The 21st Century Project awarded a $12 million Deployment and Transition contract with IBM Corporation, which will provide staff to help support state departments switching to the new MyCalPays system, the State Controller’s office confirmed this week.
The contract states that IBM will provide 3 senior deployment liaisons and 32 liaisons to departments throughout the state as specified in the contract, which dates through September, 2013, according to the controller’s office.
"IBM will be focusing on the deployment of the system to ensure than the more than 160 departments in the state are ready and able to transition to the MyCalPays application," said Garin Casaleggio, deputy communications director for the State Controller’s Office.
The 21st Century Project, an effort within the State Controller’s office to replace legacy payroll systems with a single system for all state employees, will roll out with MyCalPays, the new payroll system, for 1,300 employees in the Controller’s office in June, according to Casaleggio.
Currently, the State Controller’s Office works with about 17 legacy systems to produce state employee payroll, project director John Hiber said during a legislative hearing in August. The systems are "highly customized," according to Hyber, who stated that the state processes payment for 294,000 employees with more than 50 types of payroll deductions.
"So in summary what we’re going to end up with with the 21st Century Project is a system that’s more secure, more reliable, it will be manageable, it will be a more flexible system and it will be able to accommodate our current needs and our needs for the future," Hyber said at the hearing.
The project has now successfully completed building the new system and has since been loading data into the system and verifying it, Casaleggio said. While the project reported in August that tests resulted in some conversion problems, project leaders completed a data collection effort that resulted in a successful test of the new system last week, according to Casaleggio.
"There are no conversion problems this time around," he said. "We’ve successfully converted department data and we’re on a more efficient path with the data collection from the departments."
With the June rollout still on track, project leaders will continue to work with human resources departments, other departments and agencies and bring them into the new system, Casaleggio said.
