CA Department of General Services

DGS

Department of General Services, Real Estate Services Division (RESD), Asset Management Branch (AMB) wished to successfully streamline the current State Property Inventory process to modernize the electronic collection, update and reporting of data to improve services to the public and create efficiencies to program operations in its custodial responsibility of the state’s property inventory pursuant to Chapter 907/1986, Government Code Section 11011.

This statute designated the DGS to complete and maintain a comprehensive centralized inventory of all state-owned real estate assets for all state agencies currently known as the Statewide Property Inventory (SPI). The system includes land, and anything permanently affixed to it, such as buildings, installed systems, building equipment, and can also include roads, parking facilities, fences, utility systems, structures, etc. Leases also includes leases for land and structures.

 

Business Challenge

DGS Current SPI system was technically outdated and available primarily as a desktop application for management, maintenance and updates of State’s property inventory. System itself was over 20 years old and underwent numerous fixes that created additional complexities within the legacy application, however it never received any technical upgrades. This resulted in an SPI system that was becoming difficult to use and maintain with cumbersome manual processes which required saving hundreds of spreadsheets and other documents in shared drives and then manually checking and verifying each document, followed by duplicate entries of data by staff and SPI reporting that didn’t meet the requirements of staff, clients and management.

 

ECI PAL S2AA

ECI’s consultants main responsibility was to provide leadership, guidance, and knowledge transfer to DGS-EST on all technical issues related to planning and implementation of a centralized statewide Property Inventory (SPI) system as part of the PAL S2AA process which included:

– Business and Technical Complexity Assessment

– Documenting SPI’s As-Is environment

– Identifying pain points and challenges with current SPI system

– Documenting To-Be Business Process

– Documenting Mid-Level Solutions Requirements

– Documenting As-Is & To-Be Technical Environment and Specifications

– Market Research for Alternative Solutions (COTS, MOTS, Custom Built)

– S2AA Technical Assessment of Vendor Solutions

– Recommended Solution and Implementation Roadmap

 

ECI focused on alternative solutions and analyzing those against DGS current IT environment from the technical and financial perspectives. As a result of this effort DGS has a clear vision of what is the most viable alternative solution to replace their current SPI system.