Leadership: Department of FI$Cal (Financial Information System for California) Director Jennifer Maguire was appointed in October 2022. She has worked for the state for more than 25 years and more than a decade at FI$Cal, previously serving as its chief deputy director and deputy director — and spearheading its transition from a project to a department. Before joining FI$Cal, Maguire spent about seven years at the California Department of Justice in roles including Staff Services Manager II; and prior to that, she spent around seven years at the California Department of General Services. FI$Cal’s Chief Deputy Director Subbarao Mupparaju assumed that role Jan. 3. He’s also its former chief information officer of six years, where he worked on FI$Cal’s transition and project completion; and before rejoining the department, he was CIO at the Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). Find Mupparaju’s Industry Insider — California One-on-One interview when he was FI$Cal CIO here and his HCD CIO One-on-One here. FI$Cal’s current CIO is Kanuri Murty, who is also deputy director of its Information Technology Division. He assumed those roles in February but has worked in state government since 2015, most recently as chief of Infrastructure and Platform Services for FI$Cal. In 2018, when he was chief of FI$Cal Business Intelligence and Analytics Services, Murty won an IT Leadership Award at the California Public Sector CIO Academy.*
Budget: $115.3 million according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May Revision of his proposed 2023-2024 Fiscal Year state budget, an increase of 8.7 percent from the $106.1 million in his proposed January budget. State lawmakers have approved the FY 2023-24 state budget but as of this writing, Newsom has not yet signed it. Additional changes to the budget are expected via budget trailer bills; their extent is unknown.
Total staff: 382 positions. Of those, 162 positions are in its IT division.
The Department of FI$Cal supports the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal), the state’s statewide financial system that handles a plethora of functions including budgeting, accounting, procurement and cash management. Simply put, it’s the state’s accounting system, and its deployment, the beginnings of which date to July 2014, were formally completed in 2022. Created in statute by what lawmakers termed the FI$Cal Act, the system was aimed at streamlining as many as 2,500 legacy financial systems across more than 120 state departments. FI$Cal comprises three divisions: Administrative Services; Business Operations and Solutions; and Information Technology. It is part of the state’s executive branch and its umbrella agency is the California Government Operations Agency.
Commenced in 2005 as an IT project “to develop a comprehensive budget system that would connect to other state financial systems, including the IT systems used by the State Controller and other departments,” according to then-acting State Auditor Michael S. Tilden, the project scope transformed the following year to merge “accounting, budgeting, cash management, procurement, and other operations into a single, modernized system.” A series of Special Project Reports (SPRs) further modified its scope, schedule and budget, the acting state auditor said in January 2022, noting the most recent set its end date at June 2022 with a “projected total cost of more than $960 million.”
Open FI$Cal, the state’s financial transparency portal implemented in 2018 to show FI$Cal data, now has data from 184 departments, equating to about 76 percent of the state’s budgetary expenditures, per its website. Usage has risen over time as more departments have moved to use FI$Cal for their accounting. FI$Cal partners with four “control agencies,” the departments of Finance and General Services and the State Controller’s and State Treasurer’s offices. FI$Cal has also worked closely with the California Department of Technology during its creation with CDT approving SPRs and offering oversight in areas including project governance, time management, and resource management. FI$Cal deployed its last “project functionality” in June 2021; and the passage of Assembly Bill 156 in September 2022 reflected “formal recognition of the project completion,” Maguire wrote in a November commentary. The bill, she said, provides a road map for future activities, including “enhancing, upgrading and ensuring the alignment of the FI$Cal system with the state’s financial management processes.” (Find more coverage of AB 156 here.) Notable budget requests, procurements and vendor-related activities this year include:
- Ongoing work to transition state entities to FI$Cal. CDT submitted a budget change proposal (BCP) May 12 seeking $2.2 million from the state’s General Fund in FY 2023-24 to “assist in the successful completion of the onboarding process to the statewide Financial Information System for California” in accordance with government code. CDT is “working toward transitioning from its current PeopleSoft platform to the mandated FI$Cal system which also utilizes the PeopleSoft platform,” according to the BCP. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) also submitted a BCP May 12 seeking a “one-time increase” of $6.6 million and 27 positions to support its transition to FI$Cal. FI$Cal did a functional business performance fit/gap analysis of Caltrans’ “commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning system” in May 2020 and decided it could meet the department’s “critical financial management and business operation needs.” The funding will provide resources for Caltrans to “assess critical gaps and begin onboarding and performing (Master Department Workplan) MDW tasks.”
- FI$Cal announced monthly virtual vendor days in March 2022. Topics since then have included Software Testing Tools, Accounts Payable Automation, Supplier Electronic Management, Invoice and Payment Solution, Intranet Content Management Solution, Online Identity Proofing and, last month, Enhanced Data Loss Solutions. Planned enhancements this year include electronic fund transfer, a vendor portal, bond accounting and enhancements to process common transactions, Maguire wrote in a March commentary.
- Five IT Specialist I recruitments in FI$Cal’s IT Division. The department is seeking to hire analysts in Application Development, Information Security, and Policy and Standards. It also is recruiting for a System Administrator and a Project Manager. Find additional coverage in today’s Industry Insider — California newsletter.
*The California Public Sector CIO Academy is presented by Government Technology, Industry Insider — California’s sister publication.
