OKLAHOMA WATCH: State agencies encounter problems with licensing software platform | News

OKLAHOMA WATCH: State agencies encounter problems with licensing software platform | News

A push to modernize the licensing and credentialing course of with a brand new software vendor has encountered a number of problems, together with an outage inflicting licensing delays on the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority and problems monitoring persevering with schooling credit on the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training. 

The vendor, Thentia, couldn’t be reached for remark. Emails to media and gross sales accounts have been returned as undeliverable. The Office of Management and Enterprise Services, which signed a statewide contract with Thentia in August 2020, stated the corporate is conscious of the problems and has been working to resolve them. 

More than a dozen state agencies, boards or commissions use the Thentia software for licensing or different regulatory capabilities. Among the others are Oklahoma Real Estate Appraisers Board, the Oklahoma Accountancy Board and the Board of Chiropractic Examiners. Some of the leaders of these agencies have offered testimonials or movies for the software platform on the Thentia company web site. 

Agencies who’ve signed on to the Thentia service pay 20 cents per license per 30 days. State monetary studies present the corporate obtained not less than $1.5 million within the fiscal yr 2021. Much of that was from the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, which was underneath the Oklahoma State Department of Health till it turned a standalone company on Nov. 1.

The Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, which licenses peace officers, safety guards and personal investigators, has a be aware on its web site explaining the problems with compliance studies for persevering with schooling on the Thentia platform. It stated the system can’t determine programs by title and coaching coordinators can’t see the complete coaching histories of officers. It additionally notes errors in calculating coaching hours. 

“Those problems have been communicated to our system vendor and they await resolution,” the be aware to police chiefs, sheriffs and coaching coordinators stated. “We have been waiting months for resolution of most of these problems and we, like you, are very frustrated. However, we cannot fix any of the system errors ourselves. We are totally dependent upon the system provider to do so.”

In an interview, CLEET’s interim Executive Director Preston Draper stated the company started utilizing the Thentia platform in July. Despite the problems working compliance studies, Draper stated the company remains to be blissful with the platform and is assembly frequently with Thentia representatives.

“We anticipated there might be some issues with this,” Draper stated. “It’s not as smooth a transition as we had hoped, but we are working on it.” 

Draper stated licensees are nonetheless capable of submit their persevering with schooling credit, however the company simply can’t get a system-wide report or breakdown by license sort, enterprise or legislation enforcement group.

“The (enforcement) mechanism we’re using to do a blanket search is still in process,” Draper stated. “It was a huge amount of moving parts to transition into a digital system, so it’s not surprising that there are some hiccups in trying to make that all work.” 

Lt. Jason Spradlin, who coordinates coaching for the 11 officers on the Oklahoma Baptist University police division in Shawnee, stated the Thentia system is an enchancment over the outdated paper-based system to trace persevering with schooling. Individual officers can nonetheless enter their coaching, however working system-wide studies continues to be an issue. 

“It’s definitely an improvement if they could work the bugs out,” Spradlin stated. “The bugs have been there since it started. They tell us they’re aware of the issues and they’re working on them, but they haven’t given us a timeline.” 

Caden Cleveland, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, stated the CLEET points have been distinctive to that company and concerned synchronizing information from two databases.

“They are confident this will be corrected in short order and have their local Oklahoma office team committed to working around the clock until a full resolution is complete, which is expected in the next few days,” Cleveland stated in an electronic mail. 

The Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority launched the brand new Thentia portal in January. 

The authority had a full outage of the Thentia licensing system for a number of days in September. In response, it prolonged expiration dates and deadlines for affected licensees as much as a few weeks in some instances. 

“That affected our ability to process applications because people couldn’t submit them, and we couldn’t access the portal on the regulator side,” stated Kelsey Pagonis, communications director. “It was one big event, and it lasted several days.” 

Pagonis stated there haven’t been any widespread outages of the Thentia system since September. Current problems are minor and normally deal with errors on the cost facet of the system or coordination with the information from a separate seed-to-sale tracking system, she stated. The authority tracks greater than 374,000 affected person licenses and 11,400 enterprise licenses for the medical marijuana program

“With the volume of licenses that we encounter on a daily basis and have to maintain, to me it’s not unreasonable or unfathomable that there would be glitches or issues that occur,” Pagonis stated. “We also have a team that works really closely with Thentia and reports all these bugs.”

The outage on the company was associated to Thentia’s companion, Google Cloud, which skilled a worldwide disruption in September, Cleveland stated. 

In the final 4 months, the state has revised its statewide contract with Thentia to place extra protections in place and extra accountability for Thentia, the Office of Management and Enterprise Services stated. 

“Additionally, Thentia has shown dedication to partner with the state by voluntarily reimbursing agencies either financially or in terms of free service when there has been a service or implementation issue,” Cleveland stated in an electronic mail. 

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