It also has quite a bit of work to do to get there.
Three representatives from the agency spoke at an exclusive briefing for Industry Insider — California members in Sacramento on Friday: Director of Enterprise Information Services Edmond Blagdon, Deputy Director of Integrated Business and Technology Solutions Jeffery Funk and Chief of the Office of the CIO Jasmin Williams. Together, they sketched for the audience an image of an agency seeking to free itself from the restraints of paper and manual processes.
“A lot of people ask us about our agency’s data warehouses, and we have literally rows and rows of paper still in folders in warehouses,” Funk said at the briefing.
HOW CDCR WANTS TO USE DATA
The leader of CDCR, Secretary Jeff Macomber, loves data.
“Never put numbers in front of him that you have not triple-checked,” Blagdon advised the briefing crowd.
Additionally, the agency regularly fields calls from the governor’s office for specific data requests, often with tight turnaround times. So, one of Blagdon’s visions for IT is to enable the secretary to quickly answer questions with data.
“We do have a pretty robust reporting team, but rather than the secretary having to ask, ‘Can I get this report’ and three days later they get the report — natural language. Just speak to the database,” Blagdon said.
More broadly, the agency wants to enable more robust data governance — a statewide effort with the backing of the Office of Data and Innovation, among others — and data-driven decision-making.
“Almost everything we do is manual, almost everything we do is paper-based, Funk said. “And it's really tough to get from a manual, paper-based system to having dashboards, analytics, all that other stuff. So really what we're working on is a strategy to digitize first, and then get to a point where we not only have the dashboards, but then we'll have enough data in our repository to actually do some analytics, start to be able to answer questions and really be like most of the other departments that are already doing governance and decision-making through data.”
A recent example of process transformation at the agency is the introduction of tablets to aid in searching inmate cells. Officers are required to search cells regularly and document the process. However, documentation has traditionally been done manually and without much transparency — leading to issues such as inmates complaining about officers leaving their cells in disarray, for example.
With tablets, the officers can take pictures of the cell before and after a search. They can document the reason for the search, and the digital process of noting findings has dramatically reduced the time it takes those officers to file reports, down from about three hours to 20 minutes. As CDCR rolls the program out to all its institutions, Funk said it anticipates saving thousands of hours of staff time.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
Aside from the literal warehouses filled with paper-based data, another hurdle in the way of CDCR modernizing and automating is a lack of Internet.
“Right now, within our institutions, a lot of them don’t have Wi-Fi,” Williams said. “We’re looking for connectivity. In order to be innovative, in order to digitize, in order to connect applications and software to our office … [we need] connectivity.”
If the agency can improve on that, it would set a foundation for much other technology that could capture or generate data, which could then be analyzed and used to drive decisions or answer questions.
Part of that data capture, Funk suggested, could involve form automation — moving from paper to digital forms, then feeding information from them into the right places and extracting insights from them.
However, vendors should be prepared to get creative on helping CDCR find ways to fund such projects — more on that in future coverage of the briefing.
Editor’s note: Industry Insider — California will continue to report on this event in the coming days.
