Leadership: The department’s director is Tony Tavares, who was appointed June 17 and, since 2020, had been director of Caltrans’ District 7, which serves Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Tavares has been at Caltrans since 1997. George Akiyama, the department’s CIO of more than seven years, retired at the end of 2022, and in early January, Marcie Kahbody, deputy secretary and agency chief information officer for the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA), stepped in as interim CIO.
Budget: $20.7 billion for the 2023-2024 Fiscal Year, with rounding, in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget.
Total staff: Up slightly from 22,161 in FY 2022-23 to 22,251 proposed for FY 2023-24.
A state department that is an integral part of California’s transportation portfolio and among its most recognizable organizations is underway on a comprehensive digital transformation.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is one of eight departments under the umbrella of the California State Transportation Agency, including the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the California Highway Patrol and the California High-Speed Rail Authority. It has 12 districts statewide. Its “journey of transformation,” Akiyama said in Caltrans IT’s 2021-2022 Annual Performance Report, centers on stability, efficiency and innovation and includes modernizations that range from specific analytics to enterprise-level enhancements to public-facing improvements. The department has an “extensive enterprise infrastructure portfolio,” per the report, released last fall, and more than 400 IT applications. Significant IT projects wrapped in calendar year 2022 include:
- The Sitecore disaster recovery effort, finished in February, delivered more and better disaster recovery redundancy in the event an existing data center should become unavailable, and improved the reliability and availability of Caltrans’ public website.
- Implementation of Apptio’s IT planning module in March delivered a central location for data in the IT program’s Spend Plan and a home for detailed labor information, empowering projections on operating expense and equipment, and labor. The module also provides the ability to view summarized data and metrics in dashboard format.
- Caltrans processes and manages billions of dollars a year in service contracts for everything from IT to roadway improvements. The Security Services Division worked with Caltrans Legal, and the divisions of Procurement and Contracts, and Project and Business Management to develop new cybersecurity contract language that’s standard for all contracts and became effective in May 2022. This addressed the ongoing challenge of making sure all vendors and contractors know and follow mandatory cybersecurity compliance requirements.
- Website upgrades to the department’s public-facing site are ongoing. A web team assessed the site in June and identified several opportunities to improve visitors’ experiences including prioritizing mobile first by optimizing pages that get the most use; improving navigation; improving page loading speed; and informing the site’s layout by doing more to understand how visitors use it.
- In August, department IT staff finished implementing the AASHTOWare preconstruction system, a modern application that lets Caltrans manage project information and automating processes as it moves through the early stages of replacing the 40-year-old mainframe that processes and runs department preconstruction projects. A centralized, web-based hub, the new app has kept Caltrans engineers on track to advertise more than 500 projects a year, valued at more than $4 billion.
- Developing the department’s eCommerce web-based credit card processing method — its first ever — which offers users the ability to pay online. The result enables Caltrans to meet Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard requirements, and will be expanded to “other areas with business requirements for credit card web-based eCommerce payment processing,” according to the report.
- Staff created a standards process for IT hardware and software last year that helps guide the choice of the best new technologies. It lets Caltrans focus on sustainability, improves customer service with training on support; and improves communication and the flow of information between employees, customers, vendors, execs and regulating bodies.
- Caltrans migrated databases from Sun Solaris to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer as a way to move off legacy and unsupported technologies. The results offered future cost savings, hardware and software standardization, improved reliability, hardware performance, security and encryption; enhanced IT and vendor support; and consolidation of procurement contracts and licensing.
- An upgrade of PeopleSoft, which empowers staffing services like payroll, learning management, certification and time reporting, is a recent project. Officials wrapped the plan and build stages in July and as the end-of-year neared and had a tentative go-live date set for November. The new version offers a more direct, intuitive user experience, quicker on- and off-boarding and a variety of new business functions and features.
- An upgrade of the existing CGI Advantage commercial off-the-shelf enterprise resource planning system is ongoing. Caltrans worked with the Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) on planning, with a projected go-live date of July 1, 2025. A budget change proposal funded the project in June and planning is now underway, with a statement of work nearing completion as of fall 2022. The new version will offer better system stability, security and functionality.
