May Minutes

ITAC MEETING MINUTES
May 21, 2009

Attendees: Gloria McNeill, Dr. Marc Hoit, Teresa Justice, Niamh Darcy, Robert Michaud

Wake County: Sean Fiene, Lib Wanner, Bill Scanlon,
Due to work schedules, Reginald Brown, John Killebrew, Hank Cox, Darryl McGraw and Vass Johnson could not attend the meeting.

The meeting began at 8:40 a.m.

Lib Wanner welcomed everyone and thanked Gloria for hosting the meeting.

Lib introduced to the committee to Bill Scanlon, IT Manager for Applied Technologies and opened the discussion on the Accountability Portal update.

Accountability Portal – Pre GO LIVE Demo
Lib began the presentation with a brief history of how the Accountability Portal project came into existence, the thought process behind the build, and the County’s choice to use in-house developers to save costs on creation of the application. Lib then turned the presentation over to Bill Scanlon to demonstrate the workings of the Accountability Portal.

Bill Scanlon opened the demo Accountability Portal site and indicated that an agile method was used to create, test and deploy the Accountability Portal and that the iterative process worked well for the project. Bill noted that the Accountability Portal will display both current fiscal year and previous fiscal year budget and actual data beginning with FY 2009 data. Niamh Darcy asked how real time the data is that is being displayed on the portal. Bill explained that the information displayed is updated at each month's end and that the site will have a disclaimer ensuring that the user is aware of the last update.

Robert Michaud asked Bill why the County would allow the user to filter by vendor. Bill explained that citizens may wish to know who the County is doing business with and that if other vendors see that their company can offer a better price, it may lead to improved pricing for County needs.

Niamh asked if the budget data would be updated whenever the budget is amended, and Bill indicated that it would be and also that the application may be enhanced to add a link from the portal to the Board of Commissioners agenda item where the amendment was approved.

Robert Michaud asked if the application will be able to explain when money is transferred and if the County is thinking of using various examples for the explanations to help citizens understand the budget to actual expenditure more easily. Robert suggested using a family budget as an example, and Bill indicated that he thought that was a great idea. Teresa Justice added that the County could include this information in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the Accountability Portal, as well. Both Bill and Lib agreed to use very common examples in the FAQ section. Niamh then asked if the County will use a soft launch for deploying the Accountability Portal. Lib answered by stating that the first launch will actually be internal, to be used by the employees for testing, and that the Board of Commissioners will determine the amount of publicity around the public launch, with her recommendation being to keep it relatively low until some of the kinks have been worked out.

The discussion then turned to the County’s response system to citizen inquiries about the information displayed in the portal. Lib gave an overview of the citizen tracking tool that is currently being developed in Lotus Notes and that has been patterned after an existing service request application being used internally by the IS Department. Bill demonstrated the form that the citizen would fill out on the portal to ask questions and that it would be transferred into the Lotus Notes application to be distributed by a member of the County Manager’s staff to the correct person in the organization for a response. Bill also indicated that an e-mail would be sent to the e-mail address provided to let the citizen know that his/her question had been received and that someone from the County staff would be back in touch with them within 5 business days. The group asked questions about how requests would be tracked, discussed methods for trying to narrow down questions – rather than providing free form text – to help in getting faster replies, and ways to capture the answers to frequently asked questions and get them added to the FAQ section of the portal. Dr. Marc Hoit then asked if there would be a moderator over the response given to the public, and Lib stated that, depending on the question asked, the responder would check with possibly the Public Affairs Office, the County Manager's Office or the County Attorney’s Office depending on the nature of the inquiry.

Other Business
Lib discussed with the group the agenda for the June 18 meeting and that there will be no meeting for July and August. In September, the committee will revisit the Accountability Portal for a status update.

The ITAC members thanked Lib and Bill for the presentation delivered, and Lib Wanner thanked the group for their input and participation.

Meeting adjourned at 9:35 a.m.