Three IT leaders from the department recently spoke to a roomful of vendors at an exclusive Industry Insider — California event in Sacramento: 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.
Below are some of the projects and ideas they mentioned.
- Gate clearance: CDCR operates 31 adult facilities, and it takes a separate clearance process to enter each individual facility — cumbersome for people such as vendors who serve multiple institutions. The agency is trying to get funding for a project to centralize that process.
- Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi service needs to be improved in many institutions to effectively support other technology projects, such as new software.
- SOMS: The Strategic Offender Management System, a major system that handles information about incarcerated individuals — the “bible” of information on them — will be up for renewal in 2028, meaning 2027 will be a year of SOMS activity. The system was built starting in 2009 on technology from Marquis and EMC2.
- Automation apps: The IT department recently met with three cohorts of corrections officers and asked them what they could automate. From that exercise, they emerged with a list of more than 60 application ideas. The trio didn’t give many details about these applications, but did specify that funding for such projects is very tight.
- AI use cases: The agency has seen success in using AI to answer more complicated technical support questions. Looking to the future, leadership wants to move toward a model where data repositories can be queried using natural language to answer questions with statistics. Another idea is to use AI to rewrite older applications — specifically, helping to transform applications written in .NET to JavaScript.
