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Discussion of the Host system for managing asylum seeker data
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Council Member Julie Won inquires about the Host system, a centralized platform for managing asylum seeker data across city agencies. CTO Matthew C. Fraser provides details on the system's development, technical aspects, and data access policies.
- Host system built on Salesforce government cloud to manage asylum seeker intake and distribution
- Discussion of data access controls and sharing between city agencies
- Addressing concerns about potential federal government access to the data stored in Salesforce
Julie Won
0:43:05
Okay and my last question is about I don't have a lot of information on it but we've heard a lot in bits and pieces from especially from health and hospitals while they were running the Herx that OTI had built a platform on host where you were the first centralized platform for all city agencies including DHS, H and H, OEM and HPD were all using a centralized database to collect all the migrant data that were taken in.
0:43:33
Can you give us a status of what that looks like?
0:43:36
Who's running that platform?
0:43:37
Is it all internal?
0:43:38
Is there an external contractor?
0:43:40
And what are the boundaries of how you're sharing that information if at all with the federal government?
Matthew C. Fraser
0:43:45
Yeah.
0:43:46
So when the asylum seeker crisis started to take fault started to take hold and we were looking at managing thousands of people coming into the city, we had to upgrade the existing capabilities for the agencies that were providing the shelter services because their systems weren't built to handle the type of capacity and the specific cases around like the asylum seeker program.
0:44:15
The New York City Homeless laws and programs were built to shelter New York City Homeless.
0:44:21
They were they did not contemplate a humanitarian crisis.
0:44:24
So out of that was birthed the host system.
0:44:28
The host system was the first case management system that was built to manage intake and distribution of people after they came in to the agencies.
0:44:37
And then once they got into the agencies, the agencies processes took root and they began to manage those populations while sharing that information back into host.
0:44:47
Currently, we are the system's manager, meaning that we build the system and we support it.
0:44:53
When it comes to managing the data and the distribution and accesses of the data, OTI doesn't make decisions in that space.
0:45:00
The business owners of the system make decisions on who has access and what type of access that they should have.
0:45:08
In terms of the specific access policies, I would defer to those at DSS, health and hospitals and NICEM.
0:45:19
They can give more accurate information around who has access, what type of access they have and what they've authorized.
Julie Won
0:45:26
So which cloud is it on?
0:45:28
Is it internal as well?
Matthew C. Fraser
0:45:30
So the system is built on the back end of the system is built on Salesforce on the government cloud which means it's US based cloud and we use Salesforce as a platform.
Julie Won
0:45:42
Okay.
0:45:42
So you guys took an out of the box CRM from Salesforce and customized it for our usage?
Matthew C. Fraser
0:45:48
That is correct.
Julie Won
0:45:49
Okay.
0:45:49
And does Salesforce have access to our data as well that
Edwin Pemberton
0:45:52
is No.
Matthew C. Fraser
0:45:53
The way that customer data is controlled is it's built into a customer tenant.
0:45:58
Natively, they do not have access to our tenant so they can't pull information out.
0:46:04
But again, as they are the service provider, I mean and you factor in any possibility, they provide the service.
0:46:11
So it's not inconceivable that they could promote themselves to be a manager in our account.
0:46:18
But that that would Yeah.
0:46:21
Yeah.
0:46:22
That would be that has never happened to the best of our knowledge, not just with us with any customer.
0:46:28
So we have no reason to believe that that would be the case.
Julie Won
0:46:31
Okay.
0:46:31
And for the city agencies themselves, you're saying that they independently will choose who they give access to but can they access each other's data cause I thought the whole entire point of host was that they can cross share the data across all the city agencies.
Matthew C. Fraser
0:46:44
Yeah.
0:46:45
So you have a thing called attribute based access control which means that you may be able to see the record but you may not be able to see specific attributes about the record based on the agency and your role within the agency.
0:46:57
So we've been very careful about when we share information, making sure that people only got the information that they needed to do their specific function and not oversharing information that gives people too much.
Julie Won
0:47:09
Okay.
0:47:10
My last question before I wrap up is are are you concerned at all that Salesforce if they were subpoenaed to give the information that they would have to to the federal government?
Matthew C. Fraser
0:47:19
I'm I'm not concerned in I'm not concerned in the slightest and and part of the reason for that is because this challenge is not or this environment is not unlike any other challenge that they would face legally for any other thing that they would need access to.
0:47:38
And to the best of our knowledge, our partners in this space whether it be Salesforce or the parent cloud that they sit on top of, they tend when it comes to request for customer data, defer back to
Jennifer Gutiérrez
0:47:50
the customer to fulfill those requests.
0:47:54
Yep.
0:47:55
Thank you so much council member Wan.
0:47:57
Next we have council member Bacher followed by council member Holden and then council member Brewer.