The officials examined their departments’ hurdles during COVID and offered advice to colleagues in a recent conversation with Alan Cox, executive vice president of Techwire parent e.Republic and publisher of Techwire and its sister publication, Government Technology. Joining the discussion were Barney Gomez, vice chancellor for Digital Innovation and Infrastructure for the California Community Colleges (CCC) Chancellor’s Office; Subbarao Mupparaju, CIO and deputy director of the Department of Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal); and Jason Piccione, deputy director of the Office of Information Services in the state Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA). Among the takeaways:
- Three “Vs” — virtualization, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and VPN — were crucial for CCC, its vice chancellor said Dec. 4 during Techwire’s virtual “State of Technology – CA Industry Forum.” VoIP allowed the system of 116 community colleges to “be more agile and nimble” with its voicemail traffic, telephone calls and call forwarding and call finding. A product from Labster enabled the agency to go virtual with Career Technical Education Classes in subjects such as biology, physics, anthropology and chemistry. And VPN was a big help in securitizing the agency’s colleges, Gomez said, adding: “Without the use of a VPN environment, you’re going to be very challenged and you’re going to be lucky if you don’t get caught up in that kind of a situation.”
- Going forward, he said, the CCC will be implementing “a lot more technology.” It’s standing up a document management solution and is using workflow tools “to basically help with the day-to-day business operations of getting contracts through, and managing those contracts and moving things quicker than we could do if we were in the office … .”
- Getting off paper — quickly migrating paper-based back-office processes — to digital was vital, even though FI$Cal, which began as a project to build its new system, has been a department for less than five years, its CIO said. Along with transitioning about 200 people to telework, FI$Cal also had to shift its contact center from being based on physical forms to digital, ultimately deploying a solution quickly that would enable its customers to still reach it.
“How do you do the things that you normally do in our office settings in this new physical world without deteriorating customer service, employee productivity, without missing any of the planned activities?” Mupparaju said, describing that as the department’s big issue it had to address in 2020 as it continued operations virtually. - Telework has driven FI$Cal’s priority areas, Mupparaju said, indicating the agency has had to be “more aggressive in adopting cloud solutions” that will enable staff to provide services remotely. Back-end IT, he said, has proven “somewhat unpredictable,” as “sometimes we cannot avoid needing the hands and eyes on the equipment.” A network upgrade, he said by way of example, might require recabling and necessitate sending people out to data centers — not an easy task in a time when COVID-19 shutdowns are shuttering state offices.
- DCA needed and continues to need “to align or realign our person-centric focus,” from two perspectives, its CIO said. On its civic engagement side, the department needs to meet residents wherever they are. That includes a variety of payment types such as PayPal and multiple devices, Piccione said, pointing out that cellphones are the “sole compute device” for many people. And with respect to the department’s roughly 4,000 staffers, officials must continue to assess their equipment and comfort levels for telework as well as their digital competency with technology, tools and equipment.
“The reality is we took that challenge,” Piccione said, “we met it and we were productive.”
