The California Department of Conservation (DOC) has a budget of $129 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year.
The DOC “manages programs in the areas of (1) geology, seismology, and mineral resources; (2) oil, gas, and geothermal resources; and (3) agricultural and open‑space land,” according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) budget analysis documents. It is one of the divisions under the Natural Resources Agency.
As one of the state’s oldest departments, the DOC has documents dating back to at least 1880, many of which come from the California Geological Survey. The department has been making an effort to digitize those and current documents.
“We did not complete our hard copy inventory; however, we did successfully award a vendor to start our ECM (enterprise content management) planning effort, which will start in early January 2018,” department CIO Catherine Kendall wrote in an email to Techwire.
The department is also responsible for tracking oil and gas wells throughout the state. In order to do so and fall in line with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Safe Drinking Water Act, the department is building out a statewide well tracking system, with a LAO-recommended budget of $21.1 million for the 2017-18 part of the system’s development. A total of $45 million is proposed over five years for the project.
The department also runs farmland mapping, monitoring and conservation programs. Conservation districts throughout the state are managed by the department, as well as the state Geological Survey.
Kendall also wrote that the following projects were successful in 2017:
- Targeted a 40 percent reduction in technical debt and achieved a 55 percent reduction in technical debt and a 950 percent increase in technical assets
- Deployed Microsoft Office 365 successfully, including the replacement and upgrade of the DOC Intranet page "DOC Insider," which now runs on SharePoint online
- Implemented DOC’s first big data and applied analytics lab, called "3P Labs" (Predict, Prevent, Protect), which received an Innovation Excellence Award in Data Management and an Innovation Excellence Finalist in Data Analytics from Oracle at 2017 Open World
- Implemented electronic signatures, which will be deployed throughout DOC in 2018 to reduce paper footprint
- Deployed an Information Technology Services Management (ITSM) tool that will provide a fully integrated view of IT operations including incident/problem, change, project management, asset management, and dashboarding
- Certified 13 IT resources and nine program resources as Certified Scrum Masters for agile software development
- Implemented voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) for field/district offices
Director, California Department of Conservation – David Bunn
Contact info: webmaster@consrv.ca.gov
Deputy Director, Office of Information Services – Catherine Kendall
Contact info: CIO@conservation.ca.gov (916) 445-0692
Following is a conversation with Kendall at the California Tech Forum last fall:
