As California continues to grapple with how to utilize cloud computing and software-as-a-service in government, one of the state’s smaller IT shops is showing how it’s done.
The California Conservation Corps (CCC) took home a 2014 NASCIO State IT Recognition Award at a ceremony Monday evening in Nashville for its speedy implementation of an online recruitment system built on the Salesforce platform, which is Software as a Service (SaaS). The CCC bested finalists from Connecticut and Missouri in the "Fast Track Solutions" category.
"The success of this was that it was a short project," said Rita Gass, CIO of the California Conservation Corps.
The CCC also needed a solution that was cost effective — the budget was only $100,000. Custom software or an off-the-shelf solution both were too expensive, so the Corps opted to bring in Jobscience, a small business, to help with the development and implementation, and ultimately manage the service. The one-time cost was $52,000 and a five-year subscription to the Salesforce cloud platform will cost $158,000.
Another factor was time. With only nine IT personnel on staff last year, CCC couldn’t afford to tie up their work schedule. The project couldn’t take longer than six months; it gone done in early 2014, in just four months.
Gass said the new system is bringing in more applications and is more efficient for CCC staff. Two old on-premises legacy systems, built in 1989, were written in the Clipper programming language and ran on an Advantage database. Applicants had to travel to a CCC office and fill out a paper form, and then a CCC recruiter would manually enter the data. It was time consuming.
"Sometimes parents had to take their kids to apply, so it was hard for us to reach out to young adults," Gass said.
Because the new Corpsmember Recruiting System (CoRe) is online and it’s easier to use, CCC has seen a big spike in the number of applications it receives. Before the new system, about 50 per month came in; now there are upward of 800 monthly. The new solution also has freed up CCC recruiters to do more outreach with prospective candidates instead of spending time on data entry.
The new system also provides reporting capabilities, Gass said. Managers can now run queries on where applicants are and are not coming from. If there are only a few applicants coming from a particular city, the CCC is now able to target its efforts based on the data.
Gass noted the Corps might well be the smallest IT organization from California state government to receive an award from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. Cloud computing is a natural fit given the CCC’s limited resources, she said.
"Since we are a very small IT shop, we can’t just grab the data and migrate to another provider. We looked for a company that is very stable and is proven," Gass said.
As is tradition at NASCIO, each award recipient makes a video highlighting their project:
