The California Coastal Commission was formed in 1972 to help preserve the state’s coastal resources. The commission’s CIO, Alfred Wanger, spoke with Techwire about the technology it uses to support its mission. The commission has an overall budget of $22 million.
Techwire: What is your budget?
Alfred Wanger: I can say in regards to the budget, we don’t have a specific line-item IT budget. Most of our facility operations are kind of embedded in our overall operations budget and we have interagency agreements with the Natural Resources Department and Department of Water Resources that provides data center access and Internet provisions.
TW: What tech projects is the Coastal Commission working on?
AW: There are a couple things we’re doing that are mandatory, that all the agencies are doing. We are in the midst of — just completed a migration to the new state email system, provisioned by Microsoft. They did kind of an email upgrade for the state, so all the agencies had to migrate from one platform to the other. It’s a cloud-based email system. We’re in the throes of completing that migration, with the challenges that come with that, which are they charge more for less and don’t give us any money to pay for those services — which is probably a recurring theme you’re going to hear from other agencies. They have a lot of requirements, they keep heaping them on us and aren’t giving us additional monies to cover those.
The agency has historically been self-hosted on email and network services. As you’re probably aware, the state is making a strong move to cloud-based services for data services, data storage and email, so we’re in that mix of moving towards those cloud-based systems. I just got off the phone today to find out what the new SharePoint system is. It’s a collaborative suite that our agency began to use a few years ago, in the initial Microsoft statewide offering. We have a small team — for an agency of about 165 staff in six offices, we only have four people in our IT shop, plus a Web developer and a database administrator. They’re always hopping and to do the kinds of analysis, planning and research for system changes, requires additional capacity beyond being fully booked on a day-to-day basis. The state has also recently put out a new statewide policy on cloud-based usage for any future purchases. We used to have a lot of on-premises servers that we manage for our network. We have distributed users among our six offices but now the state is asking us to change the technology platform. We’re trying to understand the new requirements, and this is the common lament of small agencies: that we just don’t have the extra time and capacity to really figure these things out.
TW: Anything specific to the agency?
AW: The other two or three things that we are working on is a couple of years ago, we rolled in a commercial off-the-shelf data system called Accela. The vendor helped us set up a new data system, we consolidated about 14 separate, home-grown old Access-based databases into a single Web-accessible database for our internal use that handles all of our record creation, data tracking for our permit programs and federal programs. That also integrated with being able to attach documents to records; it does mapping and GIS services for staff as well. We are in the process of developing a public portal to expose most of the data to the public; it is public record. We are in the process of trying to stand up the infrastructure. We’re working through that and we’re seeing gaps in data. Reconciling and cleaning up data is not a insignificant effort. I’m hoping later this year, we’re going to be rolling that out to the public.
We’re also doing a significant upgrade of our Web presence. There are a couple Web applications that we’ve put up, one called Your Coast. People can find out all of the current information on public access sites. I think there’s between 13,000 and 15,000 locations up and down the coast. A couple of years ago they agreed to create a phone app that would be a companion to this Web-based information.
TW: What are the timelines for those projects?
AW: I would expect the mobile phone app to be out in the next six months for sure. The coastal management system, our permit tracking system, will be out in the next six to 12 months.
TW: What does the future tech of the commission look like?
AW: We’re trying to look at where the state is trying to lead everyone in terms of cloud-based systems and services. We have an internal discussion going with our technology team to try and look ahead. Keeping up with the pace with technology is a challenge, but part of our strategic planning is to look at where technology is heading. There’s tremendous opportunity here on engaging with the public on data and services. We think that’s especially important as we look at the challenges of sea-level rise.
TW: What are the commission’s goals?
AW: Hopefully, trying to keep us up to date and to do the best we can to provide the best resources and information we can. But living at the speed of light, just understanding what services that are out there that would be useful is a challenge.
