How NY’s Tech SWAT Group ramped up COVID reaction — GCN
How NY’s Tech SWAT Team ramped up COVID reaction
When New York became the country’s coronavirus epicenter this spring, the state’s Office of Details Know-how Companies (ITS) released a COVID-19 Technology SWAT Staff to construct IT methods immediately — and at no price.
Considered to be the 1st of its form at the state stage — and modeled just after the 2013 revamp of Health care.gov and the 2014 U.S. response to Ebola at the countrywide degree — the effort included recruiting “private-sector authorities to function professional bono on significant jobs, help in creating new applications, and aid [state] employees construct the new technological abilities needed for responding to the crisis,” according to the state’s COVID-19 Know-how SWAT Group progress report.
Starting off in March, ITS partnered with the Governor’s Business and the Department of Money Solutions to set up volunteers to do the job alongside point out team in 30- to 90-day sprints. Amongst March and May, the workforce received curiosity from 7,300 volunteers and 3,500 companies additionally 5,200 submissions of help, in accordance to the report. The hard work resulted in 19 pro bono partnership assignments designed with about 25,000 volunteer hours and at a price savings to taxpayers of about $14 million.
In addition, interior govt teams produced yet another 21 assignments that yielded pretty much 50 million support interactions and 342 million web site views across 60 million buyers.
The Engineering SWAT Staff targeted three principal parts, mentioned Scott Reif, the state’s main communications officer: website and cell progress, details science and analytics, and stop-user support and electronic content method.
“We realized there was do the job that we wanted to do with our web sites, because of the targeted traffic, due to the fact of the presentation,” Reif said, introducing that the web pages necessary to be a lot more user-friendly to fulfill increasing demand from customers. The Division of Labor (DOL), for occasion, observed a 200% raise in net targeted visitors.
“We prioritized organizations that could supply groups or teams to perform in particular areas, and then certainly vetted, did onboarding and, in the conclude, they actually worked facet-by-aspect with our condition workforce — just about, certainly — but they labored to surge methods to react to COVID,” Reif explained.
For a single of the initiatives, the state’s Digital Services Crew worked with Acquia to strengthen DOL’s Main content administration system throughout all point out web-sites. They also created it a lot easier to collect prerequisites, designed a characteristic to add and substitute files and scaled how various site updates could be pushed to creation.
That function associated a discovery session all around architecture, greatest methods, progress enhancement and the Drupal-primarily based Main Distribution that New York works by using to spin up new web sites. The workforce did a two-week growth improvement sprint that led to advancements in filtering and results displays.
“We worked with their workforce on the a person facet to proceed producing on individuals enhancements to permit them to carry on to stand up a new Labor web page with all the functions and options that are going to be required in this new ordinary,” reported Joel McManus, enterprise account government at Acquia.
The company also partnered with ITS to stand up in 3 times the coronavirus.wellbeing.ny.gov site that provides details to New Yorkers on COVID-19 indicators, screening sites and the most current updates in addition to forms for submitting grievances of violations of health and safety constraints. ITS made use of Acquia’s Site Manufacturing unit to roll out new web-sites, so “they ended up ready to pivot just one working day when the coronavirus really naturally accelerated,” McManus said.
Other SWAT Crew assignments integrated doing work with Cisco to deploy networking devices and access points to aid field functions at screening web pages, with Accenture to audit and streamline DOL’s website content material and with HPE to support digital desktop infrastructure capacity and distant get the job done for condition staff members.
For an additional task, ITS and the condition Wellbeing Office labored with Microsoft to launch a statewide COVID-19 screening platform that people could use to self-monitor, ask for and timetable tests and acquire success from a state-operate testing web page. A similar system is offered for antibody tests. New Yorkers can locate much more than 750 testing web sites on a map that ITS and DOH made with Google and Castlight Health.
The departments also partnered with Apple to make New York the 1st condition to combine regional coronavirus info on social distancing, tests and financial reopening into its COVID-19 cellular and web-site screening app.
In addition to health and fitness-centric get the job done, ITS joined with Microsoft, Mastercard, Square and Codeacademy to make specialized trainings for ITS, the Electronic Services Team and other companies on how to enhance engagement whilst teleworking, hone digital skills and supply electronic products and services to New Yorkers.
“You’re talking about increasing for the potential, obtaining extra competencies to our condition teams,” Reif mentioned.
The ITS-led tasks included a single with Google Cloud to start a redesigned unemployment insurance coverage application that built-in the Pandemic Unemployment Help approach. ITS and DOH also established up a dashboard to publicly report COVID-19 info these as scenarios, areas and recoveries by area, age and race.
To share classes learned, the point out established a playbook for many others to use to generate their individual SWAT Teams. It delivers details on how to get a workforce started off, recruit and vet volunteers, foster conversation among stakeholders and get govt leaders’ guidance.
“Although much of the context throughout this document was written with the coronavirus reaction in brain, the Tech SWAT principle could be deployed in response to any disaster,” the playbook states.
About the Writer


Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance author centered in northern Virginia.