Current IT Projects

Project Description: Delaware wants residents and visitors to be at the center of everything we do. The design and functionality of Delaware’s digital government experience must be well-crafted, intuitive, accessible, and offer fast and focused transactions that result in a satisfying experience. Delivering on this outcome requires partnership across state agencies, and a commitment to the on-going evolution of Delaware’s digital platform. The Digital Government Foundation Program will draw from best practices found in successful agency initiatives such as the Department of State’s One Stop and Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s Digital DNREC. These programs highlight both the demand for an improved digital experience and an increase in customer usage and satisfaction. In addition, user experience research, application and transactional data analysis and resident dialog will derive priorities and expectations. The culmination of this multi-layered technology and end user platform will result in a transformative experience for Delaware’s residents and visitors by providing digital access to an increasing number of government services.

Current Status: The Digital Government Platform Foundation program is progressing through the Build phase with the technical integration environment completed on December 4th. Pilot agencies may now confirm connectivity from participating applications and further develop technical and transactional requirements for implementation. Incremental releases will begin in March 2024 with full Go DE portal functionality available in 3Q24.

Project Description: This project will encompass three 13 to 20+ year old statewide PeopleSoft applications – Payroll Human Resource Statewide Technology (PHRST), First State Financials (FSF), Comprehensive Retirement Information System (CRIS-Pension). We will capture as-is business processes, conduct fit-gap effort with critical statewide stakeholders, and identify and review customizations for possible business process standardizations. The deliverables are complete statewide requirements and recommendation(s) to ERP Executive Sponsors for next steps including RFP.

Current Status: Feedback sessions with a sampling of representatives from centralized and non-centralized agencies, school districts, charter schools, and higher education intitutions are complete. The project team is working to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will measure the effectiveness of a new system in meeting specific performance objectives while preparing the RFP document. Analysis is also being conducted on the State's other large scale ERP implementations.

Project Description: The Delaware Emergency Management Agency is seeking to implement a grants management solution for their grant funding opportunities. The goal is to integrate the DEMA workflows into the DSHS Grants Management Suite application, which has been implemented for the Office of the Secretary and the Office of Highway Safety. The project has also operationalized the State of Emergency Driving Waiver Program within the same application. The targeted implementation date for all DEMA workflows is July 2024.

Current Status: The project team has completed testing for the Homeland Security Grant Program workflow (HSGP). The DEMA Homeland Security Grant Program is live in production for grant years 2020-2022. The team is planning to go live with the 2023 applications by the end of December 2023. The team has completed a review of the process flow requirements for the remaining grant programs to ensure the path forward includes any and all scope changes created from the results of the configuration and testing of the Homeland Security Grant Program. The DEMA Leadership team has approved Change Request #3 which will cover all changes to the remaining workflows.

Project Description: The purpose of this project is to select and implement a system that allows for the Department of Agriculture's Poultry and Animal Health unit to conduct their routine operations digitally.

Current Status: The project is currently in the execution phase as the USAHERDS test environment is live. Also, end user training has been completed and user acceptance testing has begun.

Project Description: DTI is comprehensively addressing the broadband infrastructure challenges throughout Delaware. The broadband funding stream is the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). This provides a singular opportunity to fund many of the initiatives identified by DTI as critical to achieving best-in-class broadband access for all Delaware residents. Over 11,600 addresses have been identified, and DTI will be working with several federal funding opportunities to provide service over the next several years. ARPA 18 month project will see the installations for at least 4,318 constituents.

Current Status: Given the additional funding made accessible through several federal programs specifically targeting broadband efforts, Delaware has revised its original investment plan of ARPA dollars to maximize the potential of all available resources. Beginning in September 2022, an 18 month project using ARPA funding began. The ARPA project started with planned deployments to 4318 households/businesses and has grown to 6200 addresses. Vendor Statements of Work are complete and up-to-date with the three ARPA engaged carriers: Verizon, Mediacom and Comcast. Regular project meetings with each carrier are underway. The broadband internet sites are updated with the latest information regarding broadband deployment and mapping. Based on the initial SOWs, the project is nearly complete with approximately 99% of ARPA designated addresses now having access to a wired high speed broadband connection. 6200 addresses are now broadband served with only 85 remaining. Each carrier is preparing to complete the required end-of-project speed and latency testing. As a result of additional available ARPA Broadband funds, DTI is currently working with each carrier on ARPA SOW amendments to serve additional locations. These additional funds will bring broadband to another approximately 400 locations. The team expects work to begin by end-of-month January 2024.

Project Description: Secure End User Services (SEUS) is the active phase of IT centralization. SEUS offers the greatest chance for Delaware to modernize and evolve its IT infrastructure and resources in a way that best supports agency business needs to meet citizen expectations now and into the future. SEUS will equitably deliver the essential technologies and tools for a productive, secure State workforce. Agencies and workers benefit from standard enterprise tools, security, training, governance, and 24x7x365 support. SEUS is comprised of six enterprise components: Service Desk, Desktop, Network and Connectivity, Voice Services, Email and Collaboration, and Security Suite. These critical services are funded by a consumption-based (per-employee/month) cost recovery model. In accordance with Senate Bill 153, all Executive Branch technical personnel and assets will be centralized to deliver technology in the most efficient and consistent manner possible with the resources the state has available. IT centralization offers the greatest chance for Delaware to modernize and evolve its IT infrastructure and resources in a way that best supports agency business needs to meet citizen expectations now and into the future.

Current Status: DTI has effectively analyzed the organization, infrastructure, services, vendor contracts and financials to develop target state objectives. The IT Centralization program is moving forward in a phased approach with focus on a Secure End User Service package and the resources required to support its enterprise-wide delivery. Cost model user consumption level information was provided to OMB in August to support target budget discussions that will determine agency funding for SEUS agency deployments for three of the six service towers. This process will be activated in fiscal year 2025 (July 2024) for Email and Collaboration, Security Suite, and Voice services.

Project Description: The new Fire School and Fire Commission 'Learning Management for Emergency Professionals" (LMEP) application went live, July 2021. Phase 2 is under-way which includes new features currently being implemented in a priority order. Phase 2 includes a new Client portal and Student portal for clients and students to securely access their information online.

Current Status: The new Client Portal is live with 75% of clients registered. The Client Portal allows clients to view online their account information, affiliated students, invoices, and renew their annual ambulance certifiicates. The new Student Portal is in testing which will allow Students to register for classes online. The client and student online payments module is currently under development.

Project Description: DNREC WHS seeks a more consistent method of tracking response to environmental incidents, including field report submission.

Current Status: The project team continues to work with DNREC Waste and Hazardous Substances - Emergency Response Branch and a vendor to bring this project to its completion. Many of the requirements for this project required functionality that was either custom or newly introduced by the vendor. The team continues working through the system testing with the assistance of the vendor and plans to have the client start testing early in the first quarter of 2024.

Project Description: DNREC Division of Waste and Hazardous Substance Tank Compliance Section wishes to develop a means to collect tank inspection data in the field and store that data in a centralized environmental database. This project will include the migration of currently stored data as well as communication to/from an existing environmental database.

Current Status: DNREC Division of Waste and Hazardous Substance Tank Compliance Section has contracted with a vendor to implement two tank inspection forms within an existing environmental database. The project team has completed several interations of data migration over to the environmental database. This data will be used to prefill the inspection forms for use in the field. The vendor continues to work on the workflow for the inpection forms and the DTI project team continues to work on the data workflow for data reveived from the field. User testing will take place later in the first quarter of 2024.

Project Description: This project will modernize the Parks web site. The design focus will be on mobile-first given that 70% of web site visitors utilize a mobile device during peak seasonality.

Current Status: Since the project began, business requirements were completed, a vendor has been selected, and project planning has been completed. The project is currently in the design phase. Delaware has reviewed preliminary design concepts from the vendor and are working to finalize the overall theme and design by end of the year.

Project Description: The purpose of this project is to develop a Licensing Management / Enforcement system with workflow for the Office of the Marijuana Commissioner (OMC) and Division of Alcohol and Tobacco Enforcement (DATE).

Current Status: The project is currently in the planning phase and the project team is in the process of gathering requirements and documenting business processes.

Project Description: Most of the CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioner) units that cool the Biggs data center are from the 1980s and are no longer supported by warranty or vendors. The CRAC units are not functioning at full capacity and are not located in proper alignment to the servers to be able to cool properly. Servers are scattered throughout the whitespace making it difficult to cool the areas effectively, and this increases the risk for downtime for IT equipment in the data center. This effort will upgrade the critical infrastructure hub’s carpentry, electrical systems, mechanical (HVAC, etc.), Fire Suppression and Telecommunications systems to avoid catastrophic failure.

Current Status: Inital reviews of the statement of work, provided by the vendor are underway. DTI will finalize the review and provide final versions back to the vendor post Deputy Attorney General reviews.

Project Description: DTI Telecom Team intends to purchase and roll out Cisco Webex Cloud voice. Present day State of Delaware Voice customers utilize Cisco on premises voice services. Our goal in implementing cloud voice is to address the following: Ray Baum's Act e911 compliance issues, end of life phone hardware in February 2024, allow for secure and scalable use of softphones statewide, and reduce the workload on the Enterprise Voice team. Cloud-based voice will allow DTI to roll out Softphones in both state facilities and to remote users. This will drastically reduce the need for purchasing and life cyling agency handsets. It will also allow customers greater flexibility in where they can access voice services and reduces/eliminates the need for on premise hardware, while immensely increasing the levels of redundancy for voice centric operations.

Current Status: Work has begun to set up and test the cloud based version of Webex and transiton the first three agencies to the new system.

Project Description: DTI is going to create a Citrix Platform to allow remote State users access to applications that require special access and other platforms that may need firewall rules to access. The goal is to move away from the need for remote desktops to access these apps and streamline the management processes.

Current Status: A base platform running Citrix has been built and tested. This new platform has been branded as Delaware Desktop-as-a-Service or DE-DaaS. The team wrapped up the migration of the Horizon VDI apps over to DE DaaS with the last two applications, Teammate and Intellinx. These applications were tested by each respective business area to ensure the quality of the delivery. Once testing was complete, the team collected documentation, performed two weeks of hyper-care and then closed out the phase. Separately, DTI is now formulating a plan for what Phase 2 will entail, i.e., migrate more apps and desktops, begin migrating agency users, etc. The scope for Phase 2 is being determined.

Project Description: The goal of this project is to create a ServiceNow out-of-the-box-based one-ticket lifecycle that supports multiple types of requests and the various tasks, approvals, and delivery methods required. This project will require verification of current state and target processes and will take into consideration the multiple request fulfillment workflows between DTI and our agency partners.

Current Status: This project is currently in the final stages of the Execution phase of the project lifecycle for Phase I. Sprints #1 - #5 have all been completed as well as associated Sprint Testing. The Showback Meeting/Demo Sessions have also been completed for each of the assigned Sprints. Post end-to-end demo remediation is actively taking place in preparation for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Phase 1 of this project is due to be completed by the end of February 2024 since two additional Sprints were added on to the original schedule. Phase 1 is inclusive of the first three Process Workflows. Phase 2 workflow planning is also actively taking place while work on Phase I is coming to a close. The overall project is scheduled to be completed in April 2024.

Project Description: This project addresses the third phase of development for the Department of Safety and Homeland Safety Grant Management Suite tool. The project will address improvements to the Office of Highway Safety grant management budget module, incorporation of the Car Seating Fitting Station database, and implementing a new workflow to support the Office of Highway Safety Paid Media Campaign project management functionality.

Current Status: The DSHS Office of Highway Safety (OHS) team is working to enhance their instance of the DSHS Grant Management Suite to improve their budget management module, add additional fields that will support federal reporting requirements, and enhance their Schedule B reporting process. OHS will also be incorporating three new workflows into their application to include the Paid Media Campaign project management, the Car Seat Fitting Inspection work process, and the Seat Belt Survey collection process. Additional milestones were added to the project scope with the recently approved Change Request that was completed. The project is in the Execution phase. The project is due to be completed by end of February 2024.

Project Description: The OMB Land Inventory project is working towards a solution that will establish a centralized enterprise geodatabase to address the realty property and asset data needs of various state agencies.

Current Status: The Office of Management and Budget, Office of State Planning (OMB OSPC) business area received FY24 funding for the project solution. At this time, OMB is awaiting the finalization of the contract phase of the process being administered by GSS. The business area anticipates that once the appropriate contract and approvals are in place, the notice to proceed should commence by early-mid January 2024.

Project Description: DNREC seeks to replace most, if not all, of its permitting, licensing and registration applications with a dynamic and customer friendly portal. This cloud based solution will interface with online payment acceptance, First Map, EQuIS, compliance monitoring, as well as document management systems.

Current Status: Customer Care support continues for the Division of Air Quality's Minor/Small Source programs that were recently deployed. Completed Testing for the Division of Watershed and Stewardship's Shoreline and Waterways program and preparing for January deployment. Development continues for Division of Air Quality's REG 2 programs and the Division of Water Permits and Licensing Testing Module.

Project Description: DTI continues to replace end-of-life switches throughout the state.

Current Status: DTI continues to make significant progress on the replacement of network equipment and has installed over 600 total switches to date; Phase 1 (155), Phase 2 (115), and phase 3 (337). Remaining switches will be completed the first week of 2024.

Project Description: DTI is working to bring the agency into the DTI support model for State agencies.

Current Status: DTI has successfully completed the initial migration of the agency to the state network, which includes data connectivity, voice platforms, collaborative services, and file share capabilities across all locations. DTI continues to support follow-on tasks winthin the project. 1. Prepare a new server environment for software deployment and migration of DSHA applications and databases. 2. Configuration of community rooms to the new state standards. 3. Upgrade of phones that are out of warranty. 4. The personnel onboarding process is being tested, and communications are being developed for distribution.