Department of Consumer Affairs Profile
Editor’s note: Following is one in an ongoing series of profiles of the largest California state government agencies.
The California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) has a budget of $655 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year, and the information services budget was allocated $47.2 million of that.
The DCA is one of eight entities under the state of California’s Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency, and acts as the state’s resource center for consumers and licensees. Recently, the DCA completed the BreEZe project, which replaced legacy licensing and enforcement platforms with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system. “After well-documented challenges with the first release of the application,” said DCA CIO, Jason Piccione, “the project team pivoted expertly and two and half years later, landed a much-improved second release.” That included increased organizational management, identifying specific program needs and more training.
In early October of 2017, the DCA released “DCA Search,” a search platform for California citizens looking for information on licensed professionals. Currently the platform covers 18 of DCA’s regulatory entities, with the remainder expected to be available by summer 2018.
DCA Search was primarily designed, developed and implemented by DCA staff, said Piccione. “The expertise that we have grown throughout the IT shop at DCA is impressive,” he said. “DCA needed to jump into the deep-end of continuous integration and continuous delivery, and we did.”
The DCA Search platform uses DevOps concepts and tools like Docker, Jenkins, GIT, Bugzilla, SonarQube, Selenium, Taurus, Maven, Splunk, F5 LTM and Artifactory, Piccione says. “On the back-end, we have Oracle RAC on RedHat Linux running on VMWare.” Not only is the project a single application, but Piccione believes it will serve as a framework for new developments and services offered to the public by DCA for many years to come. “As I consider the future, this framework will allow us to implement requirements much faster,” he said.
Much of the next six to 18 months will be centered around the DCA’s cybersecurity posture, Piccione said. DCA will be looking at cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions and making sure certain staff resources can support security operations.
“Over the past year we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the need for securing digital assets beyond our perimeter,” he said. “We’ve made the decision to invest in a CASB solution which will provide us with the required added security. Implementing a CASB solution helps to fill many of the gaps that exist surrounding compliance, threat detection and general use of cloud applications across multiple different services.”
Director, California Department of Consumer Affairs – Dean R. Grafilo
Contact info: dca@dca.ca.gov (800) 952-5210
Deputy Director, Office of Information Services – Jason Piccione
Contact info: Jason.Piccione@dca.ca.gov
