The California Employment Development Department (EDD) is seeking to engage a firm that collectively possess extensive experience and expert-level knowledge in Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) and who will lead the definition of a service to support the continued modernization of all Unemployment Insurance (UI), Disability Insurance (DI), and Paid-Family Leave (PFL) business programs, business operations, and business support technologies. This work will support EDDnext, a statewide effort to embrace customer-centric benefits systems. The overall objectives of these EA/BPR services are to improve the customer experience, promote service delivery enhancements, implement sustainable business operations, and advance technical innovation for the EDDNext project and for our whole department.

The California Employment Development Department (EDD) administers one of the nation's largest public benefit systems with over 21 million claimants and 63 million claims being filed for Unemployment Insurance (UI), Disability Insurance (DI), and Paid Family Leave (PFL) over the past decade. The EDD also supports hundreds of thousands of employers, medical providers, and other stake holders. Through EDDnext, the state will engage with communities across California to help design and implement systems and services that are easier to use and adapt to changing circumstances. 

The challenge is to create a seamless and consistent experience across EDD’s different benefit programs and channels even though each program has vastly different processes, technologies, legal requirements, and customer needs. From the customer’s perspective all services come from EDD and so interactions and experiences should be consistent across programs and channels. Specific challenges this project will address include: 

1. Promoting a consistent experience across different channels and programs.
2. Automating and streamlining application processing to accelerate service delivery, improve uniformity, and enhance resiliency
3. Maintaining high quality service delivery during periods of increased activity volume    
4. Communicating more specific and useful information about claim status to improve the customer experience 
5. Empowering EDD employees to deliver services more quickly by providing better tools and training 
6. Maintaining real-time performance data across programs to evaluate the customer experience, to permit more rapid decision making, and to facilitate changes as needed to improve services
7. Reducing technology maintenance costs across all programs 

The project will improve customer service across EDD's UI, DI, PFL benefits programs focusing on 4 strategic objectives: 

1. Full understanding of existing processes and systems.​
2. Successful identification and implementation plans of recent technology investments delivered during the pandemic that can be leveraged going forward.​
3. An outline of creative, implementable, and achievable solutions to increase efficiencies and promote a more seamless, positive customer experience.​
4. An achievable future state architecture that results in a more efficient, seamless, and positive customer experience.

The project is seeking responses from a team of consultants that can meet the following requirements:

1. Deep experience designing Enterprise Architecture (EA)/Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) for large and complex IT projects with a customer-centric perspective.​
2. Ability to translate and communicate EA/BPR assets to the business objectives of the programs.​
3. Experience with public benefit systems and organizations including an understanding of United States Department of Labor (USDOL) and other statutes and regulations.​
4. Experience with a diverse software ecosystem and the ability to understand the environment and provide a workable future state.​
5. Support the diverse language and accessibility needs of our customers.​
6. Experience with multiple customer intake channels including real-time chat and chatbots.