Government Gains with the California Department of Technology Office of Critical Services

What was the biggest challenge you faced in this project?

Identifying those eight agencies with manual forms and consolidating the questions on them to make a more streamlined experience was just the beginning. When we’re coming at this project from the Office of Critical Services, we have a very IT-centric lens. We’re going to these agencies and checking their tech stacks to see what they would need to get from this streamlined digital front door to actually putting benefits in the hands of people who need them. Anything we do to create a front end solution has to be hooked up on the back end to each of these agencies, and that’s where the biggest challenge comes in. 

We have to sell agencies that already have really full plates and stretched budgets on this north star vision of a digital disaster relief portal. When the Los Angeles wildfires hit, state agencies responded with the same frenzy as when COVID hit. The difficult part in maintaining momentum on something that shifts from acute to preventative. Finding that sales pitch is tricky. We have to talk about the efficiencies, the cost savings, and the resident impact. This work has a really clear upside, but we have to convince them it’s worth the effort. 

How did you approach this challenge and how did you decide which tools to use to solve it?

As I’m figuring out how to make the effort for this project seem worth it to these different agencies, I have to think about the data that will convince them. That means things like figuring out how much those agencies are spending on individual contracts and how much time it takes their team to process applications for benefits, and doing some math for them about how much they might save if a centralized disaster portal became a jointly managed effort. 

So the actual form people will fill out to have access to all these different resources is a shorthand for saving lives and saving money. I don’t talk about the digital front door as much—because it’s not about the nail, it’s the picture you’re hanging it on. It’s not the form, but the efficiencies, and cost savings, and millions of dollars of benefits you’re getting out there to people who need it. 

Where will the lessons you learned here be applied in the future?

I think we’re learning a lot about how to get different stakeholders on board for a solution that’s like a giant group project. All those stakeholders have so many reasons to say no—they already have project roadmaps, the data cleanup they’ll have to do is costly, the integration work would take too much time. So we have to work with them instead of dismissing those concerns. We can offer people from our team to help them with anything that’s causing a roadblock. 

We know that creating a centralized disaster portal is going to meaningfully change workflows people are used to. But we also know there’s precedent for these agencies working together. I’m heartened to see that state agencies see the value in what we’re doing and are willing to hear us out. I think if this solution gains buyin from agencies across the state, we’re setting even more precedent for future efforts like this. We’ll become more proactive rather than having to be reactive when disaster strikes. Those seeds we’re planting here could germinate in ways that will be hugely helpful in the future.