The California Employment Development Department (EDD) is seeking seeking a firm that will collectively possess extensive expertise and expert-level knowledge on a service to to recommend and assist in the establishment of a comprehensive, flexible, and agile governance framework for all aspects of the EDDNext project. The goal is to ensure strong stakeholder representation, facilitate rapid initiative progress, and expedite the resolution of any issues for our EDDNext project that will maximize value and performance, align with EDD strategic direction, and to quickly mitigate any risks to success for our 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 decades.  The EDD organization also supports many auxiliary business functions for hundreds of thousands of employers, medical providers, and other stake holders. Through the EDDnext project, 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.   

 In order to achieve improvements, efficiencies, and uniformity across multiple program areas, the EDD is going through transformation processes that incorporate several planning initiatives, standardization efforts, foundational changes, and input from multiple programs.

Today, the EDD operates multi-level governance structures involving many stakeholders. EDDNext does have an existing, preliminary governance structure that will evolve, adapt, and mature as the project progresses. EDDNext envisions governance structures for each of the many workstreams. A critical partner will be the department-wide CX Governance Committee. 

As a results of these transformation change, we foresee the following challenges: 

• Delays in approvals and reviews due to multi-level governance processes and timelines
• Ensuring that the appropriate stakeholders are engaged and present for specific decision resolution
• Potential gaps in the comprehension of stakeholders relative to the implications of decisions due to the scale and complexity of the workstreams
• Lack of historical knowledge of prior decisions and the associated rationale or justifications
• Senior stakeholders are over-committed as they are often required to be present in multiple governance structures
• Lack of sufficient time allocated to thoroughly review background materials to support informed and timely decision making

EDDNext seeks respondents who possess the following requirements:

1. Ability to coordinate with the business process re-engineering service guiding principles to be used in the governance framework and process for decision making.​
2. Experience in establishing governance framework EDDNext and guiding principles with a keen focus on customer experience, as well as user experience and equity access.​
3. Extensive experience and success working with large and complex public agencies.

The project will improve the service focusing on the following strategic objectives:

1. Provide governance solution to streamline EDD's decision process with clear workflow and guidelines on reconciliation of overarching decisions which may have upstream and downstream implications.​
2. An understanding and documentation of how to triage and escalate decisions within a multi-level governance structure.​
3. Systematic workflow to manage competing priorities as the governance evolves with the project.