Summarizing the 21-page report, Rob Peterson, CDFA’s agency information officer, told Industry Insider – California: “Vendors who propose solutions to CDFA should know and understand this road map, as we are no longer contracting for siloed solutions but for solutions that can be leveraged across the department. Included in the road map are the common business functions that vendors should be aware of to leverage their proposal, as well as a vision of where CDFA is going.”
The road map has four purposes:
- Identify the existing IT environment within CDFA, which is “not what would be considered as the ‘ideal’ state to aid in achieving CDFA’s Strategic Plan Goals and Objectives.”
- “Ascertain and define a vision for a future state, where CDFA needs to better position the department to achieve the Strategic Plan Goals and Objectives.”
- Recognize the issues and constraints that the department faces, that will both help and deter the ability to achieve the desired future state.
- Identify CDFA organizational changes that could be made to assist the department in planning and making wiser investments in IT solutions and how the processes can be altered yet live and thrive within the defined constraints.
The road map itself, which was published this spring, is direct in its assessments of the agency’s past and current limitations:
- “The current state of technology within CDFA is a major constraint, and roadblock, to achieve the CDFA Strategic Goals and Objectives. For most areas of technology, CDFA is operating siloed, unsupported, and unsecure technology that is mostly beyond its expected lifespan.”
- “The future state is driven by eliminating the siloed applications and its supporting infrastructure and consolidating data to be an enterprise asset, not an individual program asset. Concurrently, the individual program needs must be addressed as well as those of the stakeholders. This is achievable using existing enterprise applications, as it is being done in many other state departments today.”
- “For the department to move forward, the default practice of developing small, siloed, custom solutions needs to cease; CDFA must move forward with solutions that are more flexible, robust, secure, and configurable enterprisewide solutions that can be leveraged to implement the functional needs of most, if not all, of these common functions, as well as the needs of other less-common functions.”
But it’s not just the products and the process that need to change, the report says.
“A significant issue arises that must be considered by the department, though one that has been faced and overcome by many state and federal entities, which is that of data governance and data management. As stated previously, CDFA does not do either in accordance with any best practice or standard, and the current approach would not be sufficient for enterprise solutions.” It says that CDFA and its Enterprise Architecture Office “must move forward with establishing an Enterprise Data Governance and Data Management practice as a strategic initiative.”
In addition to strategic and policy reforms, the road map says the department’s workforce also must adapt.
“There will be a shift in many areas of IT, moving away from the low-level, hands-on work towards communicating and coordinating with service providers, performing configuration-type work, rather than coding, and generally understanding how to manage COTS and SaaS solutions, contracts, and the vendors who provide those solutions,” the road map says.
“While still IT, this is a shift towards more contract management and knowledge of the vendor proprietary applications, e.g., knowing how to configure them and understanding the capabilities. This transition will impact our Infrastructure and Application Development sections the most, and both personnel assignments and training needs must be considered. The COTS/SaaS Office will need to expand while the Applications Development Unit, for custom software, will need to be reduced, meaning workload will need to be redistributed based on the solution type.”
Looking to how these changes will affect the department’s future workforce, the road map adds: “Training will also need to include more nontraditional IT training, such as vendor and contract management, training on contract terms and conditions and service level agreements (SLAs), CDFA policies and procedures regarding contract administrations, etc. These topics are not the traditional IT training topics and for some staff, this will be difficult to embrace and learn, potentially leading to some staff turnover. However, this type of training is necessary for CDFA to manage enterprise solutions.”
