The changes were spelled out in a memo issued over the weekend by Marlon Paulo, CDT’s deputy director for statewide technology procurement. Paulo noted that some previously issued solicitations were canceled Friday and that new ones will be released within the next two weeks. The state will stay with Salesforce as a key contractor for the project.
Paulo’s memo acknowledges that because of the changes and the fairly short solicitation period, vendors may have interests, concerns and questions.
“The State recognizes that the vendor community has questions about the path forward, and ideas about how to improve its success,” his memo says. The state will hold a vendor conference from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday “to answer questions, solicit input, and align on the way forward.” Details of the invitation were scheduled to be posted on the state’s Cal eProcure portal by today.
“As the State moves forward in this strategic realignment and upcoming solicitation, we will look forward to a continued partnership with the vendor community,” Paulo writes. “The State welcomes different perspectives and innovative ideas to inform and transform the delivery of CWS-CARES.”
The California Automated Response and Engagement System (CWS-CARES) was identified in December 2017 as the successor to the legacy Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS), the tool used by the state and counties to improve “the lives of children and families by giving (child welfare) service workers information to improve casework services and freeing them from repetitive tasks.”
The “rationale” for the change, as spelled out in Paulo’s memo, states: “CDT will reconfigure and reissue solicitations to inspire and benefit from more innovative ideas and approaches, reduce total costs, pull in schedules, and encourage performance. Additionally, the procurements will be revised to enable and encourage integrated development, testing, and deployment that can deliver valuable functionality to users.”
For vendors, the changes may create additional opportunities for smaller and medium-sized companies to seek participation in the upcoming shift, OSI Director Dan Kalamaras told Techwire on Monday.
OSI, working with CDT and the state Department of Finance, is seeking to revamp the legacy child welfare system. As the state’s liaison to California counties’ child-welfare systems, OSI has long been seen as the vanguard of state IT evolution and modernization.
The three solicitations that are to be reissued are for the CARES Data Infrastructure (CDI), a Platform-as-a-Service System Integrator (PaaS-SI), and Product Value Services (PVS).
Kalamaras said the state will also be seeking an individual to serve as an adviser to the process.
The cancellation of the solicitations is “intended to kick off the reset of these procurements in accordance with this approach,” Paulo wrote. “The procurements will build from the existing solicitations and include several strategic adjustments.”
His memo adds: “CDT will reconfigure and reissue solicitations to inspire and benefit from more innovative ideas and approaches, reduce total costs, pull in schedules, and encourage performance. Additionally, the procurements will be revised to enable and encourage integrated development, testing, and deployment that can deliver valuable functionality to users.”
Some ancillary parts of the new system may be developed before the overall data synchronization between the old and new systems, one of the bigger challenges the state has faced as the project has evolved.
“The themes are a stronger governance model to ensure success and delivery,” Kalamaras explained. “We’ll still develop the core system in what we call sandbox, but where and when we can, we will … iteratively deploy some ancillary modules to production along that path. So we’re a little bit more iterative in delivery than we were six months ago.”
Kalamaras also noted that OSI’s Deputy Director Becky Stilling will be retiring at the end of the month, at which point a recruitment will begin for her successor. Stilling, a longtime IT executive with numerous state agencies, came out of retirement in January 2018 to take the OSI role.
