It’s a big job. The California Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) encompasses 40 boards, bureaus, committees and a commission that regulate and license professional and vocational occupations. As part of its responsibilities, DCA licenses and certifies practitioners in more than 255 professions, ranging from barbering and cosmetology to vocational nursing and psychiatric technicians. In order to accommodate the licensing and enforcement of 18 of its certifying boards and bureaus, DCA developed BreEZe, an online licensing and enforcement application that supports more than 2 million licensees and processes over 900,000 license renewals while generating $240 million annually. BreEZe neatly updated an inefficient series of independent legacy systems and packaged them into one, unified system that made it remarkably more efficient.
Recently, in an effort to upgrade to even higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness, DCA moved its BreEZe application to the State Data Center cloud-based platform. This smart move to the cloud will allow DCA to realize considerable cost savings in hardware, software, and staffing hours in the years to come and provide greater access for consumers to interact with the Department.
Licensing and regulating such a wide and varied number of professional and vocational occupations really is a big job, but thanks to BreEZe and Cloud technology, DCA is well positioned to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the people of California.