IT Projects Recognized as State’s Best at 2023 Summit

The “Best of Texas” awards during last week’s Texas Digital Government Summit* acknowledged various significant IT projects, state agencies and local entities for advancing public-sector IT. Recognizing technological excellence is a cornerstone of the event via the Best of Texas awards.

Below are the categories, projects and winners recognized Friday by Government Technology.

BEST INNOVATIVE USE OF DATA ANALYTICS

The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles worked with the Department of Information Resources and law enforcement officials across Texas to create the state’s first-ever closed data portal for agency use. The portal allows law enforcement partners to address their data needs, enabling more timely completion of criminal investigations. The data portal also offers access to data sets related to electronic tags issued by licensed motor vehicle dealers and temporary permits issued by county tax assessor-collectors and the agency.

Also receiving an award under this category is CapMetro, Austin’s regional public transportation provider.

Previously, CapMetro had siloed applications and systems that required significant amounts of time to aggregate data. As a result, it would take the transportation authority two months to run necessary reports, making essential business data unavailable for real-time decision-making.

To solve this, CapMetro implemented modern data analytics tools and technologies to create a modern data platform that centralizes and makes data accessible across the agency, enabling near-real-time data feeds and mobile applications.

BEST APPLICATION SERVING AN AGENCY’S BUSINESS NEEDS

The first recipient of this award is the “Texas Child Care Connection (TX3C) — Child Care Case Management Project.” The Texas Workforce Commission’s IT and child-care divisions partnered with KinderSystems to implement a new time and attendance tracking system called KinderConnect. With the new system, child-care providers can clock in to work through a web application, and parents can check in through a mobile app. This is the first phase in replacing the “Workforce Information System of Texas (TWIST)” child-care system. The solution has improved customer experience and provided timely access to services and information transparency.

The second recipient to receive this award is the University of Texas at San Antonio for its business intelligence application. Several university departments identified a collective need for better reporting capabilities, including more robust metrics, real-time reporting, analytics and dashboards.

To meet these needs, the university implemented Oracle’s business intelligence application, allowing users to create charts, pivot tables, reports and dashboards. University departments, including financial affairs, people excellence and other areas involved with projects and procurements, can now create dashboards and report data in real time.

BEST APPLICATION SERVING THE PUBLIC

The Department of State Health Services (DSHS) earned this year’s award for its website redesign. The department’s website hosts more than 4,000 web pages and more than 200 health topics created and managed by 150 programs under the DSHS umbrella. The last redesign of the DSHS website was in 2010 and lacked full accessibility, mobile responsiveness and functionality for DSHS customers and stakeholders. The website redesign focused on creating a future-friendly website with improved visual design, structure, content and navigation to help users find information and services they need.

BEST IT COLLABORATION

This year’s best IT collaboration recipient is the “Texas Regional Security Operations Center Pilot Project.” Since 2019, the Department of Information Resources has been aware of more than 150 ransomware events impacting Texas government organizations — 90 percent of which occurred at the local level. The number of ransomware events targeting counties, cities and school districts indicates that cybersecurity programs at the local level need strengthening. The Texas Regional Security Operations Center (RSOC) aims to meet these challenges through collaborations with state and public universities. DIR’s first partnership is with Angelo State University, resulting in real-time network security monitoring, network security alerts, incident response and cybersecurity educational services.

BEST WORKFORCE/WORKPLACE INITIATIVE

Lastly, the “IT Staff Augmentation Improvement Initiative” earned this year’s best workforce/workplace initiative award. For context, contracted workforce members specializing in IT can be hired through DIR information technology staff augmentation contracts, or ITSAC for short.

In January 2022, the Texas Health and Human Services’ (HHS) IT division launched the ITSAC Improvement Initiative with three goals:

1. Improve data management and reporting
2. Promote ethical, standardized practices
3. Promote efficient practices

This resulted in the following improvements:

• The agency switched from manual processes to a SharePoint-based request form and dashboard.
• HHS ITSAC’s policy addressed the complete procurement and contract life cycle of an ITSAC contractor. 
• A survey tool was launched to obtain feedback from supervisors about their experience with a contractor to better inform vendor performance reports.
• Other opportunities to make processes more efficient were discovered, leading to quicker onboard times and saving 23 business days on average during the acquisition process.

*The Digital Government Summit, Government Technology and Industry Insider — Texas are part of e.Republic.