By Miriam Barcellona Ingenito, Director of FI$Cal
I am pleased to release our second departmental Strategic Plan! The 2021-25 Strategic Plan highlights our mission, vision, and goals for the next five years. Our customers continue to be our top priority and this plan is our commitment to continue to enhance our system functionality and services using innovative solutions.
In the Strategic Plan you’ll find information on how the FI$Cal system integrates and standardizes the processes for statewide budgeting, procurement, cash management, and accounting, providing all the functionality to support these processes. The plan also details the financial transparency portal – the website that allows the public to monitor state spending – and the FI$Cal Service Center, which provides system support. It highlights our “coming soon” FI$Cal Learning Center, a one-stop experience to help end users become skilled FI$Cal users. Additionally, the plan includes information about the numerous self-service tools available in the system such as the Operational Insights Dashboard, the MEC Automation Tool and FI$Bot, our virtual chatbot.
Staying true to our vision, we are increasing our use of technology as a means to deliver high-quality service and a much-improved customer experience. We boosted the capabilities of FI$Bot with features like artificial intelligence, to help our customers achieve their goals. We are introducing a new cloud-based business intelligence tool to bolster departments’ ability to explore, analyze, and report their own data. Additionally, we are deploying robotic process automation, or RPA, in a number of important areas, which can automate many repetitive tasks that workers perform.
As you will see in this Strategic Plan, we have a bold new focus on education and training. Our newly formed Workforce Development Center (WDC) is fully up and running within the Business Operations and Solutions Division (BOSD), and we recently completed a pilot and will be launching the FI$Cal Learning Center later this month. The Learning Center, the central tool utilized by the WDC and our clients, will house current and centralized content available to end users, improving how they search for and interact with educational content. Additionally, BOSD will continue with online services such as User Support Labs, virtual instructor-led training courses, forums, town halls and FI$CalTv webcasts to inform and train our end users.
At FI$Cal, our customers stand at the forefront of what we do, and I’m happy to share our Strategic Plan that outlines how we will continue our mission to support our customers so they can manage the state’s finances transparently and more efficiently.