Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) CIO Subbarao Mupparaju and members of his executive team outlined upcoming initiatives planned for the project during a recent presentation during the Techwire Industry Briefing in Sacramento.
The following is a summary of future initiatives Mupparaju said are in the pipeline:
1. Information Security. FI$Cal plans to put in place a new self-service solution for identity management that would replace a manual process for creating user IDs.The self-service feature would improve auditing of who has access to the FI$Cal system and what their roles are. Also, for upcoming health and human services departments that will migrate onto FI$Cal in 2017 and 2018, FI$Cal is investigating what additional data security platforms will be necessary for those customers.
2. Business Intelligence. FI$Cal currently is using out-of-the-box BI applications from Oracle. Future enhancements are planned; in particular, Mupparaju said FI$Cal is working on new BI extensions to extract additional data. The project is also looking for ways to provide self-service reporting and visualization capabilities to FI$Cal users so that the IT organization doesn't have to do it in-house. Mupparaju called it next-generation BI: "We want to get to a situation where we can ingest data of any format and use metadata to understand that format, and allow self-service — visualization and data discovery features for end-users."
3. Transparency and Storage. FI$Cal is working on an open data portal, with the goal of having it ready by the third quarter of 2017. Mupparaju also said FI$Cal is interested in building a self-service repository where agencies and departments could store financial data from legacy systems.
4. Technology upgrades. By mid-2017, the goal at FI$Cal is to achieve five-year support for all hardware and software components. Aging routers and load balancers will need to be replaced, among other network upgrades and virtualization hardware upgrades. FI$Cal also wants a state-of-the-art business transaction monitoring solution, Mupparaju said.
5. Cloud. Mupparaju said his goal is to have "zero on-premises IT." Future cloud-based initiatives being planned for 2016-2018 include migration to Office 365 Skype, SharePoint migration, email migration, SaaS-based IT service management and project management, and an online ticketing solution.
6. Staffing and training. Mupparaju said FI$Cal has a "generous" training budget that's enabling the state to take on increasingly more work as it begins take over maintenance and operation of FI$Cal. The project is looking for learning management tools, its own software development life cycle tools, and optimization of virtual desktop infrastructure for the project's developers. Mupparaju also said as time goes on, FI$Cal increasingly will begin to augment state staff with outside contractors, using Requests for Offers (RFOs).
Watch the full video of Mupparaju's presentation here.
