In recent developments, California has migrated its open data portal to a new provider; met a financial goal with nearly two dozen large IT projects; and is working with the 4-Core partners to keep the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC) up to date, state CIO Amy Tong told many of the event’s more than 400 attendees during her opening remarks Monday. Among the takeaways:
• The open data portal data.ca.gov, sponsored by the Government Operations Agency (GovOps) and maintained by the California Department of Technology (CDT), has migrated to OpenGov for data storage, Tong told the audience, adding: “… there are over 2,000 data sets … already on our portal as well as over 1,000 GIS data sets that are on our portal. That represents about 45 organizations in the executive branch, and that number continues to grow.”
In an interview with Techwire, Jason Carian, a strategic account executive with OpenGov, said the company engaged in a pilot with CDT during the latter part of the 2018-2019 fiscal year, then accomplished the migration early in the 2019-2020 fiscal year, which began July 1. OpenGov, Carian said, is able to work not just with CDT and GovOps, but with other state agencies whose data is hosted on the portal.
“The nice thing about OpenGov, and the way our technology works is, all these portals federate with one another, meaning it kind of creates a huge mesh network of data portals,” Carian said, referring to the connection between data.ca.gov and portals at other departments. OpenGov takes part in the state’s Software Licensing Program (SLP) that’s administered by the Department of General Services’ Procurement Division.
• The four-stage Project Approval Lifecycle (PAL) has helped 20 “large initiative” IT projects stay under a 10 percent budget variance during the past three years, Tong said. Projects that fail to stay within that 10 percent budget variance require a “special project report,” she said, noting, “those of you who are familiar with the public sector or have worked in the public sector, you know that is a way to reset the project.” But in those 20 cases, a special project report hasn’t been necessary.
“It’s really a planning mindset, getting prepared up front, and then the planning also includes planning for contingency, right? Because we know things don’t go smooth, so how do you recover quickly? With a good contingency plan. That’s what gets you to the final outcome,” Tong told Techwire afterward.
• CDT is working with the other three 4-Core partners — the California Highway Patrol, the California Military Department and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) — to “push for what is called a California Cybersecurity Integration Center 2.0,” Tong said, promising more details in October, which is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. In an interview, she characterized the push as more about “continuous improvement.”
“We know that in order to keep up with all of the adversaries and everything else in cybersecurity, we have to continue to challenge ourselves. It’s just a way of identifying the next generation of data intelligence, threat analysis, event prevention. That’s what I meant. [There are a] lot more proactive measures and intelligence behind it,” Tong said.
• The state continues its move to cloud, but has “changed from a cloud-first policy to a cloud-smart policy,” the CIO said. A state chief enterprise architect, she said, is working with vendors and state entities in a work group to create the agency’s first cloud-smart strategy playbook.
Being “cloud smart” acknowledges that “every scenario is different” and that one size doesn’t fit all in terms of cloud solutions, Tong said, comparing it to football and “ … having different plays to fit different scenarios so that you can apply exactly what will work for your department.”
