“Believe it or not, even with the pandemic response, we actually have a lot of pent-up demand that’s ready to launch,” state Chief Information Officer Amy Tong said Friday during Techwire’s virtual “State of Technology – CA Industry Forum.” Tong, who’s also the director of the California Department of Technology (CDT), laid out the department’s priorities for 2021:
- Broadband for all: The California Broadband Council will release its formal Broadband Action Plan by year’s end, which it was tasked to create in August by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Tong told vendors to expect recommendations on the 13-page draft plan, which was issued last month.
- Artificial intelligence: Progress on refining AI continues apace, Tong said, including in the area of automations that might be quickly implemented. The state is considering holding a vendor engagement early next year, possibly in February, to receive input, refine ideas, consider policies, weigh use cases and discuss “where to be careful.”
- Shared services: The concept of sharing and pooling resources among departments is key, she said, and is driven by a need for efficiency and standardization. Sharing services could also enable the more effective training of staff and help the state obtain better pricing for goods and services.
- Digital ID: The state will continue exploring this as a way to streamline residents’ online authentication process by having them do it only once, offering a single entry point for their interactions across state government departments.
- The state’s sweeping transition to remote work since the spring — with which Tong has been “quite pleased” — has opened up possibilities for state government’s recruitment and retention of IT professionals. For many positions, candidates no longer need live in the immediate Sacramento area. This change also relieves pressure from the “silver tsunami” — the wave of senior IT professionals who are retiring and taking with them knowledge of legacy systems.
- Tong said that, with the IT community having worked in stopgap crisis mode for most of 2020, there’s “actually a lot of pent-up demand” for projects that may be realized with new initiatives launching in 2021. As these initiatives evolve, she said, the private sector will have opportunities to give more input on the policy side — even though some of the outcomes may be more related to programs than to the technology itself.
- IT procurement may offer more chances for smaller vendors to be involved as departments look to smaller modernization projects as opposed to large “rip and replace” projects affecting whole enterprises. To that end, she said, CDT aims to engage with vendors in more frequent and focused ways, as the state has been doing recently with virtual vendor sessions. “Big bang, hundreds of millions of dollars”-types of projects aren’t the right approach, she said. “We don’t want … departments to wait (until) they can save up so much money and then do a big rip and replace,” but rather focus on “small, incremental” initiatives.
Friday’s “State of Technology” event also featured insights from State Controller Betty Yee; Subbarao Mupparaju, CIO and deputy director of the Department of Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal); Barney Gomez, vice chancellor for Digital Innovation and Infrastructure for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office; and Jason Piccione, deputy director of the Office of Information Services in the state Department of Consumer Affairs.
The event was moderated by Alan Cox, executive vice president of Techwire parent e.Republic and publisher of Techwire and its sister publication, Government Technology.
An IT market outlook for California state and local government was delivered by Joe Morris, vice president of research for the Center for Digital Government, which is also a part of e.Republic. Morris conveyed specifics about CIOs’ anticipated spending priorities under what many are calling “the ‘new’ new normal,” and Techwire will have more from Morris this week.
