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Los Angeles Digital Summit: And the Winners Are ...

Government IT projects from across the greater Los Angeles area were recognized this week at the LA Digital Government Summit, a program in which peers nominate and choose the most outstanding projects.

Government IT projects from across the greater Los Angeles area were recognized this week at the LA Digital Government Summit, a program in which peers nominate and choose the most outstanding projects. 

The winners are:

Outstanding IT Project Award
Octavia Lab: Creativity Within Reach  
Los Angeles Public Library

Octavia Lab, named after award-winning science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, is a creative commons where state-of-the-art tools, technologies and training will offer patrons the opportunity to create, design, fabricate, produce and share their ideas and inspirations.

Octavia Lab benefits include: deliver on Strategic Plan goals that nurture student success; champion literacy and lifelong learning; contribute to L.A.’s economic growth and stimulate the imagination; and meet the objectives that establishes a creative commons and bridges the digital divide to offer patrons subject matter expertise in the training and use of state-of-the-art equipment, the design and fabrication of projects and the production of audio, digital and video content.

The Octavia Lab is a 2,630-square-foot facility that is a game changer for L.A.’s creative and business community of current and aspiring makers/builders, podcasters, filmmakers, musicians, and entrepreneurs. Lab equipment includes: audio visual editing equipment, analog to digital conversion of recorded video and sound equipment and software, CNC mill, a CNC embroidery machine and sewing machines, green screen, large format printer, laser cutter, music and sound mixing board, sewing machine, vinyl cutters, 3-D printer among other technologies, equipment and software. The Octavia Lab exposes people to these technological opportunities at minimal cost. The Octavia Lab democratizes access for people to use state-of-the-art and tried-and-true tools and practices to design, make, and build collaboratively.

Staff-led programs will help visitors create podcasts, digitize family memories to preserve for generations to come and experiment with equipment to bring your ideas to life. Octavia Lab resources and programs are free and open to the public by appointment.

Fleet Mobile App  
LA County Internal Services Department

The Internal Services Department (ISD) Fleet provides vehicle maintenance and repair services for about 5,000 vehicles and equipment deployed throughout the 4,084 square miles of LA County and belongs to approximately 30 county departments except for Fire, Sheriff and Public Works.

Due to the geographical size of LA County and the number of fleet customers (including 10,000 motor pool users), ISD identified the need for an application to allow users to readily access fleet info and make important reservations.

High-level objectives, with the development of this ISD Fleet App, included:

• Greater visibility and fleet information within customers' reach  
• Quick view of vehicles and related critical information
• Enhancing customer service and making it easier for customer departments to serve constituents
• Removing bottlenecks in fleet processes and increasing productivity
• Giving users ability to use GPS with a click of a button

Positive outcomes and successes included:
• Increase in departmental customer satisfaction
• Efficient way to reserve motor pool vehicles; reduced time to process and reserve vehicles 
• Customer awareness of vehicle status and services needs
• Increased compliance with vehicle maintenance requirements
• Direct fleet knowledge in the palm of their hand

While all of the benefits listed above show the value of this mobile app, staffers saw an unintended benefit during the catastrophic Woolsey Fire last year. When communications were compromised by the fire, LA County responders were able to use the fleet app to obtain much-needed information including locating the closest fueling station, driving directions and information on the available fuel types. Use of this app was made possible due to the iPhone GPS chip that operates without network connection.

HackLA — City of LA Bug Bounty  
ITA Information Security Office, City of Los Angeles

HackLA was the first city-run bug bounty program of its kind, allowing trusted hackers and security researchers to safely test city of Los Angeles websites for unknown security vulnerabilities. The ITA Security Office engaged HackerOne, a leading hacker-powered security platform, to identify and remediate vulnerabilities across some of the city’s most critical public-facing websites. From HackerOne’s community of over 200,000 hackers and researchers, 50 of the most trusted members were invited to earn monetary rewards for safely reporting unknown security threats to the city of Los Angeles.

HackLA resulted in 42 vulnerabilities being identified and remediated that had not been previously discovered through security tools or internal testing, nine of those represented great risk to the city of Los Angeles. The HackLA program also allowed the ITA Information Security Office to improve its cybersecurity defense strategy and incident response efforts with departments.

Integrated Work and Asset Management System
Tony Royster and Assistant GM Val Melloff
City of Los Angeles, Department of General Services

The city’s new Asset Management System revolutionizes the way the city manages its real estate portfolio. The integrated work management system provides easy, centralized access to information on over 8,800 owned and leased properties; 35,000 assets; 250 leases; and 70,000 annual corrective and preventive building maintenance work orders in a centralized location. The system replaces spreadsheets, several databases and a failing work order system. It includes mobile technology that transforms how the city allocates resources, improves productivity and provides services for decades to come. The project celebrates a four-year strategic partnership between Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Office of Budget and Innovation and the city’s General Services Department, which is responsible for managing facilities, equipment, supplies, maintenance and other support services.

City departments have the ability to assess the city’s inventory in support of the homelessness initiatives. Important data such as space usage and location details are accessible, helping staff identify vacant properties for potential homeless services and housing. Property developers can search and download information about how to purchase and develop city property, and groups engaged in public forums can query properties to schedule community rallies.
With this, the city is better equipped to make fiscally responsible decisions about property, leases and equipment assets.

LAFD Brush Clearance Vegetation Management System 3 (VMS3)
Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD)  

The development and implementation of an innovative software system and associated business process improvement used to manage the inspection and enforcement of brush clearance in the city’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone. The LAFD team created an innovative and truly transformational system that increased operational efficiency, accuracy, and timeliness of the inspection and enforcement of properties within LAFD’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, saving the city more than $700,000, improving service levels and greatly enhancing public safety.

The program has been a tremendous success by nearly every measure. Not only has the city increased the operational efficiency and saved a considerable amount of money, it also greatly enhanced public safety by completing these inspections and enforcement in a timely, safe and efficient manner. 

ShakeAlertLA Earthquake Early Warning Mobile App
City of Los Angeles
Information Technology Agency (ITA)

ShakeAlertLA sends alerts to users within Los Angeles County that an earthquake of greater than magnitude 5.0 or level IV intensity has been detected and that they may soon feel shaking. The app is available for Apple and Android devices and available in English and Spanish. You can also use this app to prepare for an earthquake, get details on recent earthquakes, and find help after an earthquake. This app is built on the ShakeAlert system developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (https://www.shakealert.org/)

Since its launch, the city’s app has picked up great interest from neighboring cities and counties. The Mayor’s Office of Public Safety (MOPS) is discussing with other agencies how to expand the reach of the app so that Californians in other regions can get get alerts from the app. The city’s Information Technology Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey and AT&T are working on making improvements and new enhancements based on feedback from the public. Southern California earthquakes, experienced in July, have triggered an even greater demand from officials and the public for expanding the app. As of July, the ShakeAlertLA mobile application has been downloaded over 670,000 times for iOS and Android devices.

ePlanLA
City of Los Angeles
Department of Building and Safety

ePlanLA allows residents, architects, and developers to apply for building permits and to submit building plans for review entirely online. It offers customers the convenience to manage and check the status of their projects online at any time, from anywhere. In addition, customers participating in the program save on printing costs and travel time to a city facility.

ePlanLA has met the customer business goal of providing them the ability to submit applications and plans electronically 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It saves them from having to drive to a Development Services Center and wait in line to apply for the permit types implemented in ePlanLA. It has reduced their need to print building plans and improved the overall efficiency and transparency of the plan review process by providing up-to-date status of their review.

The system was launched to the general public in late June 2019. The system has facilitated the review of those plans that have been submitted electronically. More permit processes will be added in future releases, which should increase utilization of the system by the public. For those that have used the system, the feedback has been positive.

MyVoiceLA
City of Los Angeles I-team
ITA and Personnel Department

MyVoiceLA is a Web application that allows all city of Los Angeles employees to report any experiences regarding workplace harassment and discrimination. This project is a collaboration between the L.A. Mayor’s Innovation Team, the city Personnel Department and ITA. MyVoiceLA was carefully designed with expert and community input to make users more comfortable with reporting. For instance, the application reduces barriers to reporting by allowing employees to submit reports anonymously, at any time, and from any location (e.g., away from the workplace).

Beyond helping employees to resolve their individual challenges, MyVoiceLA helps the city overall by centralizing its data on harassment and discrimination, allowing the Personnel Department to expand its analytics capabilities, more deeply understand working conditions, and implement more efficient business processes.

Since the website’s launch, the Personnel Department has seen an almost 200 percent increase in the number of complaints received year over year. Despite this increase, the city has maintained its record of quickly following up with complainants, with the majority of complainants contacted within five days, and 97 percent contacted within 10 days. These results are possible due to MyVoiceLA’s streamlining of this business process.

The system was designed iteratively to incorporate user feedback. Including survey responses and user feedback, the input of approximately 300 city employees was incorporated before the site was fully launched in September 2018.

Fire Performance Dashboards
City of Oxnard IT Department, GIS Division

This project created three Fire Department performance dashboards for National Fire Protection Association compliance and accreditation. Each of the three performance dashboards — medical turnout times, non-medical turnout times, and incident response time (from the moment of fire station being alerted to arriving on scene) — has a full set of filters that allow users to view data based on custom time range, fire shifts, incident type and location. The dashboards also include a built-in interactive webmap that allows users to see the spatial distribution of incidents, including which neighborhoods where they occurred. The dashboards are easy to navigate and automatically refresh with the latest data. The included data does not reveal any type of sensitive or personal information and is intended for public viewing. The dashboards are accessible from any Web browser, including mobile devices, and does not collect personal data.

The collaboration was between Oxnard's GIS Division and Fire Department.

Pasadena Water & Power Online Rebate Application
City of Pasadena

Pasadena Water & Power, a city-owned public utility, replaced a paper-based application with an online system to process rebates for customer purchases of qualifying efficient appliances and home products. The key benefit for is an easy to use online system with up-to-date information about products and models eligible for the rebate. In addition, the time to verify eligibility and process rebate checks has dramatically decreased by 70 percent, shaving off nearly six weeks of processing time and backlog. Prior to the online system, paper forms were completed and manually verified by utility staff.

With the new system, customer accounts are integrated into the rebate application, eligible products and models are updated daily from the Energy Star website, and application submissions can be completed in an intuitive and seamless interface. Back-end processing occurs through an electronic workflow. Aggregated annual energy efficiency reports, required by regulatory agencies, are now calculated automatically based on the information supplied throughout the process.

San Diego's Small Cell Availability Suite
City of San Diego

On Aug. 27, 2018, the Federal Communications Commission required municipalities to make available their assets for distribution of 5G equipment. The city’s permit issuance process had historically taken five to 10 months per assessment and now was required to award or decline in 60-90 days. Through innovative usage of GIS technology, San Diego met this target. Using ESRI’s WebAppBuilder and in-house GIS talent, the team generated:

1. An internal interactive mapping interface to identify street light availability for mounting small cells

2. A dashboard to monitor the submittal process

3. A public-facing interface to support telecommunications vendor research and requests for asset usage

4. A mobile editing application to quality assure (QA) asset locations and attribute data. Data and applications are secured and access roles are administered centrally. The Department of Information Technology supported the Development Services Department (DSD) within a very compressed development window to ensure equity and transparency to a process which impacts asset management, planning, public safety, sustainability and compliance monitoring. The technology also supports public interest and community engagement. Savings include improvements in data capture accuracy, governance and significant reductions in labor hours and redundant research.

Workflow duration has been decreased by 200-300 percent using the new technology. Data is more accurate due to new quality assurance and quality control processes, resulting in additional efficiencies.

Career PathFinder
Los Angeles County
Department of Human Resources

Career PathFinder is an online, interactive tool that leverages big data to help current and prospective employees plan their careers. It's supported by analysis of hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles County employee records from the past 30 years. The Career PathFinder transforms this rich data into meaningful information to provide never-before-offered insights such as the most-to-least common paths employees have traveled to or from each job title and the salary difference of each of those paths. With this tool, current and prospective employees interact with data to build individualized paths that can guide their career development.

Career PathFinder benefits individuals who are planning an LA County career as well as the professionals who help guide those career planning efforts. For the career planners, the Career PathFinder uses an intuitive, customer-centric approach to help them envision career possibilities, lessen their uncertainty about making a career move, and motivate them through decades-long career stories that promote the county as an employer. For the managers, supervisors and HR professionals who serve as the career guiders, the Career PathFinder helps them facilitate career planning conversations, address career planning inquiries, target employees’ development for individualized career paths, identify potential internal applicant pools and determine talent pipelines.

As an employer of choice, LA County receives employment applications from all over the country. As such, this resource is serving anyone interested in a career with the county. With an average of over 2,600 unique visitors per month, the tool delivers on its goal to make meaningful career planning information transparent and accessible to all current and prospective LA County employees.

Automated Adopt-A-Family Application
Los Angeles County
Department of Public Social Services

The Automated Adopt-A-Family Application is a Web-based application that efficiently matches sponsors with an “adoptee” family in need during the holidays based on specific criteria submitted through an online application.

The implementation of the Automated Adopt-A-Family Application successfully replaced the manual submission of the sponsor applications and assisted tremendously in the timely matching of sponsors with families meeting their criteria. In previous years, prior to the system automation, the number of matches was limited by the time needed for staff to go through the manual process for each sponsor and potential adoptee family’s applications. For example, in 2017, over 650 sponsors provided gifts to 949 eligible adoptee families during the holiday season. With the automation, participation nearly doubled. During the 2018 holiday season, TLVS had 1,036 sponsors provide 1,454 families with gifts.

Enterprise Call Center Replacement Project  
Los Angeles County Internal Services Department

The Internal Services Department’s maintained a call center which had antiquated infrastructure (over 10 years old) which was at the end of its life cycle and included unsupported equipment. The call flow integration and modification were complex, and there were limited reporting capabilities which required heavy customization. Customer service was paramount to having positive outcomes and interactions with callers and this could not be achieved, as dropped calls were not measured and essential call statistics were difficult to obtain. In addition, it was expensive to operate and had limited scalability and AI capabilities. This lack of flexibility limited modifications, routing changes and automation.

With call times of 54 minutes during peak hours, it was apparent that the system needed to be more than just upgraded or refreshed; it needed to be replaced.

The implementation has resulted in the following savings, improvements to customer services, and improved flexibility for employees and service delivery.

  • Initial savings of $71,544 annually.
  • Peak hold times were reduced from 54 to 6 minutes, and number of calls were reduced by 17 percent due to AI automation
  • Allow the agents to focus on the more complex issues that require agent interaction as well as more time to spend on team-building exercises and individual development through training during their work shift
  • Telework — enabling employees to work anywhere and alleviate traffic congestion
Woolsey Fire Technology Response and Recovery 
Los Angeles County Internal Services Department

Los Angeles County is on the road back from the worst wildfire in its modern history. The Woolsey Fire started Nov. 8 and burned for 13 days before it was contained. This was an unprecedented, fast-moving brush fire, 14 miles wide, with a footprint of 150 square miles, driven by gusts of up to 70 mph. It was the most destructive fire L.A. County has ever seen. Three canyons were affected and 70,000 homes, businesses and other structures lay in the fire’s path. A quarter of a million people were evacuated. Approximately 800 L.A. County firefighters were deployed to the fire, along with some 3,000 firefighters from dozens of agencies around the United States.

The response and recovery also included a major operational IT effort. Fire response and recovery efforts included 11 departments. These departments provided countywide logistical support and leadership to the LA County Recovery Coordinating Center. A SharePoint site allowed for information sharing and collaborations across organizations and departments.

Recognizing the fact that disaster survivors may be unable to access assistance in person, the county also offered a technology-based recovery solution. LA County Recovers is a webpage the county designed and implemented exclusively for Woolsey Fire survivors as an online repository of recovery information and guidance. The webpage contained explanatory videos produced by the county in English, Spanish and American Sign Language. The county also activated a call center, via its established partnership with 211 LA County, to provide recovery support via telephone and in multiple languages. In addition, 72 communications blasts, reaching over 492,697 email addresses and cellphone numbers, were sent.

The Woolsey Fire was the first time the county established its Recovery Coordinating Center, essentially a department in waiting. This and the overall effort showed a coming-together and represented a strong example of government responsiveness.

CalFresh End-to-End
Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services

To promote the CalFresh program, the Department of Public Social Services began accepting CalFresh applications telephonically and leveraging sophisticated technology to capture applicants’ Telephonic Signature. The telephonic signature feature is the key component which allows the Customer Service Center End-to-End operation to complete CalFresh application over the phone. Customers may now apply for CalFresh benefits over the telephone by calling any of the DPSS Customer Service Centers and if eligible for expedited benefits, have their application immediately approved.

The CalFresh End-to-End operation has enhanced the quality of customer service and improved the application process and service delivery to all Los Angeles County customers. End-to-End saves time and provides the public with an easy and secure application process over the phone. It has reduced the need for CalFresh applicants to visit district offices, reducing lobby traffic and paper applications. The CalFresh application interactive Voice Response (IVR) option is also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to those who are interested in applying for CalFresh benefits, obtaining more information regarding the program or needing help with the application process.

Since its inception, the End-to-End project has achieved positive results. The Customer Service Center has completed more than 2,577 CalFresh applications via telephone. The current approval rate for End-to-End CalFresh applications is 73 percent of these, 45 percent are approved on the same day.  

Mobile Assets Tracking System
Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor

Mobile Assets Tracking System (MATS) is an application that was developed by the Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor’s Information Technology Department to provide real-time asset inventory updates, including reporting and auditing compliance accountability for all equipment.

Before the development of MATS, a cumbersome paper-based, inflexible system existed for the inventory and tracking of materials within the Office of the Assessor. The former system involved the Technical Support Team manually filling out paper records that tracked the movement of inventory, which was then forwarded for approval and manually input.

Many paper records were lost during the approval process, or were never submitted, resulting in the failure to capture equipment moves within the department. Completion of annual inventory was nearly impossible to complete.

The estimated time savings in warehouse, technical support and software teams is 120 hours a month, resulting in $6,000 monthly cost savings. Total costs savings is almost $72,000 annually from both ITD and Warehouse Department. Furthermore, the MATS application is open source, and is adaptable to other county departments.

There is no cost for MATS development, as no vendor or contractor was utilized in the system design process. In fact, MATS was created by the Assessor’s ITD and student interns from the University of Southern California (USC).

Prior to the development and utilization of MATS, the typical annual inventory process involved 12 staff members and required 2½ months to complete. This same inventory process can now be completed in only 2½ weeks.

DHS Patient Financial Services Appointment Scheduler
LAC+USC Medical Center — Information Systems

The Patient Financial Services (PFS) staff is responsible providing financial screening and clearance before a patient’s scheduled outpatient visit. The Information Technology Division and the PFS leadership of the LAC+USC Medical Center designed, developed and implemented an in-house web-based application to schedule, manage and track the patient’s financial screening appointment to ensure that the patient was financially screened before their outpatient visit and was able to be seen on the day of their appointment. Many of the 330 daily walk-in patients for screening at the LAC+USC Medical Center were appearing on the day of their outpatient visit and could not be seen immediately. Thus, they missed their outpatient visit, causing frustration for the patient and the staff and interrupting the operations of the outpatient departments.

The Information Technology Division and the PFS leadership of the LAC+USC Medical Center designed, developed and implemented an in-house Web-based application to schedule, manage and track the patient’s financial screening appointment to ensure that the patient was financially screened before their outpatient visit.

The DHS PFS Appointment Scheduler has allowed the PFS department to create and manage appointments electronically for over 7,000 patients monthly at LAC+USC and 7,300 at other DHS facilities.

The patient management queue module generates a real-time dashboard that shows the number of patients waiting in each area and availability in each location. This enables PFS staff to schedule an actual appointment or redirect the patient to a convenient location where the patient can be seen in a more timely way. This promotes the Patient Centered Principle and provides better customer service and allows PFS management the ability to efficiently manage staffing allocation, productivity, workload and generates appropriate reports.

Court Referral System
County of Los Angeles, Department of Beaches and Harbors,
and Court Referral Community Service Program

The Court Referral application is an online system in which the Department of Beaches and Harbors’ (Department) Operational Services Division (Facilities) staff track the Court Referral Program Time Sheets.

The Court Referral service mutually benefits the Department and the local courts by providing court referrals the opportunity to perform their public service assignments at some beach locations. For each court referral, the department is required to track the hours worked and provide official reports back to the referring court.

The Court Referral process was heavily paper-based. The new Court Referral System eliminates most of the paper-based processes, improves staff performance, and provides on-demand court referral compliance reporting. Instead of printing reports and faxing them to the supervising agency, the system provides the ability to electronically deliver an email directly to the centralized court office with the system generated official paperwork attached. The staff can quickly set up new court records and record hours worked at the end of each work shift.

User-Centered Strategic Planning and Delivery Program
County of Los Angeles

The UCSPD program identified how service delivery can be reimagined and how department technology needs can be better supported to address the needs of customers. The UCSPD program is primarily facilitated through Design Thinking Collaborative Workshops (DTCW) that are centered around key primary questions, customized to department culture, and engage users to generate bold ideas for how to address program outcomes through the enablement of technology and/or other innovative solutions. The OCIO created and facilitated this program across Los Angeles County to identify bold ideas and goals, explore and envision possibilities, and then identify areas of investment for partnership where OCIO can advise and support execution that can ideally result in demonstrated impact.

As a result of this program, Los Angeles County for the first time has five Enterprise Information Technology (IT) Strategic Goals that transcend departments and programs, align with the Board of Supervisors Strategic Priorities, and create a common focal point for service delivery and technology investments that ultimately impact 10 million residents. The five goals are:

1. Mobility: Accelerate mobility for employees and residents to deliver services anywhere at any time
2. Data as a Utility: Enable the use and accessibility of data to build a countywide culture that emphasizes data-driven decision-making
3. Digital Civic Engagement: Engage our residents and communities with a variety of digital methods to interact with their government
4. Workforce Empowerment: Build a modern workforce that embraces evolving technologies that transform service delivery
5. Transform Procurement: Revamp procurement processes for more speed and flexibility to accelerate improved delivery to residents

These goals have been used in county budget meetings to prioritize requests, align department priorities to the county’s Enterprise IT Strategic Goals, and engage senior county leadership to better serve the public by elevating the technology needs of their department.

INDIVIDUAL AWARDS:

Cristina Tolentino
City of Los Angeles

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has variety of methods for conducting its emergency communications. One of the systems LAFD relies on to communicate to its staff at the fire stations is the Fire Station Alerting System (FSAS). This system has been using the traditional Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) (e.g., T1, 56 Kbps circuits) to connect its dispatch centers to the fire stations throughout the city. As the telecommunications industry migrates off the T1 circuits to Ethernet, with a tentative due date of 2020, the city has been working to migrate the FSAS transport from these T1 circuits to the Ethernet.

After a long research, design, testing and planning, as of July 2019, a number of fire stations have been successfully moved to the new Ethernet based system, knowing that the old system which uses T1 and 56 Kbps voice and data circuits from the common carrier(s) will not be supported by 2020. The work is still in progress to move all the fire stations over to this new transport before the due date, imposed by the carriers. The new Ethernet based system is utilizing Meraki network devices, voice and data converters at the fire stations running on ELAN circuits.

The FSAS Project Team has consisted of Dispatch Engineering, Network Engineering, Data Construction, Data Maintenance, Data Transport, Remote Fire Stations, Alarms and Cabling, LAFD CAD and Tech Control Teams. The Project Team was led by communications engineer Cristina Tolentino. Her project management skills and technical knowledge ensured a successful migration plan to ensure that LAFD would have a reliable means of transport for its FSAS for many years to come.


Eduardo Magos
City of Los Angeles

Over the past five years, Magos has led the city’s MyLA 311 project providing invaluable technical expertise and leadership to mobile — Apple and Android, and Web application versions of the city’s Service Request system. Always with the “user experience” as a priority, Magos successfully juggled demands for “Amazon-like” performance, with the operational needs of departments trying to provide service citywide.

Magos is also one of the department leads in the citywide CLM/CRM platform development efforts. Leading the ServiceNow Team, he has used the power of the cloud and managed service platform to help ITA compensate for the staff shortages, while helping both the department and city organize and restructure the way IT does business in the city. Utilizing the ServiceNow Incident and Program Management modules as the tool to structure, organize, document and enforce a quality change management program, the department was able to shut down and eliminate obsolete hardware and software, consolidate overlapping and sometimes duplicative systems, modernize and maintain current software versioning and patching, all with approximately 50 percent less staff.

Jayson Joseph
City of Los Angeles

Writeup not available.

Wayne Chan
City of Los Angeles

Wayne Chan is an IT manager for the LA Information Technology Agency (ITA). This year, in addition to his responsibilities as the manager over ITA's Compliance section, Chan successfully lead multiple phases of the new earthquake early warning project, which included two projects involving the development of a mobile app called ShakeAlertLA, launched in December 2018; and a Public Announcement (PA) system integration pilot with EEW in the main City Hall building. Both projects involved coordination and planning involving external stakeholders, such as USGS, CalOES, AT&T, Early Warning Labs, as well various internal agencies and support groups.

Hunter Owens
City of Los Angeles

Hunter Owens leads ITA's Citywide Data & Predictive Analytics section and provides leadership for data science projects and development of new tools and solutions for the city's data analysts. Owens plays an important role in leading the expansion of the data science in the city and has established his role as ITA's data analyst expert. In addition to his data analytics projects, Owens was tasked to provide critical technical support for the development of the high-priority ShakeAlertLA earthquake early notification mobile app. He was involved in the ShakeAlertLA project from the inception, when he helped prepare the city's partnership proposal with USGS, to drafting technical requirements for the RFP, participating in the selection of the development partners, and leading the user acceptance testing (UAT). ShakeAlertLA mobile app development project is the mayor's high-priority project which was successfully launched on time in December 2018.

Owen often interacts with ITA's executive management team, department GMs, and elected officials and has made presentations to City Council members and the Mayor's Office. 

Carlos Octoman
City of Los Angeles

Carlos Octoman oversees the Data, Voice and Video Network Operations serving over 600 citywide facilities including LAPD Stations, LA Fire Stations, 911 Dispatch Centers, Civic Centers and various Public Counter locations. His expertise, dedication and tireless efforts have contributed to a well-implemented data network that allowed the migration of the Fire Station Alerting system from the legacy network to the modernized and well-maintained network. Octoman found the best reliable solution to the complex network, thus implementing a highly reliable network providing high-quality service for the 911 Dispatch Network that serves over 100 LAFD stations and facilities.

COUNTY

Hooman Hassanpour
County of Los Angeles

Hooman Hassanpour has demonstrated benevolence, competence, integrity, dedication and commitment to improve and inspire our organization and the community of Los Angeles County. Hassanpour is the chief information officer of the Child Support Services Department (CSSD), managing a team of 25 broken up into four groups: Help Desk, Technical Support, Programming and Information Security. Hassanpour incorporates the input of his team members and allows them to participate in the decision-making process to arrive at a consensus. Under his leadership as CIO, a CSSD Social Media campaign was developed that quickly resonated with the public and provided the department a platform to generate awareness of services offered to Los Angeles County residents. Not only did CSSD’s Support LA social media campaign institute effective public awareness about the important services offered locally, it also reached critical mass statewide. As a result, it received the 2018 Best of California Award for the "Most Innovative use of Social Media & Citizen Engagement” by the Center for Digital Government. Hassanpour created a new IT Division policy to deliver customer service by adding easy access to services and concise communications. He oversaw the development of a paperless court file system (ELF, for Electronic Legal File system) that reduces the cost of paper, transports files and decreases the number of labor hours. This system was acknowledged and received the 2018 Los Angeles Digital Government Award for “Outstanding IT Project Award.” 

Tony Cronin 
County of Los Angeles

Cronin was lauded for his management of the Data Center (DC1) migration that began in 2017 and is scheduled to be completed by 2021. This project included critical and complex coordination among customers, internal Information Technology Service (ITS) staff and vendors to ensure the timely migration of customer applications. Cronin also regularly communicates with OCIO and Internal Services Department (ISD) executives and Gartner to ensure that the project risks were mitigated and the overall project stayed on track.

Cronin continues to produce quality deliverables, often under very demanding constraints. He demonstrated this ability to produce quality work during the Data Center migration project as well as the Downey Data Center decommissioning project. Weekly, bi-weekly and monthly reporting was required to ensure ITS and customers were in sync on the project milestones, risks and accomplishments. To offer the team additional planning transparency, he produced a project dashboard that managers and executives could access to stay on top of the latest issues and accomplishments in near real time.

Cronin is a leader and responds quickly and efficiently to change, traits that are fundamental a project manager. During the first year of the Data Center migration project, he responded to several technical delays that he had to incorporate into the project timeline. He adjusted milestones to ensure the overall project was completed ahead of a phase I date set by the Board of Supervisors.

Ralph Johnson
County of Los Angeles

In his first year as the chief information security officer (CISO), Johnson has made significant contributions to improve the security posture at the county. He led a team of deputy CISOs in reinvigorating the Information Security Committee and realigning it with the county IT Governance councils, conducting the first countywide HIPAA Security Risk Assessment, an extensive security training and awareness program and phishing campaign, and a significant update to the county’s Security Incident Response Plan.

Johnson revised and updated the 13 IT Security Policies and consolidated them into five IT Security Policies that are aligned with industry standards and best practices. He also led a service procurement to conduct the county’s first Security Program Assessment and a comprehensive perimeter penetration test across the county’s 34 departments/agencies.

Johnson also provides information security leadership as a member of the MS-ISAC Executive Committee and co-chairs the MS-ISAC Education and Awareness Committee, CIS Cyber-Marketplace Product Review Board, is curriculum director and certified trainer at the Holistic Information Security Practitioner Institute and also serves as a continuum education instructor at the University of Washington, Cybersecurity and Risk Management Program.

Tony Wang
County of Los Angeles

Tony Wang was nominated for the Los Angeles Outstanding IT Service & Support Award for his contribution to the development of the Graphic Scrolls Management System. Wang was the primary application developer and played a crucial role in the successful delivery of the strategic service objective. He led the project, demonstrated diligence and self-motivation that inspired the rest of the team. 

In the effort to improve service delivery through the use of innovative technologies, Wang took ownership of renovating the legacy system, which was developed more than nine years ago. He collaborated with the business stakeholders for requirement gathering, understanding user pain points, and improvising creative solutions leveraging agile development methodologies and an iterative customer feature enhancement process. The revamped system was inaugurated into business use as scheduled in October 2018. The system included nifty new convenient features such as:

• Digital asset inventory management
• Job request scheduling and tracking
• Intuitive user interface and self-service management portal
• Customizable graphical design templates
• Searchable graphics library
• Reporting and printing capabilities
• Other rich on-demand features

The IT team received many commendations and positive customer satisfaction feedback from business users. The new system enhanced the business operation by streamlining mundane processes, improving system performance, and boosting efficiency.

Examples of some of the efficiencies gained: The artwork upload now takes 7.5 seconds, compared with the legacy system of 120 seconds; the Order Correction function now takes 60 seconds compared with the legacy system of 300 seconds; and recipient information export takes 20 seconds compared to 300 seconds.

Jeff Aguilar
County of Los Angeles

Aguilar oversees, guides and mentors the Department Information Security Officers (DISOs) within the three Health Agency cluster of departments. These are among the largest county departments consisting of multiple health clinics, hospitals and community facing services. He provides security oversight and governance during the CIO analysis phase of departmental project and budget requests. He also provides regional leadership through participation as a Pepperdine Cyber Risk Professional and through the Pepperdine Executive Program.

In the past year, Aguilar has been instrumental in the oversight and completion of the countywide HIPAA Risk Assessment engagement. In this capacity he worked with the consulting firm to organize the activities of the assessment across 11 disparate departments. At the conclusion of the assessment, he was instrumental in developing the individual departmental corrective action plans and continues to work with departments to achieve completion of the identified corrective actions.

Aguilar has participated in evaluating numerous information security aspects of the Voting System for All People (VSAP) project. This project will dramatically change the voting experience for Los Angeles County voters. He also serves as a member and guiding force on the Network and Risk Management Cybersecurity Workgroups. In this capacity, he assists the workgroups in developing and reviewing policies, operational standards and moving forward other assignments and tasks of the workgroups.