As it prepares to transition away from its vendor, the state entity that runs California’s spending transparency portal is making some changes to its technology.
The Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) posted an update on its website recently detailing the moves toward Microsoft technology; it will use Power BI for transparency reporting and Azure file storage for expenditure data file downloads. The department has also added new filters and improved the search function as well as the data download methodology.
The Open FI$Cal transparency portal was launched in 2018 and has mostly been supported by OpenGov. But the department planned to move away from vendor support and toward in-house support. The department’s contract with OpenGov ends in September; at that time FI$Cal will phase out the OpenGov versions of the transparency report and data download website.
As it makes the journey, FI$Cal’s IT leadership is operating on a cloud-first policy and is focusing on enhancing resilience, cybersecurity posture and digital services.
The transparency portal contains information from 153 departments covering about 76 percent of the state’s budgetary expenditures. Another 31 departments are deferred or exempt from participating, and certain data, such as some vendor payments, is excluded from the portal.
