The awards were presented by Alan Cox, publisher of Government Technology* and executive vice president of parent company e.Republic.
The categories and winners, announced Wednesday at the conclusion of the two-day summit, are as follows:
Best Application Serving an Agency's Business Needs
Cal Employee Connect (State Controller’s Office)
Cal Employee Connect is an employee self-service Web application that provides approximately 300,000 state civil service and California State University employees with online access to earnings data, Form W-2s, and leave balance data, historically only available in paper form.
Engineered and developed by State Controller’s Office (SCO) Information Systems Division staff, the application was custom designed to directly interface with the state’s payroll system while adhering to rules defined by the Personnel and Payroll Services Division. The application was production-ready just as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the state workforce into an emergency telework model. The deployment of the application enabled SCO to stop printing and distributing direct-deposit earnings statements and deliver those statements electronically instead. This saved the State Controller’s Office more than $187,000 annually in printing and postage expenses.
The application houses more than three years of data and allows employees to compare two earnings statements side-by-side and to download the data into spreadsheets or into encrypted and password-protected, camera-ready documents. The state did not have an employee self-service portal for this information prior to Cal Employee Connect. The project was developed in-house using open source technologies and methodologies. It was developed “mobile first” to provide a responsive design for all devices and platforms. Analytics show that, at times, more than half of users are on mobile or tablet platforms. As a result, special attention was given to provide a rich mobile experience. Adoption rate in the first four months has exceeded 54 percent.
Best Mobile/Wireless Project
California Department of Motor Vehicles: Mobile Queue Ticket Experience
In 2018, the Department of Motor Vehicles began offering customers a text message notification when they were entered into the service queue while waiting for their customer service number to be called. After the initial release of this feature, DMV began working to build upon this functionality by providing customers with a Mobile Queue Ticket.
Customers opting to receive a text message can now monitor their place in the queue via the new Mobile Ticket Issuance feature. Once in the queue, customers will receive a confirmation text with a link to view their mobile ticket. Subsequent text messages will notify customers when they are in the eighth position in the queue, and as they are being called to a technician window. In addition to allowing customers to view their progress, this option supports the department’s physical distancing efforts by allowing customers to run errands or sit in their vehicle while they wait for their number to be called. It also benefits non-users by having fewer customers on site. DMV staff also benefit as they have less distraction from waiting customers regarding their remaining wait and place in the queue.
Best Application Serving the Public (two winners)
- California Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT): Online Shopping and Pandemic EBT Projects: On April 28, the California Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) Project began its online purchase program in response to COVID-19. This project enables individuals and families to buy groceries online using their EBT card at Amazon and Walmart. They may also use cash benefits to make purchases online at WalMart. To date, the program has processed more than 758,000 transactions totaling $48.7 million.
Also in response to COVID-19, in May, the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the California EBT Project implemented Pandemic EBT, or P-EBT benefits. This program enables children who would otherwise receive free or reduced-price meals at school to receive extra food benefits when schools are closed. Families received up to $365 per eligible child on their P-EBT card to use on food and groceries. To date, 2,689,097 P-EBT cards have been mailed, with 80 percent (just over 2 million) of those cards activated. The activated cards represent almost 2.9 million children, or 75 percent of total eligible children with active cards. In addition, over $8.66 million in food purchases were done using P-EBT.
The pandemic has caused a significant amount of uncertainty and anxiety for California EBT recipients. Until online purchasing was activated, food and cash benefit recipients’ only option was to visit a grocer or retailer. For those immunocompromised or at-risk, this was a daunting and fearful undertaking. The rapid deployment of online purchasing allowed recipients to feel safe and use their benefits in a way that protected them as well as the community at large.
Pandemic EBT, also implemented quickly, provided food security to a vulnerable population of children who rely on school meal programs. Their parents or caretakers were able to provide children with food.
Both Online Purchase and Pandemic EBT were able to be developed and implemented in a matter of weeks. Interfaces were developed, coding changes were made, and testing was conducted using agile-like approaches and timeframes. These efforts proved that technology changes can be made quickly in response to extraordinary circumstances.
DSS, the EBT Project, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EBT processor, Fidelity Information Services, were able to work collaboratively and efficiently, and all parties shared the sense of responsibility and urgency to get the job done. Likewise, for P-EBT, the Department of Education — new to EBT — was able to respond swiftly and provide the information needed to the EBT Project and Fidelity to enable P-EBT to be rolled out quickly. - Unemployment Insurance Work Sharing Program Automation Project: When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Employment Development Department (EDD) was one of the hardest-hit departments in the state, inundated by requests and applications for benefits at unprecedented levels. Gov. Gavin Newsom formed a task force to help EDD respond to this challenge. A collaborative team composed of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, the Office of Digital Innovation, the California Department of Technology and EDD, along with support from key vendors, was established. This team focused on helping to implement Pandemic Unemployment Assistance as well as helping EDD process the dramatic increase in unemployment insurance claims and calls to the call center.
In addition, this team identified work sharing as a key priority for the state, enabling employers to avoid layoffs by allowing them to reduce employee working hours and supplement these reduced hours with unemployment insurance benefits. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this program was identified as high priority to help the state fight the economic effects of the pandemic and help employees keep their jobs. The Work Sharing program was traditionally a fully paper-based process. With the increased interest in the program and the anticipated increase in volume, it became clear that an online-based solution was needed. EDD decided to develop a platform to build an online application.
By using Salesforce, the program was able to deliver the Work Sharing Plan Application to employers as an online form and allow internal EDD staff to efficiently review these applications and determine eligibility. The online form enforces strict data validation rules to ensure that applications received by the program are complete and valid. Furthermore, the EDD team was able to release the first phase to the public in under 30 days. By implementing this new system, processing time for Work Sharing Plan Application dropped from over two hours to under 10 minutes for online submissions.
The team also designed a guided workflow for EDD staff that streamlined the validation process for paper-submitted applications. This allowed them to divide data entry and eligibility determination staff so the data entry staff could focus on entering applications and working with employers before applications are submitted to eligibility staff. This business process improvement allows the same eligibility staff to process a higher volume of cases and increases the overall throughput of the entire system.
Before this new system, paper applications were evaluated for eligibility. Applications that were determined to be eligible were entered into an antiquated Microsoft Access database that allowed staff to generate reports and basic correspondence. However, this older version of Microsoft Access did not allow for multiple concurrent users, so it could not be used as a resource for other staff to look up active employer data while data entry was in process. To solve this, the Work Sharing team would perform double data entry of the Work Sharing plan information into a form on the Microsoft SharePoint Bulletin Board system. Once the data was in SharePoint, all Work Sharing staff would have access to the employer’s work sharing plan data and have the ability to enter case notes for any interactions with the employer.
There are over 6,447 employers currently with active Work Sharing plans that cover over 191,324 employees who would have otherwise been laid off if they did not have access to this program. Since go-live, 1,944 employers have signed up for the program, with more than 46,214 new employees gaining benefits.
CourtStack — Digital Court Platform and Ecosystem
The case management system (CMS) and court applications landscape in California is diverse, a microcosm of the challenges that exist nationally when dealing with the vast assortment of case management systems and the add-on applications that are required to support digital courts. Current case management environment requires that add-on solutions be tightly coupled with an underlying CMS, creating a significant deployment challenge for best-of-breed systems.
Despite considerable efforts across California to build innovative solutions in areas like mobile case access, litigant case access and e-filing, it has proven extremely difficult to deploy these systems in other courts. As a result, there is excellent software that has proven useful to the courts, but it requires a software development team, a significant amount of time and a lot of money to implement. The cost for most courts is simply too steep.
CourtStack is a new platform and ecosystem. It does not replace any existing systems, but it does extend court case management systems with a standards-based API so that applications can potentially run on any court CMS.
This new ecosystem is providing a mechanism for solutions to be distributed throughout the California Judicial Branch. To date, there have been many successful and innovative projects within the California Judicial Branch that are being brought in through the CourtStack initiative, including Los Angeles’ Justice Partner and Litigant Portal (CourtAccess); Orange County’s Data Analytics Platform (CourtLogic); Santa Clara County’s Justice Partner eFiling Platform (CourtFile); and Monterey County’s Mobile Case Access and Scheduling System (CourtGo).
These projects started establishing a framework for sustainably sharing, reusing and refining court-developed applications in the California courts. CourtStack has partnered with the California Judicial Branch and the National Center for State Courts. CourtStack is governed and managed by its founding trial courts: Santa Clara (Chair/Lead), Los Angeles, Orange, and Monterey, in collaboration with the Judicial Council of California Information Technology Division. It is being implemented by its Architecture and Platforms Group along with its Application Development Group, which comprises senior developers, software architects and chief information officers from its founding courts.
City of Los Angeles Migration to State Data Center
On Feb. 26, the California Department of Technology (CDT) on behalf of the state of California became the service provider for the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
CDT worked with the city’s Information Technology Agency (ITA), which serves nearly 12.5 million people in several capacities across a broad spectrum of services, including through LAPD’s critical mainframe applications. ITA leadership recognized that their workforce was diminishing and began seeking a reliable mainframe service provider. After 27 months spent gathering requirements and negotiating contracts, an agreement was reached, and technical planning and implementation began. For nearly an entire year, the CDT teams worked many hours to prepare for the migration. Their efforts resulted in one of the most successful and seamless customer migrations to CDT. The migration of the city’s 30-year-old legacy system to the state’s secure environment improved the city’s ability to serve the public. This project is a significant example of how two governments can work collaboratively toward a common goal.
The city’s core legacy systems rely on a 30-year-old mainframe that was outdated, not up to maintenance levels, and had limited staff with the knowledge of the existing environment. To ensure the business continuity of city services to constituents, the city knew it had to do something. Migrating the city's services to the state data center allowed the city to continue to provide public services and protect residents.
The State Data Center provides around-the-clock mainframe support, disaster recovery services and state purchasing power for licensing. The city’s mainframe workload is now managed by highly skilled mainframe subject matter experts to ensure that the city’s core service continues with no disruptions. The City of Los Angeles Enterprise Network Operations Center serves as the 24/7 hub for all city network and critical applications, including those applications hosted on the CDT mainframe. CDT is also a 24/7 service provider. In working conjunction with CDT, the Level 2 support has exponentially increased the expertise available to the city.
Ted Ross, CIO of the city Information Technology Agency (ITA), stated, “Looking at the costs for replacements and looking at the skill sets and the risks associated with that, we thought it was much preferred to move mainframe applications up to the state of California.” The three-year, $10.5 million deal marks a shift in the capabilities and resources of state and local governments. One benefit for the city of L.A. is cost savings, because the contract is less expensive than running its own mainframe, plus it eliminated the need to buy new hardware and allows the city to retire all related equipment, including the tape library and mainframe hardware.
About 30 applications on the city’s old mainframe were migrated to the state data center, along with about 8 terabytes of city data. Los Angeles relies on mainframe applications for public safety, networking, security operations and its core infrastructure.
“It’s a very complicated thing to bring over 30 systems and flip the switch basically in one day,” said Ellen Ishimoto, California’s acting chief technology officer. “There was a tremendous amount of data that had to be migrated months before the actual migration date, so it was a very involved migration, but we’re so excited they’re on board, as well as we’re really excited it went so well.”
Best Data Analytics Project
California Community Colleges Data Lake/Data Warehouse
A part of the Data Services Program initiative from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, CCC Data provides the necessary infrastructure to the California Community College System to aggregate data across disparate systems to an enterprise data warehouse.
Access to this data is provided to institutional researchers; college and district administrators; and other decision-makers at the 116 California community colleges, district offices and the Chancellor’s Office, where this critical data may be used to support instructional and institutional decision-making aligned with the Chancellor's Vision for Success (Strategic Plan).
The California Community College system generates massive amounts of data with 116 colleges. Prior to the implementation of this solution, the data had been siloed across numerous systems. The CCC Data project originated with a vision to gather data outside of the operational databases. A proof of concept was constructed to create a data lake to fulfill that vision. Later, the project was expanded to include a structured data warehouse that further enhanced the usability of the data. The CCC Data project grew to support the architecture for systemwide data information and technology infrastructure, supporting access to the depth and breadth of data across the system.
CCC Data has introduced a new systemwide enterprise data warehouse and data store to the California Community Colleges systems data infrastructure, bringing about the cleansing, standardization, combination, analysis and enhanced usage of data from various systems.
Barney Gomez, the vice chancellor of digital innovation and infrastructure in the Chancellor's Office, accepted the award and shared the credit with Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley and the deputy chancellor, Dr. Daisy Gonzales. "We wouldn’t be where we are without their support!" Gomez told Techwire.
Most Innovative Use of Resident Engagement
California State Geoportal
California has unlocked the value of government data to propel innovation, improve delivery of public services and empower its residents. The California State Geoportal offers about 2,500 geospatial data sets from about 46 state departments. It simplifies locating and validating California data for residents, as well as government, nonprofits and businesses, while addressing key concerns about transparency and access.
The Geoportal permits the state to share authoritative spatial data in a single location while enabling individual state entities to manage their own online data and applications. The result: cost savings and operational efficiency.
The California State Geoportal is an innovative solution that welcomes more than 5,000 visitors each month who download and use available state spatial services by leveraging a platform that requires no additional taxpayer funds. Dozens of state departments and local governments stored their geographical data in separate silos, unable to easily share information with each other and the public.
The California Geoportal enhanced state economic development opportunities. It contains authoritative data from the Department of Tax and Fee Administration, Board of Equalization, Department of Housing and Community Development, Energy Commission and many others that provide data that enhances economic development for residents. In addition, the Geoportal improved transaction processing and business decision-making. Whether it be for environmental reporting, identifying local sales taxes, researching school statistics or hospitalization rates, the Geoportal provides users with the confidence in its data that allows for efficient decision-making.
Anyone is eligible to use the California Geoportal, which relies on a multi-tiered strategy in which data governance is delegated from the statewide level to the agency level and then to the department level. In a state as large as California, it is imperative that clear policy, governance, standards and guidelines all be set by the state but applied and managed at multiple tiers. All state and local government entities use the portal, along with residents who want to understand such issues as water quality in their neighborhoods, or how close their child's school district is to public transit.
The Department of Technology collaborated with multiple state agencies to create a state Geoportal Working Group. The Geoportal Working Group comprised 12 entities that gathered weekly to organize and guide the development of the state Geoportal. The Geoportal Group continues to meet to this day to guide the direction and future direction of the state Geoportal.
*Government Technology and Techwire are part of the e.Republic family.
