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Q&A
CFB technology upgrades and innovation strategy
2:29:37
·
4 min
Amanda Melillo details the Campaign Finance Board's plans for technology upgrades and innovation, including the creation of a new strategy products and innovation division. Council Member Brannan asks about areas where the CFB is behind technologically.
- New strategy products and innovation division with 15 new positions
- Shift from in-house custom coding to off-the-shelf products with customization
- Migration of data to cloud storage (Azure)
- Implementation of Salesforce for external communications
- Development of new application for public funds payments using low-code/no-code solutions
Amanda Melillo
2:29:37
So I'll talk about the positions that we've requested adding.
2:29:42
First of all I'll talk about a division that I started as part of my new role that I took on in September.
2:29:47
I am forming a strategy products and innovation division to drive our strategic plan and innovation across the agency.
2:29:55
So I will claim credit for having the biggest staffing request because I'm starting from building that division from the ground up.
2:30:02
I requested 15 positions for to build two new teams.
2:30:07
One is a new product strategy team.
2:30:10
When Paul first took on his role as executive director this was one thing that he identified right away that I think has been a major gap in our agency's innovation in the past.
2:30:21
Where I think that we wanted to fill in these gaps and have a team that was really focused on strategy for technological innovation.
2:30:29
What do we build when?
2:30:31
And why do we build it and who are the constituents that we are best serving?
2:30:36
So what this team will be doing is really creating and leading this product roadmap that is going to take us through the four year election cycle and beyond.
2:30:46
As is the case with many government agencies, we have a lot of legacy technology that we have to rapidly overhaul and technology is changing every day.
2:30:57
So this product team is really going to focus not only on modernizing us to where we need to be today, but also where we need to be for the twenty twenty nine election cycle and beyond.
2:31:12
In terms of our technology?
2:31:14
I would say it's a mix right now.
2:31:16
I think for a long time the agency pursued a strategy of building a lot of our technology in house.
2:31:23
So it's heavily customized code and that's just not the direction that a lot of the technology field is moving towards.
2:31:30
So one of the major shifts that we've made in the past couple of years is to really start to work with one, taking off the shelf products and customizing them rather than building from scratch.
2:31:44
That enables us to customize for our needs but actually sort of like get to market faster to adopt that terminology for a moment.
2:31:54
I'm going to use an example of something that we deployed recently which is Salesforce which we have started using for all of our external communications.
2:32:02
In years past our team might have looked at replicating that in house and that's just not how any agency does business anymore.
2:32:11
So one of the things that we have done is started exploring off the shelf solutions, particularly with low code, no code applications.
2:32:18
I think a really good example where on the cusp of launching a new application for cutting public funds payments, Right now we are making those payments out of our legacy system, which is known as KFS.
2:32:31
This application that we're using now requires a lot less coding in the back end and a lot less customization, and it's just much easier to build applications faster.
2:32:41
So these are the sorts of things we're looking for and particularly what is our strategy for when we engage with outside consultants who have in house expertise and can build technology faster versus what do we use our in house team for in terms of maintenance and continued enhancements.
2:33:00
So that is one thing I'd say.
2:33:01
Another major change that we have made within the past year actually is that we have moved our data set.
2:33:09
We have a very complex data set as I'm sure anyone who's ever had to file a disclosure statement can attest to.
2:33:17
Our in house database for as long as I've been at the agency which is over ten years now has been housed on premises.
2:33:24
Literally in a server room in our agency.
2:33:27
This is also not how people do business anymore so one of the things that we did was took our data set and moved it to the cloud.
2:33:34
So that our data is now in a data lake in Azure and that will enable us to build applications on top faster.
2:33:41
So this is the back end work and some of the strategy work that has already taken place so that we can start to build things for candidates, for campaigns, for modernizing our audit process on the back end that will just I think be an end to end improvement in how we do customer service.
2:33:57
So that's really where we're looking to invest in the upcoming year.
Justin Brannan
2:31:07
Where do you think there are, where are the holes?
2:31:09
I mean where are we behind?
Félix Matos Rodríguez
2:31:13
Yeah.