Report 2016-129 Recommendation 12 Responses

Report 2016-129: K-12 High Speed Network: Improved Budgeting, Greater Transparency, and Increased Oversight Are Needed to Ensure That the Network Is Providing Reliable Services at the Lowest Cost to the State (Release Date: May 2017)

Recommendation #12 To: Imperial County Office of Education

To ensure that the K12HSN program receives all of the service credits to which it is entitled, ICOE should amend its contract with CENIC to clarify CENIC's responsibilities in this area, including reporting to ICOE about network outages or interruptions and requests for credits to service providers, along with the outcomes of those requests.

1-Year Agency Response

ICOE and CENIC have negotiated a contract amendment under which CENIC agrees to track network incidents and outages and pursue service credits when they are earned. ICOE staff will compare CENIC-generated information related to outages and service credits to its own incident reports and ensure that all earned service credits are reflected in subsequent circuit cost summaries and provided by the respective telecommunications providers.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Fully Implemented

ICOE provided a signed contract addendum in which CENIC agreed to track and report on an annual basis all network outages and the status of service provider credits to ICOE. ICOE has indicated it will compare this reporting to the data it is independently tracking (see recommendation #11). Through that process, ICOE will ensure that CENIC has taken appropriate action on all outages that may qualify for credits to the program.

6-Month Agency Response

ICOE has developed a tool to track network incidents and outages. ICOE staff is manually harvesting the data from the CENIC Operational Announcements listserv, since there is no easy way to pull this information in a database format. ICOE has started conversations with CENIC about the possibility of automating this process for K12. The data is currently being updated on a monthly basis. The tool will continue to be refined to provide more details related to each circuit on the network and determine whether the incidents are subject to service credits from the providers. Contract agreements are currently in draft and being reviewed by CENIC.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

As outlined in our response to Recommendation 11, ICOE is collecting the data needed to hold service providers accountable for network interruptions but has not yet implemented a process by which it--or CENIC--will do so. At this time, it is not clear whether this will be accomplished through an amendment to ICOE's contract with CENIC. We will evaluate the recommendation's status again when those decisions have been made.

60-Day Agency Response

On June 8, 2017 ICOE and CENIC met to discuss new processes that will assist in ICOE's ability to report on network performance. Draft language for a contract amendment with CENIC is being developed and will be shared with CENIC by July 27, 2017.

In addition, ICOE's independent monitoring system is being evaluated for an approach to automate delivery of information from the system into a report format that provides most of the information being requested from Education. The "reason for outage" is a data element that is only available from CENIC. Currently using manual steps, the location, duration and frequency are available to ICOE from its own system and we are working to determine the best approach to extracting this data from the monitoring system into outage reports.

Tracking of service credits is a component of the outage report format developed for the new reporting. CENIC understands ICOE's need to have information called out related to service credits, both when earned, and when received by ICOE.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2016-129

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.