Roughly eight months in, the ongoing national health crisis has prompted tech vendors and the state to work together more closely, state Chief Information Officer and California Department of Technology Director Amy Tong and CDT Chief Strategist Justin Cohan-Shapiro said during the CDT Vendor Forum. But it has also altered the state’s realities and expectations around IT. Among the takeaways:
- Data-driven decision-making is “more important” than ever in a time of emergency responses, Tong said, noting that officials are becoming more comfortable using dashboards and data analysis. “And based on that, making the right decision based on the best information.”
- Procurement is likely to maintain its rapid pace — begun early last year with Gov. Newsom’s Executive Order on Requests for Innovative Ideas (RFI2) and flexible procurement. During the pandemic, “the procurement schedule has been crazy fast,” Tong said, with timelines slashed from months to weeks or days. “We know we have a lot more pressure on the vendor community to respond to that,” the CIO said, adding: “That’s not our intention. ... We continue to build our muscle and this is an area where we’d love to have our vendor community’s input on how do we measure that progress, so that we can continue in a pace that is very reasonable but at the same time very diligent in these services.”
- Absent the time to test solutions, or the funding for initiatives, proofs of concept — already, an increasingly popular methodology — are likely to see raised rates of usage as a way to fail fast and course-correct as needed, Tong said, closing with: “Those are the things that I’m hoping to continue in this new norm.”
- Broadband, Cohan-Shapiro said, “has become a de facto utility” and a “critically important equity issue” statewide — emerging as a baseline for residents as vital services like unemployment insurance and driver’s licensing have migrated more online during the pandemic. “But we also need to make sure that people can access it, and that requires a bunch of foundational work,” he said, highlighting ca.gov and digital ID as examples of “digital shared services.” Pilot programs have examined ways to improve authenticating identity but these “must be tackled holistically as a state,” he said.
- Technologists have begun to work from a more user-centric approach to the state’s Web presence, he said, pointing to the deployment of covid19.ca.gov as a critical, high-traffic “single source of truth.” That perspective will be key to ensuring that Web presence is “centered on usability” and offers the public quick access to up-to-date information.
- CDT is now working on its next California Technology Strategy, which will be published Jan. 15, Cohan-Shapiro said. By way of a preview, he indicated officials want to ensure they are putting users first — residents and state staff — and are using technology as a tool to achieve a goal. Now that technologists have shown their ability to work “fast and smart,” officials “want to capture and harness some of that in our general ways of working,” the chief strategist said, adding: “We want to make sure that we’re seeing real progress on big initiatives in more regular time frames than we might have historically.”
