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3 Years of Iterations Offer Lessons from Dept. of Insurance

The California Department of Insurance has just entered the third year of its menu modernization project.

The Department of Insurance has just entered the third year of its menu modernization project. Seventeen of the 21 sub-projects are complete, David Noronha, CIO of the department, told Techwire.

“The initial project was that all of our older systems were built in Oracle Forms,” Noronha said.

Most of the case management and reporting systems, along with two portals, are built on Oracle Forms, which Oracle has been attempting to sunset for almost seven years, according to Noronha. Some of the legacy systems are more than 20 years old.

The effort was originally projected to cost $21 million, but as workers' salaries increase, the project now costs $21.4 million. The department is servicing its own rollout as it builds all new software for most of the 21 subsystems. Several of the subsystems have been replaced with apps to streamline processing.

“It is, I would say, a modified agile [project]; most of the sub-projects go through three kinds of phases. The phases are basically an alpha, beta and final. … So it’s an iterative process, but they’re not 10 iterations; most of them are three iterations,” Noronha said.

Handling the rollout in-house helped reduce the timeline of the project by skipping the RFP process and allowed the team to adapt as the business changed during the rollout, Noronha said. However, too much adaption can risk drawing the project out indefinitely as “change after change” is made. The project is scheduled to be completed by next year. 

Noronha said the biggest success so far is the consumer-facing portal that allows consumers to file complaints and staff to respond, all online.

Kayla Nick-Kearney was a staff writer for Techwire from March 2017 through January 2019.