Collaboration InitiativeMore than a design objective, Labor has mounted a sustained effort to establish partnerships with other governmental and non-governmental entities in an effort to lower the overall cost of doing business and improve efficiency and quality of service.SERVICE INTEROPERABILITYThe use of "Service" in what follows is a reference to a shared component—a small, stand-alone program available over a network—within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Services are combined to create whole business applications. (More can be found about SOA and its strategic importance on the Standards and Design Patterns pages.) Within the frame of a SOA, agencies can reduce their individual development costs by sharing common Services. A Service is developed by one agency and shared by many. There is a governance mechanism among partners to assure that effort is not duplicated, and to provide broad requirements so that a Service can be consumed by applications serving different agencies’ needs.Many of the Services described here are the result of the independent effort of eight agency CIOs who meet weekly to review their agencies‘ technology agendas and look for opportunities to collaborate. Styling themselves as the Economic Security and Human Services Advisory Board, the eight agencies are the Departments of Labor, Motor Vehicles (DMV), Health, and Taxation and Finance, and the Offices of Children and Family Services (OCFS), Employee Relations (GOER), Mental Health (OMH), Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA). (More can be found on the collaboration work in the Collaboration document.
Labor’s Use of Taxation's Employer Service Tax and Finance has agreed to expose its employer database as an SOA Service which can be consumed by Labor’s employer registration process, reducing the personal service costs currently need to verify FEIN and name associations. Using the Tax and Finance SOA Service, Labor should save 2 FTEs per month. Tax expects to save 128 hours of computer processing time once Labor employees no longer need costly on-line terminal sessions. The total savings is estimated to be $250,000 per year. It will cost $50,000 to implement and will cost $1,200 per year to operate. In Labor’s employer registration section, clerks verify that the FEIN number and the name of the business associated with that number are correct. They do this by opening a terminal session into the Department of Taxation and Finance employer database. They do a search on that database for either FEIN or name, and obtain additional information about the employer which they add to Labor’s employer database. It's interesting to note that the Taxation and Labor database cannot be the same. Federal Unemployment Insurance privacy regulations do not permit a state to use a common database to store information about employers with which a state might have other business. There is not a problem, however, with comparing data maintained in a UI database with other employer databases which a state might maintain independently. Motor Vehicles Identification ServiceThe New York State Department of Motor Vehicles has agreed to develop a Web Service which will allow Labor Department (and other agencies) Service Oriented Applications to verify individual identities through a look-up into the driver license database.Health Vital Statistics Service for DMVTo help improve the effectiveness of Motor Vehicle’s identity management process, Health will make a Service available to DMV which will provide vital statistics data to DMV.GOER and Labor's Document Management SystemThe Governor's Office of Employee Relations will become a user of the Labor Department’s Enterprise Content Management System (ECM) to support its document-intensive Grievance Resolution business process. The relationship between GOER and Labor will save GOER over $400,000 in start-up costs and $85,000 in annual maintenance. The SOA computer programs which GOER will develop will be re-used by Labor, saving Labor an estimated $300,000 a year in development costs.Sharing Labor's Banking Services Two state agencies, the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) and the Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) make payments to local governments and not-for-profts through paper checks. Each would like to reduce the heavy processing costs of paper banking services by implementing either a Direct Deposit or Payment Card option for its recipients. By consuming the Labor Department’s SOA Banking Service, each agency will save approximately $175,000 in development cost in addition to over $1,500,000 in the combined cost of manual bank processing. Workers' Compensation and DebarmentsLabor volunteered to develop a web-based debarment database for Workers’ Comp. The agency did not have the time to add this project. In the process, Labor remodeled its own Worker Protection debarment database. The result are two separate business process databases which can exchange their data via SOA Services. These services allow each agency to check the other’s database automatically, while allowing each to post a complete list of debarments without duplication.Future PossibilitiesJOINT CODE DEVELOPMENTLaborForgeLaborForge.org is the New York State Department of Labor Information Technology public open source repository. With it, the agency seeks to attract interested parties, especially from other government agencies and entities, to participate in the continuous improvement of its applications.By leveraging the Open Source development methodology, we extend the finite resources of the New York State Labor Department to include individuals in other organizations. The Open Source methodology is a collaborative, voluntary approach to software development. The rewards to the Labor Department can be significant when committed volunteers contribute significant code segments, evaluate and test code, and provide new ideas for expanded functionality. While not established as a public benefit, Labor's Open Source repository has the ancillary benefit to other states' workforce agencies and other New York State agencies to obtain useful software at no cost, other than the work required to integrate code into their environments.
SOFTWARE AS A SERVICEThe sharing of Services within a Service Oriented Architecture frame is not Labor’s first venture into the distribution of network-based applications. The delivery of software as a network-accessible service—allowing partners to avail themselves of online applications without the pressures of development or maintenance—has a long history at Labor.America's One Stop Operating SystemNew York State has managed the delivery of the One Stop Operating System for a consortium of seven states since 1997. The application provides a case management system that is accessible by clients and Labor Department employees assisting job seekers.
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