Projects

In accordance with the County’s Vision 2026 goal of Accessible Infrastructure, the County continually improves constituent services by making them accessible wherever, whenever, and on whichever device they choose. 

More and more constituents are looking to engage with government online, and so, the County must modernize its legacy applications and processes.  Many of the typical County functions, such as ordering documents or paying taxes, are fully available online now, as well as many previously in-person only processes such as Season of Sharing grant applications.  As services move online, the County takes a constituent-centric user experience approach to ensure these processes are as easy to use as possible and are accessible to all. 

To improve on the experience over time, the County uses analytics and feedback gathered from its various touchpoints such as websites, social media, mobile apps, call centers, and counters.  The constant two-way communication between the public and the County keeps the improvements coming. 

This continual improvement process is aided by adopting new technologies focused on automation and AI.  The County already has six chatbots in use. The newest chatbot on the main County website launched in Dec 2022 and was implemented to reduce customer calls and cut down on emails about commonly-asked questions.  The chatbot is continually updated and has already reduced email volume by 81%.  This is just one example of giving the users more than one channel for getting the help they need. 

The ACGOV chatbot remedies these problems and aligns with the priorities of increased constituent engagement and providing better customer experience. By creating the chatbot, ITD created a user ‘wow’ experience, answered users’ questions more quickly, and significantly reduced staff time related to this task. ITD and multiple departments collaborated to create the chatbot, and it is continuously trained to stay current.  

In the two-week period after the Chatbot went live, the ITD Web Team saw an 81% decrease in the number of emails coming from the Contact Us page. All County Departments appreciated ITD’s modernizing the way we communicate and the use of low code technology to develop systems in very short time frames, as they not only save time and money but also add tremendous capabilities to the Alameda County Development Platform.  

http://acgov.org/government/contactus.htm

ACGOV Contact Us Chatbot

CBS Assessment Appeal System is a new modern online system designed by the Information Technology Department for Clerk of the Board, with the goal of providing an open and transparent process that relies on a clearly written set of procedures and provides due process, reducing paper usage, improving the productivity of the staff and the quality of service to the public.

The Information Technology Department partnered with Clerk of the Board and Assessor’s office that resulted in an in-house system that has been successfully used by both Clerk of the Board and Assessor staff to better serve Alameda County’s residents. This system was released in July 2020 and it will be followed by Phase 2 that will incorporate the legal appeals into the system.

In a prior initiative, Information Technology Department and Clerk of the Board designed and released an Assessment Appeal Online portal that allows property owners to electronically submit Assessment Appeals using DocuSign technology for electronic signature and allow online payments.

Both systems are now able to exchange data in an efficient way and keep property owners informed about their Assessment Appeal status.

Assessment Appeal System Screenshots

The Assessor and IT Department partnered to re-engineer the system with the goal of increasing productivity and operational agility, reducing use of paper and improving service to the public. The project resulted in the development of IMPROVE (Integrated PROperty ValuE system), the most advanced and sophisticated Assessor’s system in California. Alameda County was the first in California to launch a full-featured web-based Assessor system, all built in-house by internal resources. This solution has been delivered in incremental releases. The latest releases in 2020 and 2021 support Assessor’s initiative to implement paperless business process. The team implemented the upload of electronic documents submitted by the taxpayers into the system and the retrieval of the documents scanned by the Assessor team. This initiative allowed Assessor to digitize over 15,000 paper files.

Updated March 2021

IMPROVE screenshots

The Registrar of Voters (ROV) partnered with ITD to develop a scalable, innovative, secure, and robust Ballot Curing system to improve their process.  It aligns with the leadership priorities of ensuring the integrity of election process, increasing voter participation, streamlining the voting process, and building trust with the community. The Ballot Curing system was implemented in May 2022. It was used for the June 2022 Direct Primary Election and November 2022 General Election. This provided a platform that is user-friendly, accurate, and efficient, reducing staff by 70%, and time spent by 50% for this task and providing timely and better notification management.

The system was innovative, as it uses modern technology to automatically detect discrepancies and creates a letter or email to notify impacted constituents. The system supports seven languages as required in the County per Section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 (52 U.S.C. Sec. 10503)) such as English, Chinese, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. The system has approval and notification workflows and provides correction methods via letter, text, email, and phone call, which allows voters to fix errors and ensure that their votes are counted.

Ballot Curing

Alameda County is one of the 18 CalWIN counties that have successfully transitioned into the CalSAWS system. The county’s IT department has streamlined the migration activities into ten work streams to manage various departments and cross-functional collaboration effectively. The IT department is proud to be the only county that has successfully migrated 200 million legacy documents into the CalSAWS cloud environment, resulting in significant cost savings. This migration was an important accomplishment that required technical expertise. The IT department has also developed a generator tool to map the CalWIN tables to CalSAWS tables, translating CalWIN queries and Power BI Dashboards into the CalSAWS version. This tool has proven extremely valuable for the county’s reporting needs.

Saving the County the costs of producing Central Collection Statements on paper and the associated costs of mailing, is the goal of this project. Clients will be able to opt in to receive a monthly email instead of receiving a paper statement in the mail. The email to the client will contain a link to the County website for credit card payment or payment by check. If check is preferred a payment stub can be printed from the website to include with the clients payment.

Implemented March 2015.

To more effectively track, report, and allocate Azure cloud costs, Alameda County’s Cloud Governance and FinOps team (ITD) implemented an Azure Resource Tagging strategy that streamlines the cost management process and provides detailed and transparent chargeback of cloud resource consumption costs to Departments and Agencies.

To get to the detail of reporting needed to accurately identify and allocate these costs, the ITD team tagged over 2,400 resources in the County’s Azure cloud tenant with a BusinessUnit tag, indicating which resources were owned by which Departments or Agencies, irrespective of which Subscription or Resource Group they were provisioned in.

Additionally, to ensure ongoing compliance with tagging requirements, ITD implemented an enforcement policy, which requires the Business Unit tag to be populated from a pre-defined list of 21 Department/Agency names during new resource provisioning.

The CLETS switch is the only means of connection of all Alameda County Criminal Justice agencies to the CA Department of Justice databases, The current version was written over 40 years ago on the mainframe and is no longer supportable. AWS is a multi-county warrant management system used by Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco. AWS and CLETS switch were both implemented on the mainframe using IBM Assembly language and COBOL.

CLETS switch was replaced with a new Windows based vendor system that will allow for better connectivity. AWS was replaced with a REST API based solution that can be used by other applications, including CRIMS (Consolidated Records Information Management System), that can provide a user-interface to it.

• Offers employees a wide and diverse range of charities to choose from and the ease of contributing through an automatic payroll deduction.
• Benefits the County by running a single campaign that is efficient and cost-effective, with minimal administrative overhead.  ​
• Supports the community through the contributions made by the County’s compassionate and generous employees.

Each year, a different County agency leads the Combined Charities campaign with the goal of increasing both year-over-year employee participation and the total amount donated.  In 2022, ITD led the campaign, leveraging the creativity and technical expertise of ITD employees to exceed both these goals.

ITD titled the campaign Giving is Better, Done Together, recognizing that for the last two years, many County teams and colleagues were separated due to the pandemic and were slowly coming back together. Giving Together helps make a big difference in the local communities.

Using innovative technologies such as fun videos, gamification, MS Teams communications, and a #GivingChallenge, the 2022 campaign raised over $400,000 with 108% employee participation.

The campaign kicked-off with a message from Tim Dupuis, CIO and Registrar of Voters, framing the event in the context of the difficult time that was ending and the gradual shift back to the social norms missing over the past two years.  Human Resource Services Director, Joe Angelo, playing the role of race announcer Ace Pennington, used humor and a very large dash of enthusiasm in a video to declare the start of the race — the gamification part of the campaign — and later, to supply race update videos with an accompanying web page where employees could see the different Departments’ progress as their animated race cars advanced towards the goal in real time.

In a nice change from email, ITD created ALCO COMMS to send communications about the campaign to all County employees through MS Teams, which grabbed employees’ attention in a way that email no longer could.  To make it even more fun, the winning Department received a heart-shaped trophy representing ACGOV Cares, the County website (https://acgovcares.org/) that showcases how Alameda County employees care for their communities.  The trophy will rotate to winning Departments in future years as well.

Congratulations to 2022’s winner, the Alameda County Fire Department, and to the over 1,000 employee donors, who made Combined Charities such a success!

The CHR system is managed by UpHealth, Inc. and is innovative because it uses referential data matching software from Verato to match and link patient data to resolve any discrepancies or duplicates, provides privacy framework to securely hold sensitive information, and is designed to improve patient outcomes by providing healthcare providers with a comprehensive view of a patient’s health history, regardless of where they received care.

The CHR system is designed to be interoperable with other health information systems, allowing healthcare providers to access patient records from a variety of sources, including electronic health records (EHRs) and other health information exchanges. The CHR system uses advanced data security and privacy protocols to protect patient health information, and patient consent is obtained before their health information is shared through the system.

The CHR system provided several benefits, including improved care coordination by 20% reduction in hospital readmissions, better patient outcomes by 14% reduction in mortality rates, and reducing healthcare costs by 7%. By allowing healthcare providers to access a patient’s comprehensive health history, the CHR system helps avoiding duplicate tests and procedures, improving diagnosis accuracy and reducing the risk of medical errors. The CHR system also allows healthcare providers to identify and address gaps in care, such as missed appointments or medication refills, which can improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs in the long term.

The County has an over-arching goal to support access to services securely any time from anywhere. To facilitate this objective, ITD is leading a series of projects to advance the ability for residents, employees and business partners to access County systems through a connected infrastructure strategy. These projects include:

• VPN Standardization
• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure
• Voice Modernization Initiative
• Modern Authentication
• Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Backbone for Radio
• Active Directory Consolidation
• Azure ExpressRoute Connectivity

Collectively, these initiatives improve efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness while ensuring universal access and forward-looking infrastructure.

In support of the County’s Centralized Technology Policy encouraging consolidation of technology services, a number of departments are moving the support of commodity technology services to ITD. These services include help desk; end user and device support; server, storage and cloud administration; web-site support; network; unified communication; and technology procurement.

ITD works with each department to identify services and staff involved in these commodity services to define the future support model, align with ITD standard processes and tools, and plan the migration to minimize business impact.

The result of these consolidation efforts is more effective and efficient delivery of commodity technology services as well as freeing up department resources to focus on critical business needs.

The initiative seeks to improve the County’s efficiency through process re-engineering and implementing new technologies.

For 2016: ITD is continuing to build new imaging applications to reduce paper and improve workflow. We will also be implementing an enterprise eSignature and eForms solution as a tool in reducing paper and streamlining business processes. And we are promoting the use of video conferencing supporting the Climate Initiative.

The project started with multi-department collaboration between four Healthcare departments, CAO, and ITD with limited scope and focused solely on handling COVID-19 related questions. Through agile planning and development cycle, the technology was locked down as Azure, the branding and functionality decided upon, and a working prototype was up in a matter of days.

Through internal testing and continuous learning on what our constituents were commonly asking about, we continued to develop the chatbot features to take advantage of multiple knowledge bases as well as different ways of interacting with the chatbot. This multi-lingual chatbot takes in content from both the CDC and the Public Health Department, as well as other county resources. It accepts typed-in questions and supports a menu tree system for those that want a guided path to the answers they seek.

The chatbot was launched on May 8th and recorded 5000+ questions soon after. Two more chatbots were created for IT HelpDesk and another for Probation. This new emerging technology implementation provides a blueprint for future chatbot developments. The existing chatbots continue to learn and provide service to our constituents for years to come.

The State allowed board meetings to be held virtually. Alameda County chose to develop a hybrid format that allowed for a combination of a physical and a virtual meeting experience that was safe and secure. The County used Zoom Webinar for safe public meetings. The board room was upgraded with AV equipment to support virtual meetings. New processes and procedures were created for the COB, ITD, BOS and the public to participate. Closed captioning was added for ADA compliance. A library and talent was created to support public facing zoom meetings for use by all departments/agencies. Training of new procedures was established for the BOS, COB, ITD, department/agency heads, and the public to use the new platform.

The CDC recommended that all employees take a self-assessment test before beginning work. Human Resources in collaboration with ITD created aself-assessment screening form that employees can access from anywhere, anytime and from any device. The screening is a set of questions which provides direction to the employees on whether they should return to the office or stay at home. The County Announcement regarding the same was sent to all employees explaining the importance of filling out the form daily.

The support for business operations fell into 3 main categories:

• Remote Work – providing technology support to allow employees who normally work in the office to work securely from home or elsewhere. This included providing laptops and peripherals, softphones and headsets, VPN access and remote or virtual desktop capabilities. This also included allowing contact center workers to work remotely while still leveraging call management systems.
• Virtual Services – allowing residents to access County services without requiring face-to-face interaction. This included capabilities like electronic document approval (DocuSign), rapid application development (SalesForce), video and audio conferencing, and virtual contact centers.
• Public Engagement – continuing the transparent conduct of business in public meetings and other forums while complying with social distancing mandates. This included audio and video conferencing, conferencing services (Teams and Zoom) and the use of websites for public communication.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic required Alameda to upgrade facilities to protect the health and safety of their employees and the community. The General Service Agency (GSA), working with the County departments, implemented changes based on guidance from county, state and national health agencies. Changes included updating and adding COVID-19 signage, installing safety screens, providing enhanced janitorial services, installing touch-free utilities, installing MERV air filters and placing temperature scanners in County facilities.

In addition, The COVID-19 pandemic required Alameda to upgrade facilities to protect the health and safety of their employees and the community. The General Service Agency (GSA), working with the County departments, implemented changes based on guidance from county, state and national health agencies. Changes included updating and adding COVID-19 signage, installing safety screens, providing enhanced janitorial services, installing touch-free utilities, installing MERV air filters and placing temperature scanners in County facilities. In addition, ITD provided mobile cleansing kits to keep staff safe when servicing equipment.

The COVID Hotel project is a part of the larger Project Room Key initiative, which assists in serving people affected by COVID-19 who are experiencing homelessness and living in high density settings in Alameda County. The system is designed to track clients from their initial referral to the program from an outside provider, through their intake into a hotel, clinical assessment, exit from the hotel and finally an outreach assessment (post-exit), performed by a Street Health Team. The COVID Hotel application was built on the Salesforce Platform with collaboration from ITD, the Health Care Services Agency, as well as frontline medical personnel and outside vendors.

The project continues to be enhanced to serve the needs of the homeless community in Alameda County.

This program requires communication between Police departments, Sheriff Central Identification Bureau (CIB,) District Attorney’s office (DA,) Courts and California Sex and Arson Registry (CSAR,) which was addressed by providing a common automated workflow platform in the CRIMS system. It aligns with the leadership priorities of social justice that promotes equity and helps to ensure that all residents of the county have access to the resources and opportunities they need to thrive.

So far, 146 sex offenders have petitioned, and 129 have been granted to be taken off the registry and Megan’s Law website. All these cases were processed successfully through the newly developed CRIMS SB384 module. This program was innovative because it eliminated paper forms, provided real-time interfaces with various law enforcement partners, provided timely notifications to all parties, alerted law-enforcement of urgent tasks, and integrated with the existing PC290 sex-offender registration module.

This project is an exemplary example of multiple law enforcement agencies collaborating to solve a problem in which each one has a role to play, and the result benefits everyone. Regular meetings were conducted during the design phase involving Police agencies, DA, CIB, Courts, CSAR and ITD to finalize the optimum workflow.

CRIMS-SB384

Alameda County recognizes the increasing risk to County data and resources from cybersecurity threats. ITD is leading a comprehensive security program to address the existing and emerging threat landscape.

The program includes projects in multiple areas including:

• User awareness and training
• Data privacy, data encryption
• Security monitoring
• Incident response
• Zero-trust framework
• VPN standardization
• Identity and access management
• Policies, standards and guidelines

ITD collaborates with departments to implement security projects consistently across the County.

SSA Data Hub

• We are in the process of building various data lakes for a data hub for SSA reporting and analytics
• IFCN – Integrated Fraud Communication Network data repository
• CIS – County Information Server (CalWin) data repository
• WDT – Workload Distribution Tool (SSA Integration Team) data repository

Health Care Data Hub

• COVID data
• COVID vaccination data
• Public Health Laboratory Services for Behavioral Health

Prior to March 2021, SSA managed and assigned dependency investigations manually, using a single Excel file on a shared drive.  Supervisors across multiple locations needed to enter information into the spreadsheet to keep track of case assignments. This was a frustrating and tedious process as only one person could update the spreadsheet at a time.  In addition, the file would lock when line staff was looking up information, preventing supervisors from quickly assigning referrals.  With multiple users having full permissions to the Excel file, there was a high risk of data loss and errors, and when errors did take place, they caused unnecessary business process delays.

SSA Children Family Services needed to modernize, automate, secure, and streamline the DI process to speed up referral times and increase data and staff efficiencies.

ITD incorporated all the functionality of the spreadsheet process in the new Web Application and improved upon it by enabling supervisors and line staff across the county to work in the system simultaneously.  Many enhanced features were added to improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the assignment process.

Staff can now access the new DI app from anywhere, anytime, using any device.  DI data is safe and stored in a secure data center with cybersecurity and physical controls in place to protect against unauthorized access and compromised or lost data.  Since the app’s release in March 2022, SSA reported: 656 new cases created and distributed, a 75% decrease in time managing DI case assignment and administration, and 97% system uptime.

Dependency Investigating

ITD is committed to continuous improvement in operational efficiency. We have been working on streamlining internal operations and implementing automation for internal processes using DevOps methodology. Using various development tools, developers automate deployment and testing of the in-house applications. This effort leads to an increase in quality of our in-house applications, reduced implementation time, and improved communications with the customers and other teams within the department.

• Staying current with the Microsoft Windows Operating system using ring model of deployment
• Migrating departments to the modern M365 Apps for their business
• Eliminating GPOs and migrating necessary rules to Intune
• Encrypting devices using Microsoft BitLocker
• Implementing Multi-Factor authentication for users and admins
• Migrating user files and department file shares to Microsoft One Drive
• Leveraging Intune to push upgrades and updates to County devices
• Using cloud tools to modernize the provisioning of user devices

The eCRIMS modernization project converted all of the mainframe CORPUS green-screen functionality to the web based CRIMS platform. The new system created with the ITD, Superior Court, District Attorney, Sheriff, Probation, and the Public Defender working together creates a Criminal Justice Data Hub.

Phase 4, which included integration of Court’s Odyssey system with the various case management systems of the County’s Criminal Justice Partners, was completed July 2016. Currently work is in progress on decommissioning the legacy mainframe systems.

ITD successfully designed and launched a cloud-based application using Salesforce.com to automate the end to end application process used by the Social Services Agency (SSA) In-home Supportive Services Division (IHSS) social workers.

Alameda County IHSS division currently processes an average of 6,000 new applications for intake and about 18,000 reassessments annually. The eDocs application is designed to automate many of the manual steps of the intake process. Through integration to various source systems, the application pre-populates the forms needed by the social worker. The capability includes an electronic signature by the recipient and digital storage of the signed forms in the enterprise document management system. As a result, the application saves time and has a reduction in data entry errors. The projection for the time savings is estimated between 15 and 30 mins per application. When Phase III is completed in summer 2020, the projected time savings is about 4,000 – 8,000 man-hours yearly.

The eDocs application can generate all the necessary forms in five languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Farsi, and Vietnamese) thereby allowing SSA to serve the recipients of these languages better. Per state-mandate, these documents are digitally signed and emailed to the recipients during home visits thereby eliminating the paper printing and the additional effort for scanning, storing, printing, etc.

County of Alameda played a significant role in helping battle the October 2017 destructive wildfires that occurred in Northern California. Various county agencies were involved in providing staff and coordination for Fire and Rescue, Law Enforcement, Emergency, Public Health and Medical Mutual Aid services. ITD created this cross-collaboration tool, which allowed agencies to add resources, time, and cost information for services provided to tackle destructive and widespread wildfires in Napa and Sonoma Counties. This summary information could then be easily reviewed by Department Heads, the County Administrator’s Office, and the Board of Supervisors.

Implemented in October 2017.

Emergency Tracking System Sample Screenshots

eForm700 is an in-house system developed by the Information Technology Department in collaboration with the Clerk of the Board, with the goals of moving from a paper-based reporting system to a more transparent electronic system and improving the productivity of departmental filing officers by eliminating the manual work and providing all necessary information to view filing status and various reports.

Electronic filing makes it easier for the County’s officials to comply with reporting obligations and provides the public with the information in a more accessible and consistent format.

The system was tested and certified by the California Fair Political Practices Commission in 2019. The eForm 700 system was used County-wide for the 2020 filing year by over 800 filers. Access and use will be extended next year to all Board and Commissions and Alameda County schools to assist over 2000 filers.

While Microsoft Access Database applications can enhance certain business processes, they come with significant limitations, including restricted scalability, security vulnerabilities, and reliance on specific devices.  To tackle these challenges, the Information Technology Department (ITD) collaborated with the Social Services Agency to transform the MS Access Database applications into a .NET Core, Angular and SQL Server solution that is both scalable and secure, while also being mobile-friendly. Leveraging generative code, ITD streamlined the conversion process, adopting a modern technology stack. As a result, the initial application conversion time was reduced to 120 days, and subsequent applications were completed in just 45 days (a remarkable 63% reduction in time). Currently, using the Generative Code approach, application conversions take approximately 15 days (an impressive 88% reduction in overall conversion time).

Angular Code Generation

In June 2020, Environmental Health launched the state-of-the-art HHW Scanner system at all facilities eliminating the archaic paper-intensive process. The new system was developed in one year as an integrated three-part system comprised of an Android application (app) for scanner devices, web services for syncing scanned data to County databases, and a web application for HHW Program administrators to manage the system.

The new system was a huge success as it streamlined and automated the process, eliminated paper, improved data security, reduced staff time, centralized data, and generated accurate and timely reports. During the pandemic, it eliminated the use of high-touch items like pens and clipboards and assisted in social distancing. By using NASCAR style processing, the system improved customer service, allowed speedy check-ins, shorter customer wait times, and allowed HHW staff to safely serve more customers.

Since June 2020, due to the pandemic, all facilities allowed appointment-only participation and scanned 55,000 unique driver licenses and collected respective survey data. This is the highest number of customers the program has ever recorded, and the data produced is legible and accurate. The data entry is automated, and records are immediately accessible. With this new system, no transaction has gone unrecorded, which was not always the case with paper records. The residents can now be contacted in case of additional questions. The reports suggest that 30% of the residents were repeat customers. The reports also show a 5% – 10% increase every month in Alameda County resident participation. HHW staff is now able to target cities/locations that need awareness of this free program by using flyers and other modes of marketing and promotions. The HHW Scanner data and survey reports are sent on a regular basis to the Environmental Health management  who are elated on the tremendous success of the new HHW Scanner System.

The innovation lies in the HS2 Homefinder’s algorithm, which pairs homeless individuals or families with suitable housing based on their unique needs. It accounts for factors like location, amenities, size, and accessibility, optimizing successful placements. By integrating real-time data from housing databases and shelters, the system ensures accurate, current housing information for case managers and seekers. Stringent data privacy and security measures safeguard sensitive information.

HS2 Homefinder Screenshots

ITD also takes a “Cloud First” approach when considering technology solutions while also recognizing that there will always be a need for on premises infrastructure. With this in mind, what truly makes this solution “Hybrid” is that through this platform, integrations will exist with public cloud providers so that users can choose to provision resources either on premises, in a public cloud, or any combination in between. Additionally, users of the Hybrid Cloud Platform will have the ability to self-service shift existing workloads from on premises to a public cloud and vice versa. All of these conveniences will be available from a single management console via the Hybrid Cloud Platform so users only need to go to one place to manage their on premises resources as well as their public cloud resources.

The workplace before and after:

workplace before

workplace after (hybrid)

ProSys, driven by the dynamic functionalities of Salesforce and Microsoft, facilitates a streamlined approach when ITD engages in the procurement of equipment, licenses, and systems, or provides essential support through staff augmentation for county agencies. The system initiates a proposal, which follows a customized approval workflow designed for each county agency.

On a bi-monthly cadence, the system generates a comprehensive Board letter for the Board of Supervisors (BOS). This document serves as a comprehensive compendium, encapsulating over 150 approved proposals, a financial recommendation, and a Budget tracking form. The seamless integration of ProSys not only expedites the approval process but also enhances the transparency and accountability of ITD’s engagements, fostering a more agile and responsive mechanism for handling the diverse needs of county agencies. In adopting this solution, ITD and the county agencies have not only modernized their operational framework but have also fortified their capacity to navigate the county procurement with efficiency.

ITD Proposal Management System (ProSys)

ITD has rolled out the self-service module of the ITD Service Desk software (Ivanti) to all employees in the County. Now users can report incidents and make requests related to services provided by ITD. Once created, users are also able to track their incidents and service requests.

Implemented Q2 2020

Self Service Screenshots

Measure A1: Between 2010 and 2015, State and Federal funding for affordable housing decreased by 89% and the County and its Cities faced a shortfall of over 60,000 homes affordable to low-income families. Alameda County stepped up to this crisis. The Measure A1 Bond program provides $580 million in funding to create and preserve affordable housing for residents most in need – seniors, veterans, people with disabilities and frontline workers. The Measure A1 General Obligation Bond Funding provides housing resources for people struggling with housing costs, provides supportive housing to people experiencing homelessness, and it helps families buy homes, a critical step for building wealth and financial stability.

Measure A1 (acgov.org)

For our Social Media Platform our KPI is followers.  We use customized tracking links to measure how effective the messaging is in campaigns and our social media analytics dashboard measures engagement and compares it to nearby counties. The tool also gives recommended post times which are used to maximize engagement.

The KPI for newsletter/messaging system is subscribers. Sign-ups are promoted across county websites and departments are encouraged to leverage the tool to reach constituents as well.

Alameda County uses Microsoft Teams to chat, meet and collaborate with internal and external partners.  The employees of the County use Teams for project collaboration, staff meetings, crisis management, one-on-one conversations and much more.  Here are the Teams usage stats for March 2023 to Feb 2024.

The County has adopted a “mobile first” design philosophy and is applying it to all new websites including the redesigned ACGOV.org, allowing the site to be viewed on any desktop or mobile device. Using a minimalist approach, the usual navigation bars were removed and the search bar emphasized. The search functionality provides various filters and suggested keywords to aid locating the content faster. For those users who still like to click through a site, key links were added through out to help the user locate important and highly visited pages. This new search-centric implementation provides the public the opportunity to easily locate County services and information without the need in understanding government hierarchy. ITD will continue to improve and enhance the site with the user experience in mind.

New Acgov.org

The new Boards and Commission application not only gives the Clerk of the Board better tools to fill and monitor the over 650 board positions in Alameda County, but it also provides the members of the Board of Supervisors new insight into which positions are vacant or will need to be filled for their individual districts. The new application integrates with the websites for each individual board or commission, so that any changes to the memberships made in the app are immediately reflected on the websites for each board or commission. And lastly, the Salesforce platform for this new application will allow ITD to efficiently add new features and enhancements to further improve the usefulness of this application by allowing members of the public to submit their applications directly into the system for review and processing.

Implemented October 2017.

Boards and Commissions Legacy System and Upgraded System Screenshots

The Alameda County Data Sharing Initiative provides the public with easy online access to records and information about County business and operations. The Initiative aims to enhance the County’s commitment to transparent government and to encourage civic engagement.

ITD continues to support the initiative by maintaining the County’s data sharing website and by hosting community hackathons.

Alameda County Data Sharing Initiative

A complete overhaul of the in-house Property Tax Systems is under way. ITD developed a roadmap for the migration of the property tax systems from Mainframe to the browser-based modern system. The team implements at least one roadmap project every year. In 2020, the team automated processing of the tax refunds and rolled out a taxpayer portal which allowed taxpayers to check a status of the refund online in real time.

Updated March 2021

Refund Status Lookup – Tax Analysis Division – Auditor-Controller – Alameda County (acgov.org)

The Alameda County Superior Court, the Alameda County Probation Department, and the Alameda County Sheriff and other police agencies all worked together to create a system that will allow pretrial evaluations, assessments, and judicial reviews to happen efficiently. County’s CRIMS (Consolidated Records Information Management System), a consolidated system that is used by all public safety and criminal justice organizations, played a crucial role in creating interfaces with Probation’s Tyler Supervision (TS) Case Management System and with Court’s Tyler Odyssey Case Management System, to create a seamless automation.

New Employment Opportunities Landing Page, Logo, and Tagline

The objectives of the TDMA Migration Project are as follows:

• Provide Faster Access to TDMA Radios
• Provide greater services to our customers
• Provide ITD Radio Services better control over the EBRCSA radios used by Alameda County and outside agencies

Usage models indicate by doubling the network capacity with the TDMA Migration Project, we will provide current users unparalleled connectivity for the next ten years or more. The TDMA system upgrade will also allow other regional users to join EBRCSA, furthering regional interoperability and providing potential ITD Radio Services opportunities.

The MPLS Backbone Implementation Project will consist of upgrading the existing Aviat TRUpoint microwave radios to the latest ECLIPSE microwave radios. Several microwave paths will be upgraded from 10 GHz to 11 GHz. Along with the ECLIPSE microwave radios and path upgrades, we will be adding an integrated MPLS router to position EBRCSA for Layer 3 services and network scalability.

The Encryption Project expands our neighboring communities interoperability and ensures DOJ regulatory compliance. EBRCSA has approximately 14,000 radios and approximately 190 consoles that require a programming technician to implement encryption. Careful coordination among all law enforcement and cooperating agencies is critical to maintain interoperability during the implementation of this project. We will also be upgrading the radios to accept multi-key and over-the-air programming at the same time we add encryption.

The objective of the program was to automate the procurement request submission and reporting process to make the Technology Acquisition Review transparent, fast, and user-friendly. The solution was planned to be developed in late 2021/ early 2022 and go live by March 2022. Before making technology purchases, departments submit technology initiatives to the Information Technology Department (ITD) for review and recommendations with the goal of eliminating the duplication of systems and services, increasing system availability while improving services throughout the County, and having a consistent approach to implementing, maintaining, and enhancing cybersecurity capabilities.

TAR program has been set up to address the following policies in the county:

1)Centralized Technology Policy: Encompass new technologies and encourage agencies to partner with ITD for the management of common technologies to achieve greater efficiencies and enhanced security protection.

2)Cybersecurity Policy: To protect the county’s technology and information assets by promoting consistent behavior across agencies, as well as providing guidelines to information owners on how their technology and informational assets can and should be managed and secured.

With the use of technology to automate the process of reviewing the request from a department, the tedious manual process has been greatly simplified by asking the right questions needed to decide if a technology purchase is needed or not. This new automation has made the process transparent and accountable with the automatic routing of approvals. The streamlined process is also accessible across departments and is mandated as part of a procurement request thereby making it possible to know all the technology needs in the county.

Technology Acquisition Request (TAR)

In November of 2020, the On-Boarding system was upgraded to the latest version, which has and improved user friendly interface. System can be accessed on any device including mobile phones. Users are able to digitally sign the on-boarding related documents, upload required I-9 documents such as driver’s license, social security card, etc.

In August of 2019 we will be upgrading our PeopleSoft HR and Payroll system to the latest delivered version of PeopleTools 8.56 and PUM 28. New upgrade system will be current with the latest delivered version by Oracle.

In March of 2021, as per the bi-annual schedule, PeopleSoft Financial System was upgraded to the latest delivered version of PeopleTools 8.58 and PUM 37 along with an upgrade of both the infrastructure and database. As always, this upgrade was achieved completely by in-house staff, was completed on time, and went without a hitch. The Auditor and GSA user departments were integral in a smooth deployment and users encountered no issues after upgrade.

In August of 2021, we upgraded our PeopleSoft HR and Payroll system to the latest delivered version of PeopleTools 8.58 and PUM 36. The new upgraded system is current with the latest delivered version by Oracle.

alcolink dashboard screenshot

The State allowed Board meetings to be held virtually. Alameda County chose to develop a hybrid format that allowed for a combination of a physical and a virtual meeting experience that was safe and secure. The County used Zoom Webinar for safe public meetings. The board room was upgraded with AV equipment to support virtual meetings. New processes and procedures were created for the Clerk of the Board (CBS), ITD, Board of Supervisors (BOS), and the public to participate. Closed captioning was added for ADA compliance. A library and talent was created to support public facing zoom meetings for use by all departments/agencies. Training of new procedures was established for the COB, ITD, BOS, departments/agencies heads, and the public to use the new platform.

To support remote work, the Assessor needed to eliminate paper documents mailed in by the taxpayers and the cities for property assessments. In collaboration with ITD, the Assessor team updated their website with eForms for taxpayers to send documents electronically. The information was made available to the Assessor through their IMPROVE system. The documents were uploaded and stored electronically including millions of archived paper documents which were scanned and stored electronically for easy retrieval.

In 2018, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors (BOS) updated its 10-year Strategic Vision using Google’s 10x Thinking. The development of Vision 2026 included numerous brainstorming sessions involving County leadership, community representatives, and a renowned futurist to discuss challenges likely to affect local services in the coming decade and in how residents will expect to be served by local government. The plan is used to develop all departmental strategic plans, budget submissions, and any initiative submitted to the board.

View Virtual First projects

In April, Governor Newsom issued an executive order to officiate marriages online. The Auditor-Controller in collaboration with ITD implemented a contact-free, electronic payment solution. The application and marriage certificate process became virtual with the very first virtually officiated marriage in Alameda County being officiated in May 2020. ITD created a workflow to electronically route and sign the marriage certificate using DocuSign. This new business processes supported virtual marriages. Services were advertised on social media and the Clerk-Recorder web site.

Solution Benefits Summary:

• Supports mobility, collaboration, and security
• Not tied to a specific geography or device
• Better support for remote work
• Cloud based solution providing flexibility and lower cost
• Alignment with ACGOV Vision 2026 Goal of Accessible Infrastructure

This project is in progress and as of March 2021, approximately 700 staff have been converted to VMI.