Employment CIO Troy Rutten (L) accepts awards with Information Systems Director Al Pierce and Kurt Tackman, both from CCWD.

The state's Chief Information Officer Council honored the Oregon Employment Department (OED), Community Colleges and Workforce Development (CCWD), and the Oregon Workforce Partnership (OWP) at their December meeting this week with two separate Chief Information Officer (CIO) Awards recognizing their efforts in leveraging technology.

The Employment Department took the Gold CIO Award for their work on the Call Center Upgrade project, which was completely implemented in October 2009. The department's Information Technology Services (ITS) unit partnered with Verizon and Cisco to create a Unified Communications platform across all three call centers. This improved the efficiency of handling unemployment insurance customer calls, reduced customer wait times, and balanced the call workload over all three centers.

"We are now discovering all the great things we can do from a business perspective with the new unified call system," said Unemployment Insurance Director Tom Byerley.

Steve Wollenberg (L), Chuck Oswald, Tom Byerley, and Richard Leventhal with CIO Gold Award	Al Pierce (L) and Kurt Tackman from CCWD with CIO Silver Awards

 

 

The Oregon Workforce Partnership, Community Colleges and Workforce Development, and the Employment Department were awarded the Silver CIO Award for collaborating on the Common Registration Project. Here the Information Technology units of CCWD and OED worked with the Oregon Workforce Partnership to create a seamless registration system that would gather data elements required by Wagner-Peyser and Workforce Investment Act reporting, while also creating an iMatchSkills record. This greatly improved a registration system that was fragmented, paper-based in some areas, and as varied as the multiple local systems that existed before common registration.Before the project, customers would have been required to register in more than one system, and their records in each system would not be linked. When individuals moved from one local area to another they could maintain the Wagner-Peyser registration across the state; however, to receive the WIA services they were required to register again. Many customers would have received only the Wagner-Peyser services and not Workforce Investment Act funded services.

Common Registration cleaned up the confusion of services offered by multiple partners, saved customers time, reduced duplication of data collection, and allowed for consolidated service delivery and reporting.

"We are trying to do more than any other state," said Operations and Policy Analyst Kurt Tackman. "The goal is to deliver services seamlessly."