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Liquor and Cannabis Board to launch LEADS portal as part of multi-phase modernization
Summary
LCB officials said they will open a new Salesforce-based public portal called LEADS on March 31 to handle licensing and permits, replace several legacy systems and later add enforcement and education functionality in a planned phase 3.
Tony Hote, deputy director and executive sponsor of the Liquor and Cannabis Board’s systems modernization, and CIO George Williams briefed the committee on Feb. 5 about their multi-phase project that will move licensing into a Salesforce-based portal called LEADS.
Hote said LCB governs nearly 100 license and permit types across liquor, cannabis, vapor and tobacco and that employees previously worked across three decades-old systems. The agency chose a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Salesforce public sector platform and an integrator to configure the product rather than build a fully customized system.
Why it matters: LCB told the committee that moving licensing to the LEADS portal (public-facing name) on March 31 will allow the public to complete licensing business online and allow agency employees to do their work in a single integrated system. Hote said the modernization will improve timeliness of licensing and permit issuance and enable the agency to measure performance against the governor’s executive order on timeliness.
Williams said the agency has completed other upgrades including a Drupal 10 public website migration, an EasyVista IT service management upgrade and migration to SharePoint Online. LCB plans a phase 3 next summer to modernize enforcement and education tools used by field staff; Hote said finishing the enforcement phase is critical to avoid a partially complete project that would degrade efficiency and staff morale.
LCB said it is training internal staff to configure the Salesforce platform so future updates can be done in-house rather than relying entirely on integrator contracts. The agency also plans to implement GovQA for public records request processing and consolidate tax-and-fee systems to integrate with statewide financial platforms.
Hote emphasized that the project has taken years and that the agency is focused on keeping momentum so staff can continue to modernize functionality and achieve intended efficiency gains.
