Dondro, a veteran state government executive, has been AIO at CHHS since August 2017 and was named to the additional role of OSI director by Gov. Gavin Newsom in May 2022. In a 2022 Industry Insider — California reader survey, Dondro and state Chief Information Officer Liana Bailey-Crimmins were named as the two state government executives whom readers most wanted to hear from and about.
Dondro, who was featured in a Q&A interview with Industry Insider — California in November 2017, provided the following overview of the pending changes and the process that OSI’s realignment and renaming entails:
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The Office of Systems Integration within the California Health and Human Services Agency has long been known for tackling some of the largest and most complex IT projects. With a concentrated focus of IT expertise in project management, procurement, change management, governance, and more, OSI is without question a center of excellence in IT … but does “system integrator” accurately describe it?
Last summer, CalHHS merged the OSI director and agency information officer (AIO) roles into one, creating an organization that can leverage a cross-agency view of technology needs to inform how OSI can expand its benefit to CalHHS departments. This new structure highlights the role of OSI in providing IT strategy and support across the entirety of CalHHS, and not just on the handful of projects under the direct management of OSI. While OSI continues to provide the exceptional project management skills and expertise it always has, the new structure also drives towards leveraging this expertise more broadly.
Under the new model, OSI has already started providing support to smaller departments to help stand up project governance, change management, and planning/delivery rather than those smaller shops scaling up to handle such activities. Larger departments are now able to leverage OSI expertise to create new capabilities related to successful solution delivery, handle urgent issues, fill in short-term skill gaps, and troubleshoot problems.
OSI is developing a center of excellence to provide our departments simplified access to industry-leading tools and practices related to enterprise architecture, procurement, project planning and delivery, specifically in the context of CalHHS’ mission and unique service delivery challenges. This should accelerate the departments’ ability to obtain needed technology capabilities, deliver much-needed services to Californians, and reduce duplication of efforts across the agency.
As OSI formalizes the combination of OSI and the Office of the AIO, building upon early successes and redefining its role, it is also time to align the name with these changes. The “Office of Systems Integration” name was narrow in implying the office only integrated systems, when in fact it handles the breadth of the technology life cycle, including programmatic support. As such, the governor’s 2023-24 proposed budget includes trailer bill language to rename OSI as the CalHHS Office of Technology and Solutions Integration. This new name highlights the role of the office not only in building and implementing systems, but as an agency-level organization partnering with departments to identify solutions and actively drive towards the agency goal of whole-person care through integration.
The name change requires legislative approval through the budget before becoming effective.
