CHALLENGE:
The responsibilities of the Board of Equalization is to register customers, process returns, perform audits, and collect tax liabilities. Their efforts are hampered by the current technology landscape. Much of the functionality resides in disparate systems that are only integrated through batch programs. These systems are difficult to modify to management changes brought about by legislative mandate. Customer relationship management is limited by a lack of system integration and dated technology assets. Self-service capabilities are inadequate to serve the California citizenry and pale in comparison to what is provided by private organizations or even within other state revenue agencies. Business Intelligence is also severely limited by inadequate data quality and data mining capabilities.
ACTION:
Kiefer Consulting partnered with Board of Equalization to build a deliverable tracking tool which tracks 44 deliverables for the CROS project. It facilitates prompt and accurate data entry by using a browser-based interface. It also enforces data consistency and integrity across all deliverables. The tool utilized SharePoint 2013 as a platform. It provided the end-to-end processing including tracking deliverables by calculating dates, sending notifications and providing reports and dashboards for team (Contractor and State) member performance.
RESULTS:
Kiefer worked with the BOE to create a deliverable tracking tool for tracking project deliverables and for producing project accountability reports. Automated workflows were used to send email notifications to different groups about critical activities and tasks. Reports and dashboards were developed to measure the effectiveness of the State and Contractor with the goal of improving processing time and input to management performance reviews.
“We engaged Kiefer Consulting to help us build a suite of SharePoint 2013 tools that we will be using to track deliverables for a large IT project. Kiefer’s SharePoint developer, Gatika Patel, worked with us to quickly turn our business rules and requirements into a usable tool. I was impressed by the speed with which Gatika understood and began work on our requirements; she was professional and pleasant to work with, the project was completed on time and on budget, and it met (and in some cases exceeded) all of our requirements.”
Rick Alfaro, California State Board of Equalization