L.A. County to Launch Digital Harassment Investigation System

Building on existing technology, Los Angeles County plans to deploy an automated, digitized system during the first quarter of 2019 that will migrate sexual harassment and discrimination investigations entirely online, enable analytics and offer a securitized but single-pane-of-glass view into ongoing cases.

The Investigations Case Management System will integrate cases that previously existed on two disparate systems — on the front end in its CRM; and internally, on the back end in its Investigation Tracking Management System. It will aggregate case files that had remained partially on paper and eliminate significant legacy systems.

It will unify four types of cases: complaints against the civil service rule; complaints against equity; investigations against county employees; and work by the agency’s mediation unit. Among the deployment’s most significant features:

• It’s a custom-designed application done in-house, founded on the OpenText Documentum xCP platform and incorporating its Brava! technology and electronic signature capabilities to enable visibility across the enterprise from the Board of Supervisors Executive Office to Human Resources but ensure only those who need to know have access.
   
• The new system is founded on the county’s existing Documentum platform, its central ECM and essentially the same technology utilized by county appeals management and electronic personnel systems. The idea, Department of Human Resources (DHR) CIO Roozan Zarifian said, is once investigations, appeals, mediations; and “in the near future,” advocacy information are all integrated, further efficiencies can be generated between systems.
   
• The new system, in the works since January 2018, reinvents and re-engineers this area of the business process by automating and digitizing an “end-to-end process across multiple stakeholders,” said Murtaza Masood, DHR assistant director.
   
• “Operational analytics” available on Day One will offer insight into key operational metrics enabling a view on organizational health, informing managers via digital dashboard how long it takes to complete a case; which cases take longer; and which employees do better at which types of cases, said Jeramy Gray, assistant executive officer of the Board of Supervisors Executive Office.
   
• Following its initial deployment, ICMS will help DHR track and monitor other administrative investigations that are not equity-related, said Lisa Garrett, county personnel director, adding that as her goal is to automate all things HR, “this is another piece of that strategy.”

“We’re planning to grow the assimilation of data, more efficiencies and effectiveness in the processes, trending of data that we’ll be able to see; better decision-making for our managers and individuals that have to work the process, and those are some of the things that are going to be benefits to us as a result of the system,” Garrett said.