Jason Piccione is the chief information officer for the California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA). He oversees just under 40 boards and commissions that license and regulate consumer service providers, including the Medical Board and Dental Board. Piccione spent around 14 years at the Bureau for Private Post-Secondary and Vocational Education and the Contractor State License Boards, where he worked on statewide implementations for both. He has also served as a chief technology officer for DCA. The following is a Q&A interview he did with Techwire.
Techwire: How did you become CIO at DCA?
Piccione: My first state job and only state job has been within the DCA, all in IT. It was not necessarily within DCA Central, but you're aware that we have just south of 40 boards, bureaus and commissions that are within the DCA. I came to DCA Central as the chief technology officer in 2013. I did a system for the Bureau of Private Post-Secondary in early 2000, and that worked me up to having some exposure to the regulatory domain. Then I moved to the Contractor's Board, where, among other things, I implemented a statewide examination administration system. From 2007 until today, all the contractors that go into the board to take their exams, do so on a computer administrative system that I implemented.
Techwire: What does a typical day look like for you?
Piccione: A typical day is actually not typical. There can be some firefights; a big platform may have an issue. Something major, mission-critical could grab my attention until resolution. In addition to that, the largest component of my job is coming up with vision and strategy to keep the department, the boards and bureaus and commissions, moving forward in their business domain with the help of IT. The spectrum of what that could be is quite wide. It could be new platform implementation, website functionality, telecom, implementing new regulations, providing ideas for proposed regulation. That's the single largest component, working with the boards and bureaus in their business, understanding their business, so I can envision an overlay to get them where they need to go. The largest component is thinking about six months or a year from now, and the contact points for that are the leadership at the boards and bureaus.
Techwire: What are the next big projects?
Piccione: We have the BreEZe project that serves half our boards and bureaus as a system of record for their licensing and enforcement activities. The other half are on a legacy mainframe system, so the business modernization efforts for those programs are taking up a huge portion of our capacity. We have 16 of those undergoing a business modernization effort that is structured under a plan and individual reports. The plan outlines and structures how we're going to undergo those efforts, and the reports go into detail in the activities and special considerations for boards.
Those hallmarks start with business process identification, documentation and potential re-engineering. We focus heavily on engaging the business, from leadership at all levels, so they understand the rigors and requirements of such an effort, and it engages them in the change. It puts skin in the game for the monumental change when they introduce a new IT system.
We formalize that planning around the Department of Technology's Project Approval Lifecycle. After PAL, we procure, implement, test and succeed. That's the structure of our modernization effort. We've started that with seven of 16 of our specific programs left to modernize. Those seven include the Board of Engineers, Board of Acupuncture, Board of Private Post-Secondary.
Techwire: What are your other goals?
Piccione: I've been evolving my vision over the last six to eight months. I want to establish the next stage of DCA's enterprise platforms into a digital ecosystem. We've already established the foundation with a specifically architectured open environment that looks at our environment from two layers, the public constituent side — the California citizen transacting with government, with DCA, with the board or bureau of X — and then from the perspective of the back office. The ecosystem is front-facing with support from the back office.
The key part is that we're creating a micro-services engine in the middle that accommodates and facilitates the federation of data, communication and services between potentially disparate systems. If you had a mainframe, or a custom-developed system that's been around for a while and then you had a new platform, those are historically not going to talk to each other. But the digital ecosystem creates that central service engine, founded in micro-services, Web services, etc., that accommodates that communication. That opens up the ability to provide better user experiences because you can separate the layers. The front-facing could be efficient and good, and the back office could still be that legacy mainframe.
This ecosystem is what we created with our DCA license search, where we introduced micro-services and containerization and a continuous improvement pipeline utilizing RedHat's OpenShift in that service layer.
Techwire: What else are you doing with data? How are you harnessing it for citizen services?
Piccione: We'll be implementing a DCA data portal in November. It will be a start to displaying visually the layers of our data to the public. It will include visualizations of our annual statistical profile data that we put on the website every year in spreadsheet format. We're going to make that an interactive visualization so the citizen that's trying to engage with government can. Government data can be a little more nimble and get them where they're trying to go. The leadership is looking to embrace open data, open government initiatives.
I want to see a drastically increased online presence for folks to engage with the DCA, for nearly every transaction we offer. We have about a 50 percent online presence.
