April Minutes

ITAC Meeting Minutes
April 17, 2008

Attendees : Frieda Artis, Niamh Darcy, Vass Johnson, Darryl McGraw, Gloria McNeill and Robert Michaud

Due to work schedule, Sondra Chaffee could not attend the meeting.

Wake County: Velvadine Wallace and Lib Wanner

The meeting began at 9:07am. Lib Wanner welcomed everyone to the meeting and stated that today’s meeting agenda is the following: IS FY09 Budget Request Summary and the IS Technology Roadmap.

IS Dept. FY 09 Budget Request Summary presentation:

Lib Wanner gave the group an overview of the IS Department's FY 09 Capital and Operating Budget Requests using the attached PowerPoint presentation.

Regarding the IS Department's Vision of being a nationally recognized IT leader, Darryl McGraw asked Lib how she measured this. Lib indicated that there was no real measure in place. She indicated that Wake County participates in the Digital Counties website competition and last year we were listed as one of the top 10 County websites in the nation. She also indicated that she is currently the president of a national CIO professional organization consisting of City and County CIO's where information is shared among group members to help each other improve the use of technology in their organizations.

Lib emphasized to the group the use of the strategic planning work that was done in the fall in the preparation of the FY 09 budget request. She indicated that she had shared some of the strategic planning work with ITAC last fall and all recalled the discussion and associated target charts.

Lib reviewed the Capital budget request and highlighted the County's use of a base funding model for automation and then outlined requested additions to the model and the demand drivers for those requests. Lib noted that the upgrade to the latest version of the Lotus Notes email and calendaring system was a top priority and the expense of the project was primarily due to the need to upgrade a number of PC's to handle the new version. Lib also highlighted the upgrade to MS Office 2007 and asked ITAC members if they had stayed current on MS Office. Vass Johnson indicated that the Schools had and Darryl McGraw indicated that Wake Tech had also. Lib indicated that the County standard was currently MS Office 2000 and that we had not followed the upgrade path to 2003, but there is a need to upgrade now due to more applications needing the more current versions of MS Office to work well and support being discontinued on MS Office 2000 next July. Lib indicated that IS had looked into using open source office suites and decided against it and asked ITAC members if they had looked into this. One member indicated that they had and after 6 months went back to MS Office. There was agreement that most organizations are using MS Office.

Lib then reviewed the estimated operating impacts for the proposed capital projects and indicated that IS had not done a good job in the past at providing these estimates to the Budget Office and have made a concentrated effort this year to identify the future year impacts of technology projects. Lib said these impacts also included the need to spend money on major systems to maintain, upgrade and eventually replace them.

Lib then proceeded to review the Operating budget request with the group and explained how the IS base budget was established, changes in contract costs and what the adjusted base budget was. She then briefly reviewed expansion requests and the demands that drove those requests. Lib further explained the evaluation process and time line for the budget request and asked if there were questions or comments.

It was noted that there were a lot of things going on in IS and that the resources seemed lean. Lib indicated that she is striving to do a better job outlining to the organization what it will take to pursue the initiatives the business units would like to have done.

Technology Roadmap presentation:

Lib then reviewed a concept that IT Manager Dan Edwards had put together which outlined the life span of major aspects of the County's IT infrastructure, see attached PowerPoint presentation. Lib indicated that the idea came from information she received as part of the CIO Corporate Executive Board membership she had this year. Lib said that the intention of the roadmap is identify the main elements of the County's infrastructure and outline the lifespan of each element. She said that the presentation chart is just an example and the plan is to review the elements with key IS staff members to put accurate information in the chart and then see the relationships between the various components to be sure all key elements of the County's infrastructure stay in sync. Lib also indicated that she planned to add estimated costs for maintaining, transitioning, and replacing these elements that would correspond to the multi-year capital budget she presented earlier. Lib asked the ITAC members for their thoughts on the roadmap.

The members agreed it was a great way to show the lifecycle of the whole infrastructure environment. Robert indicated that he would like to use it for applications so he could work with the business units in his company to determine when they needed to sunset various applications and begin the replacement planning process. All agreed that this would be a great tool for applications as well as infrastructure.

Lib thanked the group for their input and indicated that the next meeting would be May 15, 2008 and Mary Baker, IT Manager for Human Services, would be giving a presentation on the HS strategic planning initiative. Lib also indicated she would ask the group at that time if they wanted to have a summer break like they did last year from June-August or schedule meetings for the summer.

Meeting adjourned at 9:45 am.