Noronha joined the department in 2010, after nearly two years as the deputy CIO with California Prison Health Care Services. He has also held IT leadership roles with the Department of General Services and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS).
CDI is the department tasked with regulating the insurance industry in the state. Its staff consists of approximately 1,400 employees who “oversee more than 1,600 insurance companies and license more than 495,000 agents, brokers, adjusters, bail agents and business entities,” according to the department website.When he first arrived at the department, he said there was legacy infrastructure that desperately needed to be updated. His first big undertaking was transitioning away from a server room that would offline systems statewide during a power outage to a data center that could support 24/7 uptime.
The CIO also oversaw the move from voice-over-IP technology in its two call centers to a more modernized cloud-based technology that offered greater reliability.
But when asked about the project he was most proud of, Noronha went instantly to his team, rather than the laundry list of technology projects he’d overseen in his time with the department.
“I’m very proud that we were able to hire really good people, retain them and build our teams so we can sustain both our operations and our future development,” he told Industry Insider — California.
That team, he noted, is what made the technological work possible. While some state departments hire consultants and third parties to lay technology foundations, Noronha said the majority of work CDI does is handled in-house.
“To really set something up, you’ve got to put in the time, which this department has done,” the CIO explained. “Also, this model that you have today of bringing in a consulting firm, that is not sustainable.”
Since Noronha’s department is smaller than the state’s largest departments, he said IT purchasing takes a somewhat different approach.
“We are a small to mid-sized department, and our projects are not as large as some of these $200-, $400-, $800-million projects, and so for those to be successful is to be a fundamental change in how contracts are let out and how systems integrators and the risks that systems integrators are willing to take, and the corresponding risk that the state takes,” he said.
Noronha said that he isn’t planning on “retiring retiring,” and hopes to continue working in the IT space without the administrative hassles of department leadership.
“When you’re CIO, the buck ends with you. So somebody is unhappy with what the response they got from the call center, somebody’s computer is not working properly, there’s a procurement issue, it’s taking too long, all of these operational needs are things that I really would like to get away from,” he said.
“That’s important, that’s very necessary. You have to keep the lights on. That’s what keeps the department going. And somebody needs to do that, but I just don’t want to do that,” he added.
The final day of his 26 years in state service officially comes to a close Dec. 30. He expects that one of his direct reports will be tapped to lead department IT at some point in mid-January.
When he’s not reading the latest IT research articles, Noronha said he enjoys traveling and visiting family in Canada.
