The massive undertaking aims to automate human services for vital programs like CalWORKs, CalFresh, Medi-Cal, foster care, and several others across all of the state’s 58 counties.
In case that sounds like an easy lift, consider that roughly 40 percent of California’s 39 million residents rely on some form of public benefits. Putting services on hold to build out a new system or capabilities is simply not an option. Erdkamp likens it to building a car while it’s sailing down the road at 80 mph.
Erdkamp’s career to this point has given her the broad skill set — not to mention the passion — needed to tackle a project of this scale. She began her career on the frontlines of social services, taking calls from frustrated benefits-seekers who needed help, but has since taken the form of various high-level public service and consulting roles that maintain a focus on large-project delivery and customer experience.
“Leading CalSAWS as an initiative and a focus for California has been a culmination of these experiences. Those have all really helped me prepare to tackle the complexities that we deal with every single day and given me the skills to navigate some of this bureaucracy that we have to deal with on a regular basis and drive technology-driven solutions because that’s really where we sit in this space — in the automation and the technology area,” Erdkamp said.
The challenges of the CalSAWS mission take many forms, ranging from compliance to navigating the web of dozens of county legacy systems. The challenging economic conditions for many in the state are an external force adding pressure to do the work right the first time, Erdkamp said.
“The original system was not meant to support 58 counties, right? So as the system grows and evolves, ensuring that it can increase [and] handle that increased load is also a crucial thing,” she said.
Looking at the work ahead, Erdkamp said that language access is a huge challenge in the social services space, and one that the vendor community could help to solve — eventually. At the moment, she said, many of the technologies in this area lack the level of accuracy and accessibility needed to translate the state’s 18 threshold languages on the public-facing portal. In the welfare arena, there is no room for translation errors, she added.
“That’s one of our most significant IT initiatives, is making sure that every channel that people come into our system is accessible in those languages,” she said. “So, whether it’s through chat, whether it’s with a phone call, whether … they’re navigating the website, all those things need to be accessible, and not in Ph.D.-level language.”
The effort to build a more robust public-facing portal is also an area where Erdkamp said the right partners and solutions would also be welcome.
Down the way, she said, areas like robotic process automation and artificial intelligence will become a larger part of the work CalSAWS is doing as the team pushes to boost efficiencies.
Procurement opportunities with the organization can be found here.
