The report, released late Friday afternoon by the California Department of Technology, is front-loaded with graphics illustrating all sorts of data, many of which support the report’s theme that the state is making steady gains in its IT evolution.
The report serves as a year in review for CDT, breaking down the state’s IT-related efforts into four main areas: “Improving Public Safety and the Security of Sensitive Information Assets,” “Enabling Successful Project Establishment and Delivery,” “Fostering a Dynamic and Unified Technology Workforce,” and “Providing Efficient and Effective Government Services Through Innovation.”
One of the areas most affecting vendors is is related to project delivery, which under past systems had “lacked effective planning,” the report acknowledges. It touts the continued streamlining of Project Approval Lifecycle (PAL 3.0), a process that “promotes comprehensive, upfront planning to ensure greater focus on business needs, improving project experiences and outcomes while producing more accurate cost and schedule estimates.”
And it gets specific about the gains of PAL 3.0: “Of the 15 projects that have completed all four stage/gates of PAL to date,” the report says, “the median time to complete the process was 13 months, significantly faster than the prior Feasibility Study Report (FSR) process that took an average of 24 months to complete. Additionally, compared to the historic average, two-thirds of FSR-approved projects had schedule or cost overruns in excess of 10 percent. Projects that have completed planning using PAL have not had any schedule or cost overruns or variances in excess of 10 percent.”
In each of the report’s four areas, individual agencies and departments are cited for how they’re incorporating new programs and practices to improve government. Some samples:
- In the area of procurement, the report has this to say: “Some of the initiatives include establishing a single enterprise cloud service contract specifically for the purchase of infrastructure, platform and software. This will allow departments to adopt safer cloud services that will improve the state’s overall cybersecurity posture. Another initiative includes established a Pre-Qualified Vendor Pool for services that leverage the agile methodology — an inclusive and fast-reacting application development process. Additionally, this CDT/ DGS partnership has succeeded in streamlining acquisitions for IT projects by utilizing leveraged procurement agreements rather than the lengthy Request for Proposal (RFP) process.”
- “… CDT expanded its cybersecurity risk management services through a statewide contract administered by the Department of General Services (DGS) to include the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate as a critical component of its cloud services.” This component is available to all state agencies and departments, as well as to California cities and counties.
- Email security and consistency has been upgraded: “CDT has released new statewide email security policies and migrated 76 state entities — almost 200,000 mailboxes — off-premises to Microsoft’s Office 365 Exchange Online Protection solution in California’s government cloud.”
- GovOps and the California Department of Human Resources oversaw the consolidation of 36 state IT employee job classifications down to nine service-wide classifications. “This modernization of the state’s decade-old IT classification system — now offering greater clarity about job qualifications and opportunities — improved California’s ability to attract and retain those highly sought employees who possess essential technical skills,” the report says.
Digital transformation of state government has yielded some notable successes, the report says, ensuring that California “has the most cutting-edge products available (e.g., open source development, open data, web development, artificial intelligence, blockchain, etc.) organized in a manner that allows any organization within the state to build, test and prove the value of digital services concepts.”
That includes four areas that have garnered headlines over the year, for better or for worse:
- Cannabis Licensing & Regulation: The report notes that CDT worked with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the Department of Consumer Affairs, and the Department of Public Health on licensing for commercial cannabis sales, implementing its system in December 2017. (The state Legislative Analyst's Office says tax revenue from cannabis has fallen far short of state predictions, for reasons unrelated to technology.)
- Child Welfare Digital Services: “At the request of the California Health and Human Services Agency, CDT has engaged with the project team to establish an overall product and platform strategy and accelerate the agile software delivery pipeline.” CWDS, which has served as a vanguard in the state’s shift to agile development, delivered its first product statewide in September.
- In July, the first cloud-based enterprise service and learning management platforms were offered to departments as a result of a collaboration among GovOps, CDT, the State Controller’s Office, CalHR, the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal), and the State Personnel Board.
- Mentioned last in this section of the report was Motor Voter, the problem-plagued program designed to automatically register customers at the Department of Motor Vehicles to vote. CDT worked with the DMV, the Office of the Secretary of State, and the California Transportation Agency to “develop digital solutions to modernize the process for applying for driver licenses and ID cards and implement automatic voter registration of all eligible DMV customers.” The program has been marked by challenges and administrative errors at the DMV that affected thousands of customers’ voting records and sparked an ongoing investigation by the secretary of state into whether non-citizens had been allowed to vote.
