events that may represent a cyberthreat, such as ransomware.
“We are looking at potential exploits and our vulnerabilities,” said Sjon Woodlyn, assistant deputy director at the DMV. “We do extensive logging and perform analyses on those logs to
determine any sort of anomalies.”
As an example, he said, “we monitor communications and might find a new attempted connection from an internal computer system to unrecognized hosts in the Middle East, China or Ukraine. Because that new connection hasn’t occurred in the past, we need to take a closer look at it.”
Both government technology innovators and private-sector experts acknowledge that many of these efforts at the state level are modest and in their infancy. Abhi Nemani, who has worked with state officials on open data policies and now serves as the city of Sacramento’s interim chief innovation officer, sees California’s challenges as opportunities to capitalize on existing data and emerging technologies.
Nemani cited a project he worked on for San Mateo County, where food stamp eligibility was high but participation in the program low.
“We built a simple, beautiful and easy-to-use app called Ohana that allows residents to find social services through their mobile phones — text or Web,” he said. “State government has the opportunity to champion this kind of collaboration, encouraging cities to work together with their data, and even more, facilitating it through statewide resources and data to make innovation more scalable.”
Eggers said many cities, in particular, have demonstrated how government can use innovative technology. A program that electronically nudges people filing for unemployment insurance benefits to be honest in their reporting, for example, could reduce inaccurate payments and overall expenditures, he said. In another example, child welfare workers could be outfitted with wearable devices that instantly provide information about the worker’s surroundings, the client’s neighborhood and its crime rate, as well the family’s background and any of its prior encounters with government agencies.
M Corp.’s Castro said government must begin to work at the velocity of the lives of its constituents or risk clashes with people who are guided by private-sector principles
and performance expectations.
“To understand where government needs to go,” he said, “you have to look at day-to-day interactions in terms of how you work as a human being.”
This story is in the Summer 2016 issue of Techwire magazine.
