Worker data in safer place

The state is significantly under budget in launching a $1.5 million upgrade that puts data for more than 16,000 Hawaii government workers in a new cloud-based system designed to be tougher for hackers to crack.

On Tuesday, Gov. David Ige’s office is expected to announce a successful upgrade of the state’s ancient Oracle-based system that tracks personnel information including health and retirement benefits for nearly all state workers, except those employed by the University of Hawaii and state Department of Education.

The state had been facing the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the antiquated computer system.

The upgrade from a system that Oracle no longer supports to Oracle’s PeopleSoft 9.2 technology pulls data from old servers and puts them instead in a new "Hawaii Government Private Cloud" that went live Jan. 20.

Even before the new system went online, it passed its first real-time test Jan. 12 when one of Hawaiian Electric Co.’s rolling blackouts knocked out power across Oahu while hometown Heisman hero Marcus Mari­ota played in the first football national championship game.

Although state buildings lost power, employee data remained secure in the virtual cloud, said Raynell Yee, who managed the upgrade.

The effort to modernize the state’s system began in July and was budgeted at $1.57 million.

The exact cost of the upgrade has yet to be calculated. But the biggest expense — staffing hours — came in at only 40 percent of the original estimate, said David Keane, the state’s IT manager for human resources development.

As a result, Keane said, the actual cost for the entire project will be "way under budget."

In a statement, Ige called the upgrade "a model as we propel state government to higher levels of efficiency, effectiveness and productivity."

For now, state government workers should see no changes, and their paychecks will be cut as usual.

But later this year the state plans a small pilot program to test a new "self-service" feature intended to allow state workers to manage employee data, such as changes in marital status, on their own for the first time.

For now the upgrade comes with increased protections designed to make state workers’ information more secure, Keane said.

"We have a lot more safeguards in place today than we had in the past," he said.

The upgrade required collaboration from the Department of Human Resource Development, the Department of Accounting and General Services’ Information and Communications Services Division (Telecommunications Services and Systems Services branches), the Office of Information Management and Technology, and the Department of Taxation.

It was an effort that produced an upgrade on time and under budget, said Randy Bal­de­mor, deputy director of the state Department of Human Resources Development.

"The state going forward is going to have to have more collaboration to do these types of projects," Bal­de­mor said.