Here is a roundup of this year’s events, with insights from the Texas Department of Agriculture (TDA), the Office of Court Administration (OCA), the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC), the Austin Transit Partnership (ATP) and the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts (CPA).
Office of Court Administration
During a briefing with OCA and TDA in May, OCA Director of IT Services Casey Kennedy shared the agency’s vision to completely transition from in-house developments to the cloud with turnkey operations.
Kennedy also shared some tips for vendors who want to do business with OCA:
- Comply with the RFP process
- Be TX-RAMP certified through the Department of Information Resources (DIR)
- Be familiar with legislative appropriations for the agency and understand what those numbers mean
- Be responsive, supportive and willing to help solve problems from the outset
- OCA uses the Texas SmartBuy website to post opportunities, using agency number 212
Texas Department of Agriculture
At the same briefing, former TDA CIO Bruce Hermes named cybersecurity and consolidation as the agency’s top IT priorities.
Hermes also noted that the agency’s licensing system, BRIDGE, is in desperate need of modernization. As such, TDA is hoping to receive legislative approval in the upcoming biennium to replace BRIDGE with a new SaaS system complete with security management, a mainstream licensing/regulatory software, modern business intelligence, expanded customer self-service features, a well-trained vendor team and a vendor data center.
Hermes shared his own tips for doing business with the TDA:
- Be TX-RAMP certified through DIR
- Be familiar with legislative appropriations for the agency and understand what those numbers mean
- Understand the Texas budget process
- Don't send cold emails or make cold sales calls
- Research the agency and then build a relationship
- Be responsive, supportive and willing to help solve problems from the outset
Texas Workforce Commission
During a briefing in September, TWC CIO Heather Hall revealed the agency’s plans to release requests for offers (RFOs) for multiple upcoming projects.
Hall referred to the agency’s “main door project,” a concept she described as “a system that supports a team of people that are kind of almost generalist,” as its largest. According to Hall, an RFO for the main door project is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2024.
TWC is also looking to consolidate its child-care program, which Hall called the agency’s “biggest program,” into a single portal. In the current budget bill, $9.3 million has been allocated for the biennium in the capital budget for a child-care application. Hall also briefly mentioned LAN/WAN and cybersecurity projects as modernization efforts in progress.
Additionally, TWC Deputy CIO Judy Sandberg named fraud detection and compliance monitoring as major focus points for the agency, having presented three new projects to the TWC governance board in September.
According to TWC Deputy CIO Jeffery Peden, the No. 1 quality the agency looks for in a partner is accessibility. Sandberg added that vendors with relationships with DIR have a distinct advantage over those that do not.
Austin Transit Partnership
During a briefing with ATP and CPA in November, Hermes, who is now ATP’s director of information technology, detailed the agency’s software needs for the light rail project in Austin.
The agency is looking to standardize software as a service in the organization so ATP’s data resides in-house rather than with contractors.
According to Hermes, ATP is prioritizing procurements related to computer-aided design (CAD) software, project management information systems (PMIS) and software for interfacing with contractors during the real estate process.
Hermes also detailed the agency's planned RFQs for the first half of 2024. In Q1, ATP will release RFQs for preliminary engineering, advance utility engineering and planning, and additional environmental support.
Q2 will see ATP’s largest RFQ as the agency searches for a delivery partner, the full list of requests for which can be found in our full coverage of the briefing.
Although ATP is a smaller agency, Hermes anticipates approximately $10 billion passing through the organization, much of which is expected to come from Federal Transit Administration (FTA) grants.
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts
CPA CIO Jay Waldo named automation, particularly through the implementation of artificial intelligence, as a prime spending area for the agency.
According to Waldo, CPA’s largest upcoming project in terms of spending is a replacement for its back-end consolidated financial system, which vendors currently interact with to receive payments for procurements. A solicitation for this project is expected to go live early next calendar year. Another upcoming solicitation the CIO shared is a restructuring of the agency’s tax call centers, particularly automation with virtual agents or chatbots to shorten wait times for callers. Waldo also listed disaster recovery, cybersecurity and privilege access management as areas of focus for upcoming solicitations.
Notably, Waldo stressed to vendors that products using AI must provide a notable improvement over current solutions rather than a lateral shift.
