Seeking to avoid a repeat of troubled or failed state government IT projects in health care, motor vehicles and Vermont courts in recent history, the Secretary of State’s office is forging its own path into the 21st century.
Without any special appropriations from the Legislature, the largely self-funded office is overhauling its online presence and internal operations to digitize communications with the businesses, licensed professionals and politicians it oversees.
According to Secretary of State Jim Condos, the result will be better staff efficiency and improved public access to state information. A series of technology upgrades in his office could also serve as a building block for connecting to other agencies down the road.
Condos’ office is in various stages of retooling the Office of Professional Regulation, Division of Corporations, Elections and Campaign Finance Division and Vermont State Archives and Records Administration, along with its online presence for each of these areas of operation.
Condos said he couldn’t speak to how other agencies have approached similar IT projects, with one exception: “It’s clear that a lot of stuff wasn’t done that should have been — for instance testing,” he said, in reference to Vermont Health Connect’s website and operational woes.
“Each agency and IT system has its own challenges,” Condos said by email. “My focus was on creating internal checks and balances for each system. This focused on three things: defining scope; engagement with clients (those who are using the systems); and vendor performance.”
He believes his private sector experience, which he says included implementing a new operating system and website, is helping him manage all the moving parts well.
The Legislature approves the Secretary of State’s annual budget, but operations for business licensing, professional regulation, elections and archives are paid for by licensing fees. Some special grants, including federal dollars, round out the purse Condos has to work with. He said there was no choice but to prioritize technology improvements.
When Condos took office in 2011, some of his agency’s information frameworks were so old they were “in danger of failing,” Condos said. Some pages of the website showed outdated information about corporations, for example, but the site’s content management systems had morphed so much over time that the pages were no longer accessible for updates.
“We were concerned that the operating system could … create problems with the data we were providing to other people,” Condos said. He suggested the resulting situation would have been especially bad for banks, lawyers and real estate agents that rely on public information for their business operations.
The systems are being updated from every angle, starting with electronic filing for corporations registering with the state, professionals applying for licenses or politicians documenting their campaign finances. Staff at the Secretary of State’s Office will push fewer papers, do less manual data entry and tap into better integrated data sets — which improves both analysis and enforcement. For the public, more of the digitized information will be accessible online.
It’s not designed to be a 100 percent native digital environment yet, however: Some forms still can be printed and submitted by mail, and handwritten campaign finance reports can be scanned and uploaded.
The flexibility prevents exclusion of people who aren’t computer literate or who can’t do business online. It also means some data entry still is done by state employees, and not all elections data will be easily searchable.
Still, Condos says, the transition improves reliability, accuracy and efficiency. Moving away from “depreciated” technology that’s no longer supported by the vendors — such as DOS-based systems and FoxPro databases — also lets his office stay nimble as it responds to changing times.
“We need to be prepared to change with technology, and with the system we had, we could not,” Condos said. “Whether the Legislature or the market tells us (to do something) different, we’re now going to be able to respond.”
The Secretary of State’s website is gradually being updated, too. Rollout is scheduled in phases to align with new data systems in the primary wings of the secretary of state’s operations.
Last in line for IT updates will be the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration (VSARA). A request for proposals is still being drafted, and the timeline not yet set.
Office of Professional Regulation
Electronic licensing was introduced in Vermont in 2009, according Chris Winters, director of the Office of Professional Regulation.
His division is the only one in the office that has a complete technology upgrade. The project began in 2006; now regulation and enforcement of 45 professions is managed almost entirely online. OPR does not regulate medical doctors, lawyers or teachers, who are overseen by different agencies.
“We’re fairly low-profile until someone has a problem with a licensed professional,” Winters said, adding that he wishes more people would use his office’s database before choosing an oral surgeon, for example. Aside from licensees themselves, Winters said the heaviest users of the OPR database are insurance companies and employers confirming that their selected providers or employees are in compliance with state law.
Rosters of Vermont’s licensed professionals, including both active and inactive licensees, can be searched or downloaded. The OPR website also publishes enforcement actions, but only after cases are closed and if an investigation confirmed unprofessional conduct.
Winters said that proactively publishing this data has cut down on the staff time spent verifying licenses or responding to enforcement inquiries. Email correspondence also has cut down on the costs of license renewals, which used to be handled by U.S. mail.
More efficiency has improved productivity. Winters said that five years ago, investigations used to last longer than one year. Even though his office fields more complaints now than ever before, average case length has come down to 260 days.
And it’s possible that the more efficient system helps prevent some cases of unprofessional conduct in the first place.
“We used to have separate systems for licensing and for case tracking, and they didn’t talk to each other,” Winters said. Each profession’s database of licensees also used to be in its own “silo,” he said. Now, both the licensing and enforcement of all professions are pulled together in one place.
To illustrate what this means for both office staff and the public, he cited the case of a man who had lost his physical therapy license for unprofessional conduct, and later applied to be licensed as a nursing assistant.
“Before, unless you had someone with institutional knowledge or memory of this name, he’d probably get licensed,” Winters said. Now, each applicant’s name can be searched just once to produce a complete record of all licenses he or she has held, along with any related enforcement actions.
With the data systems “talking to each other,” the enforcement net tightens. Fewer people with a history of violations may slip through the cracks, thereby potentially cutting down on the incidents of unprofessional conduct in the field.
It’s not just enforcement the new data can be applied to, however. Winters said the state’s health care reform legislation required OPR to conduct workforce surveys of health care professions, to identify parts of the state that are underserved by specific health care providers. Winters decided to expand the survey to all professions, and he said the Department of Labor has expressed interest in the data to assist with workforce development initiatives.
The company Iron Data Systems has handled the OPR system since 2012, when email notification functionality was added. The first two years of the contract total $218,198. Annual renewals are subject to contract amendment, starting in value at about $123,000 and increasing by 3.8 percent each year.
Corporations
Similar digitization and data integration efforts are underway in the Secretary of State’s Corporations Division.
Annual reporting has been brought online and some search functionalities have been added. Business registration and Uniform Commercial Code reporting also will be brought up to speed. Director Ali Sarafzade said he hopes the transition will be complete by February or March.
“A lot of other states have this functionality already,” Sarafzade said. Vermont corporations that also do business in those places “very much appreciate” the upgrade, he said.
Sarafzade said his office can now accept more forms of payment, including Discover and American Express credits cards, as well as electronic checks. Processing times have also come down. In fact, other than trade name registration, they now take almost no time at all.
Algorithms are not yet robust enough to review business names for eligibility, he said. “That still takes human eyes.” But he predicts other efficiencies will cut response time in half — down to roughly three days from about one week. And almost all other business submissions are processed in real-time.
As much as it feels like getting a “new toy,” Sarafzade said, he believes the gains in accuracy and efficiency more than justify the upgrades.
“It’s not like we’re going from Windows 98 to Windows XP,” he said. “We’re going from prehistoric times to flying cars.”
The company PCC Technology Group was selected to upgrade the corporation information system. After initial licensing and implementation fees of $146,803 in the first year, the full implementation is contracted in fiscal year 2014 for $605,613. Annual fees (primarily for hosting, maintenance and support) through fiscal year 2017 are $242,016, decreasing to $182,016 in fiscal year 2018, $122,016 from fiscal years 2019 through 2022, and dropping to $47,680 in fiscal year 2023. The total project contract is valued at just under $2.2 million.
Elections
The Elections and Campaign Finance Division is next in line for a technology renovation. New systems for lobbyist disclosures, campaign finance reports, voter registration and election-night reporting all are included in the plans, each to be phased in separately.
“Today, the State election-related business processes are inefficient and error-prone,” according to the request for proposals. “For example, in the course of operations it is not uncommon for the same business data to go from paper-to-computer multiple times and into multiple repositories (e.g., filesystems and spreadsheets). In addition, nearly all of these elections-related applications are at the end of their useful life and the State is unable to economically extend them.”
Staff are in the final phase of reviewing bids for the project. Steve Mattera, information technology manager, predicts they’ll choose a contractor before the end of February. Campaign finance reporting and lobbyist disclosures are scheduled to be revamped by June 2014 — in time for annual reporting deadlines. Voter registration and election-night reporting will come next.
A new voter registration database will be paid for largely through federal funding. Staff have requested that capacity for online voter registration be built into the new system, although Mattera said legislative action might be required before that function could be activated.
The contractor will be announced in 2014. Project costs are not yet known.
