By Kanuri Murty, Chief Information Officer/Deputy Director of Information Technology
Over the last year, the Department of FISCal (FI$Cal) has continued to make progress on the roadmap of activities as planned. After successfully onboarding two deferred departments, namely, Department of Technology and Department of Rehabilitation, in July 2024, FI$Cal recently onboarded the California State Auditor, an exempt department, in July 2025.
In addition to our onboarding success, we are working on several information technology projects which will create more efficiencies in system processes, and ensure a secure system for years to come.
We are currently in the process of rolling out an enhanced solution for invoice processing, by enabling suppliers to electronically submit and monitor the status of invoices. This solution provides expanded approval options, automatically creates FI$Cal vouchers, provides electronic dispute capabilities, and tracks invoice aging. It is expected to reduce time-consuming manual work and improve efficiencies for departments.
We have made steady progress on our cloud journey. After completing the planned migration of our back-office infrastructure and tools to cloud-based solutions, we continued our journey to the cloud with building infrastructure on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We started this effort by building non-production environments that are needed to meet the short-term needs of the roadmap activities. Then, over the coming months, we will focus our efforts in maturing our operational procedures to maintain and manage the cloud infrastructure in order to make our processes efficient, repeatable and optimized.
In parallel to the cloud journey, we continued to maintain and manage our on-premises infrastructure by updating them to latest the supported versions. We completed a major update of servers and middleware and implemented enhanced hardening. We evaluated the update path or upgrade options for all of our infrastructure and middleware to keep them current and secure. Now, we are currently analyzing upgrades to PeopleTools, Oracle Database v23 ai and PeopleSoft Financials. This ongoing evaluation ensures the system remains up-to-date and modern well into the future.
With the fast-evolving technical landscape, we continuously look for opportunities to improve and enhance the security solutions we have implemented. In the coming months, we will be looking at solutions that will help us move towards zero-trust architecture, which will further increase our security. We will continue our efforts to maintain the highest levels of security at FI$Cal through the people, processes, and technology that make up our security defenses.