What follows is an edited transcript of a phone interview with Techwire.
The takeaways are:
- Gigabit and broadband work is still in progress
- An RFP for gigabit is open
- There will be a master contract for broadband
- Property tax modernization is in progress
- Rogers expects more modernization and innovation
Dave Rogers: That question can go in a lot of different ways. The budget here in the county is about $5 billion, I think is the number I last saw. My budget is about $85 million of that.
TW: What is it being spent on right now?
DR: From an IT perspective? We’re a central IT organization so we run the public-sector communications radio system; we run the entire county network infrastructure — that’s kind of the roads and transportation for the county. We also support almost all the departments that are non-elected in a consolidated model. I support 28 departments, the desktop, the IT strategy. Plus we run the enterprise data center for the county.
TW: What projects are happening right now?
DR: Right now we have a countywide service management implementation with ServiceNow. The county didn’t have much of a service management strategy when I got here a year and a half ago, so we’ve been working on that for a while to get a better view into overall IT management across the county, better cost analysis, better score-carding, just every way we can to look at IT. That’s one big process, and that will probably be ongoing for the next 12 months. We’re also continuing to consolidate for the countywide enterprise services around identity, directory services and we just finished a major implementation of consolidating 15 mail systems into one.
TW: What else will be finished in the next six to 12 months?
DR: We’re getting ready to revamp all our public websites in the next six months. We’ll probably start that in the next three, bringing a more consistent look and feel across all the county departments. Then we have another big project here where we’re implementing a new HR system here in the county, with Workday, which is intended to bring a lot more self-service functionality. We’re getting ready to engage in a new e-procurement system, which is intended to bring a lot more self-service, more industry standard technology. There’s been a lot of manual processes here and we’re trying to fix that. I think we’re going to have a big radio upgrade coming soon too.
TW: What RFPs will be seen in the next few months?
DR: Most of them I just mentioned; they’re coming so soon, we’re already done with those. There might be one for printing services and maintenance.
TW: What are the biggest challenges you’ve been facing with getting these projects put together?
DR: I think the biggest challenge is budget and the perception across departments that IT is too expensive. They think its too expensive, but really, they aren’t funding IT at the level it needs to be. I’ve been spending a lot of time sort of changing that story, helping the county understand how we need to invest greater in IT to increase efficiency and productivity.
TW: What are some of your systems that need to be modernized?
DR: I mentioned we’re in the process of modernizing HR, but things like our identity system, which is older. There are two different sides — there’s the infrastructure side, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be done there. We need to modernize our overall deployment management across the county, using existing tools that we’re just not leveraging yet. We also have a broadband initiative going on. That’s a national conversation. However, we’re trying to use a master contract across a county as large as ours. We’re crossing over a whole lot of cities. We’re trying to put together a master contract and not be involved in infrastructure at all, to help incent providers to come in and do their build-outs faster. We help the contractors leverage through the bureaucracy. We’ve seen other programs where the cities or counties get involved in the infrastructure, and we don’t think that works as well. We have an RFP out on the street today that closes on Sept. 7.
TW: What are other goals that you have in mind for the future of the county?
DR: My biggest goal is to make IT part of the DNA of the county. I come from many years in government and many years in the private sector, so I have a lot of experience seeing how governments don’t really leverage IT in the way they could. We aren’t where we should be, in my mind.
Circling all these things back around, it's first changing the conversation with the board on why they need to spend money on IT. Then leveraging that conversation into let’s spend money on IT across the departments and then let’s leverage in to the county infrastructure we need to support it. I want us to be much more of an enabling organization than an M and O (maintenance and operations) organization, which is what is very common in government: Everybody is spending their money keeping the lights on, so there’s not as much innovation going on.
