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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2006 10-24 Pre Meridian City Pre-Council Meetina October 24, 2006 The Meridian City Pre-Council meeting was called to order at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 by President Councilman Shaun Wardle. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle and Charlie Rountree. Members Absent: Joe Borton. Staff Present: Bill Nary, Ted Baird, Sharon Smith, John Overton, Ron Coulter. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X Shaun Wardle X Charlie Rountree X o Joe Borton X Keith Bird Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: Mr. President. Wardle: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we adopt the agenda as published. Rountree: Second. Wardle: It's been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda. All in favor. THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Discussion of Benefits for Fiscal Year 2007 by Bill Nary: Nary: Thank you Mr. President and members of the Council I am here tonight as the HR Director with our listing of benefits for the next fiscal year. We have budgeted all of these. I did have them put into LaserFiche. If you want a hard copy, I have a hard copy here for you if you would prefer. Bird: I would prefer a hard copy because I can hardly read this Bill. Nary: Council members - I guess the (inaudible) of the budget - or the cost for our benefits for the next fiscal year that we talked about at recently and in front of Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24,2006 Page 2 of 16 you and actually we have had a decrease in our medical costs for our renewal this year with Blue Cross, which is unheard of in the market place today and I think the reason for that is we have had some really good experience this year. Generally, because we have such a small pool of participants because of the size of our work force that we sometimes can get pretty impacted by one or two claims. We didn't have any measured claims from anybody including Council Member Bird for the last year and so we gained the benefit of that for the city. So, we actually had a decrease. We have a slight increase in the dental costs and that was expected. In front of you in your packets each sheet has the separated out benefits. The medical is first. The dental is the second sheet. The third sheet is our flexible spending program. We do want to continue to support that. We think it's been a great asset to the city. We have about 100 employees that participate in the flexible spending program now. The reason it is broken out into three different groups, we are looking at potentially other vendors. Audi Clinton, our benefits specialist is actually having an interview with Discovery Benefits on Thursday to decide whether or not we need to switch carriers because of service. We have been getting pretty decent service from Express Flex, we can possibly get better service from Discovery Benefits, so we will make that analysis. The cost actually would be slightly less than what we have budgeted if we do choose to change vendors. There is an Executive Summary on the next two pages for you to look at and then the last one is just the renewal figures and actual costs and regards to the various carriers that we use. The last sheet is one that we are pretty proud of and that we want to implement again this year. We have asked for two things and we met with the Director - in our Director's meeting today and discussed with the Directors and requiring that our benefits meeting this year with employees be mandatory. The reason we want that is we have a lot of changes over the last few years and by not requiring it through mandatory, a lot of employees are really uninformed as to what values that they get in their benefits with the city. Secondarily this is probably the best year we could have to want to make it mandatory and to make sure that people knew what values they do receive in working here, especially because of our lower costs of medical insurance. The last one as I was saying is a (inaudible) we had come up with a couple of years ago and we would like to then provide that to every employee to show what their total benefit package is that they receive in addition to the their salary so the employees can really get a better sense of what they truly receive as employees of the city in both salary and benefits. We found this to be a great tool and recruiting and we have used it as in retention and have been able to create this with the Finance Department for each individual employee and the Finance Department will go through every employees' pay and be able to determine everything on here specifically as related to them. So that is a great tool that we found that each employee does seem to walk away with a greater appreciation of the benefits that the city provides. If you have any questions, I hopefully can answer them for you, if not I simply just needed your approval to continue on with the benefits as presented. As I said, we have already budgeted for these through the budgetary process. We just wanted to bring you the final picture for you. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 3 of 16 Bird: Mr. President. Wardle: Mr. Bird. Bird: Mr. Nary. Nary: Yes sir. Bird: I just have one dumb question. Is Mercer Marsh now? Nary: What was Marsh is now Mercer. Yeah, they have been merged. They have been our benefits consultants for the last couple of years and they have been a great asset to us as well and they have helped negotiate some different terms and have actually helped lower the rate. Originally in the Blue Cross proposal for this year was to leave the rate exactly the same. Mercer was able to negotiate with them to bring it down two percent. Bird: That is great. Follow up - on this personal report to the employee benefits, did I miss it Bill? Are you giving one of these to each employee? Nary: Yes. Bird: Fantastic. I am for negotiating on. It's the first time we have had savings in years. Wardle: Council, additional questions? Rountree: No, it is a nice package and I think it is always a benefit to show the employees the things they don't think about and remind them that their take home pay is just that and that there are other values in working in the public entity. Nary: We find that most employees don't realize it until they separate and have to pay their COBRA and they realize how much they really have been getting in their medical benefits while they were here. De Weerd: Mr. President. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: It is also going to be a nice time to allow United Way to talk about the program that they have going too and I just talked to the Meridian Food Bank and they hope to be in a new listing on the United Way thing that will add another Meridian address. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24,2006 Page 4 of 16 Nary: Great. I did get a call from United Way yesterday, so I didn't get a chance to call them today to tell them the dates that we will have the opportunity to participate in and then we want to have some ongoing opportunities again for them to have some access and be able to promote what they do for the new employees as we bring them on. De Weerd: Just a follow up. Just to clarify on the United Way, it was last year or the year before they now pass 100 percent of donations through to whatever entity that you choose and so now that it is a pass through we are more willing to participate. We realize that a lot of our employees are not only Meridian and that United Way does represent the entire Treasure Valley. Wardle: Thank you on that note - for the benefits program I am - my comments, I think that our staff is doing an excellent job of both putting together a package and one of the things that I am proud to say that we could stay with Blue Cross and I have had the honor of sitting with their executive team yesterday at the Idaho Private 75 as they were honored as the number four private company in Idaho and I could tell you that the executive team had a lot of good things to say about the community in Meridian, the City of Meridian and really like the things that we are doing now and are proud to be part of our business so supporting that entity while lowering our rates and offering additional benefits for our employees, I think it is fantastic. Is that clear enough direction for you Mr. Nary? Nary: That is more than enough direction. I appreciate that. Thank you Mr. President and Mr. Baird will be in the hot seat tonight because I have a family commitment. Bird: We have no problem with that. Nary: If you want me to I am sure I could come back afterwards. De Weerd: I am sure it was well timed. Wardle: Item No. 4 is the presentation on the IT strategic audit by Terry Paternoster. Terry, welcome this evening. Item 4. Presentation on the IT Strategic Audit by Terry Paternoster: Paternsoster: Thank you very much Council President. All right, tonight's discussion that the IT Department is here to go over is basically about a month or month and one half ago I came and presented before Council and discussed that I felt that it was necessary that the IT Department go out and engage a consultant in order to do a strategic audit of where the IT Department is currently positioned. I had some concern over the growth rate of the city, over some of the recent budget enhancements and I think overall there was some concern over the departments going the wrong direction and I thought that it was time that we Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 5 of 16 bring in a consultant to help us analyze where are we doing good, where are we not doing good and where there are areas that we can find room for improvement and to really take a look from an outside perspective. I didn't really have a consultant in mind even though I have been thinking about this for quite a while until I had went to this Mobile Data Force conference down at the Owyhee Plaza and one of the presenters, Mr. Kerrin Pease presented during lunch and it was an all day conference and I sat through about four hours of pretty boring lectures from people and thinking I am not sure that this was worth my time of coming down here. But, then I got to lunch and Kerrin- it was kind of a bad position, I think, to have to present during lunch because everybody is eating and they are kind of half paying attention, but I was really impressed with Kerrin's presentation on the data force stuff and the mobile stuff and the reason was that he definitely show insight that went beyond just what this is what it can do, this is how it works and you should go do it. It was basically an overall presentation that said these are all of the areas and a person needs to consider that these are the areas that you can be impacted, these are a lot of the just different growth areas and it was really very well thought out. So, at that point - I guess about a month went by and I got an email from Kerrin and I inquired a little bit more to find out about what his services provide. What I found it is that Kerrin, the founder of Kerrin Executive Services has - he is a consultant, he has over 25 years' worth of experience in the IT industry. He has worked in multiple positions in IT going at all ranges from a basic programmer all the way up to a V.P. of a company where he has overseen multiple divisions, he has multiple reports and has supervised over 400 employees. I invited Kerrin in and we had a discussion and based on that discussion I came to the conclusion that he really understood a lot of what the city going to in some of our needs and was the right candidate to help the city identify our strategic needs and maybe help set up some goals and objectives for how we can continue to growth in the future and really meet the city's needs without wasting money. I think one of the biggest concerns for me is that the city can continue to grow the way we are and support may be good, but as the city purchases more applications and those applications get more expensive, like the Public Work's enhancement this year is if that doesn't really integrate with the city wide vision it really puts us in the position that it might be wasted. It might be money we are throwing down the drain because it might not really work with other applications and at some point the city needs to get to the point that we are really optimiZing what we are buying, that we have that vision and departments aren't going the direction, but they are going in a single direction that has been set up by the city, which is kind of what prompted this review. Along with that when I came in six weeks ago are a couple of recommendations which I think were from you, Council President Wardle that you thought that it was necessary that we maybe review our data retention policy and also look at our security, which we also had Kerrin look at that to determine, you know what does he think is fair and make some recommendations. I think at this time what I want to do is I want to turn over the time to Kerrin so that he can present to you his findings and just explain to you what this big report that I just handed out really talks Meridian City Pre.Council Meeting October 24,2006 Page 6 of 16 about. As you may notice his name is Kerrin. He is a Britt. He is a U.S. citizen now, but he is a Britt. Often times you go Kerrin - De Weerd: He has a funny accent. Paternoster: A little bit of an accent. Kerrin do you want to come up? Pease: Good evening everybody. De Weerd: Do you need a step stool? Pease: Thank you for your time this evening. Kerrin Executive Services has been in place for two years and I have managed a lot of IT development and implementation for more than 25 years. What I am going to try and do today is give you an overview of what I found. I talked to city leaders, IT and a lot of employees (inaudible) how it worked. So, to give you an overview of what IT thought, considered, a little bit about their structure, their infrastructure, what they are responsible for and a little bit (inaudible--) the next five years and then into the meat of the presentation I tried to summarize that big document into a few slides about what I am recommending. What I find when I talk to everybody is IT staff are well received, they have got a good relationship with all the users. They are professional and they typically turn around the issues that are raised pretty quickly. The IT infrastructure is good. It is in place. The service level to the users means its pretty interruption free. The IT service is excellent, even though there is a few rumbling from some of the departments who historically did the wrong thing and with the IT coming in there are some standards (inaudible) stopped out of it, but that is okay. You would expect that. Security standards are effective. All those sorts of things that you would expect in terms of firewalls, complex passwords, rotating passwords, data security for specific users and all those sorts of things you would expect are in place. Backup recovery is in place, so it has daily, weekly, monthly backup. There is an offsite of that and it's monitored by IT to make sure it is completed on time. (Inaudible--) that is brought into the organization standardized, so it is the same PC, the same software in every PC. This makes it very easy to commission and deploy PC's as you get new employees. One of the things that I came across is that IT is reactive. You don't really have an IT Department as such. What you have is a glorified help desk. So, what they are very good at is taking the issues and solving it. But, what they are not involved in is planning and bringing technology into the organization. So, structure in 2006 will look something like this, so Terry and David are the long term permanent employees. We are trying to recruit to more permanent guys in the programming side and the GIS Network side, with some difficulty right now. That will be supplemented by interns. A good intern program works well to supplement the resources for a fairly straight forward (inaudible). Zack is the first one, there will be another. So, that is what it is going to look like until October next year. So, IT they look after 300 users, 11 locations, 25 servers, 230 workstations. They get about 25 to 50 calls a week from the Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 7 of 16 users, except in this quarter which is the first quarter of the budget year where the calls are up by double or triple because people spend their money, they are hiring people, they are buying furniture. So, this quarter then the backload of IT calls goes up. What I also find is there are 35 individual applications, which are departmental applications for running the departments, which they also support afar from the normal things like hardware and network software. So quite a lot to support there. If you say what are they responsible for? It is keeping the IT infrastructure to work without breaking, making sure the hardware is okay, the software works, making sure we use the right vendors to buy that hardware or software - to get the best price, good support. If a new user comes on board, (inaudible) the computer, put the software on it and then get it there, plug it in and get it going. Keeping an inventory of all the devices in the software. Responding to end user's support, all the backups and security, purchasing hardware and software, support in telephones, some software development, making sure the network performs and introducing new technology when necessary. So, quite a lot of things to do. Just a little bit about growth. You are about 70,000 citizens right now. (Inaudible--) 10 percent per year, which may be high, I am not sure if it has been like that the last couple of years. You will be at like 115,000 to 120,000 citizens in 5 years time. An increase of 50 percent or so. I had a look at the growth in employees and I just assumed it was similar, right? So, employees would be at 450 plus in 5 years time. I don't think that is far off, maybe a little bit less. It depends which areas grow. My major findings from the review where the biggest issue that the city faces is the individual applications that exist inside the interfaces in departments -- they don't talk to each other. There is limited integration interfaces, which means customer information is in this department, this department and it is not a whole. Means a lot of duplication and waste of time and information. What it also means is that it is very difficult to provide sensible management information to be able to make the right decisions. To be (inaudible) city-wide view of things is very hard to get - usually computer systems. From my perspective this is impossible to scale. If you double your resources, double your citizens, double your IT staff you are going to be patching and trying to make do with information which is not easy to get. It will just become more and more difficult. What I also found is that at the moment technology input into some of the decisions is limited because IT are typically reactive. I put together a color scheme. Black says now, orange says within six months and green says within 12 months. So what I believe the strategy for IT what it should be is application integration and consolidation across the city. What I mean by that is I mean what we are looking for is a common set of information like financial, customer, assets, inventory - so there is a set of information that you can say this should be common. Then you hang off that, just the vertical pieces that are necessary to run the departments, like the fire (inaudible), the police (inaudible) but it needs to interface well to the common set of applications so that you can get management information and that you can scale it pretty well. I do believe that you have got some good applications here already. I wouldn't recommend throwing all that out and starting again. What I would recommend is look at what you want to keep, see where you want to go Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 8 of 16 and work it out together. It is a combination, I think, of existing applications, some new ones and some custom work. I think that during this period you need to look at new technology to streamline your business activities. A lot of your workers are out in the field and with mobile technology moving well now then you should take advantage of that in the next five years. The last bullet on that is I think you need to look to IT to increase what they can do with applications so to be able to help the departments is to be able to deploy their applications, to help drive towards this consolidated set of applications and also to be able to develop some application code to (inaudible) edges, like I want a report that looks like this. I want a small modification. If IT can do that, it is much cheaper and effective to having to go outside. That is what I believe your strategy (inaudible). If you accept that as an approach then the few actions that need to come out of that is first of all communicate it, put a team together and that may be the same as the MIS Committee to really put the details together, develop a plan and then really communicate that plan to the city. Because it needs to be bought into by everybody and part of that is that you can't go off and just buy some software now, you need to say okay where am I going and if I buy this does it fit the profile of where I am going to? Does it support the vision because if not you shouldn't spend the money and like Terry said earlier you are just chucking it away. Is that the right word, chuck? I think it is important that you have to buy some software from outside, therefore you need to define a software selection process, you know so you know how to define your requirements, you know what to expect when the vendors come back with proposals, you know what your acceptance criteria is and what you are looking for from the support perspective - (inaudible). So increasing IT involvement in applications, development employment is really important. You can't do it unless you do that because the departments are fully occupied during the day to day business and you need an IT staff to supplement those resources to get it done. It also means that currently departments can go out and hire their own developer and write some code for their department and nobody ever sees it until is has to be supported so really what you need to say is that all developments are coordinated by IT and they follow the standards and they do fit the vision of where we are going. Part of that says we have to develop standards and processes for application development and we need to build a scale in IT so they can do these things. So, that was the strategy actions. So there are a few other things that I thought I would just point to that I thought was important. De Weerd: Mr. President. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: Kerrin before you continue we had a really good discussion about this at our directors meeting today in regards to GIS and even as we contract on various studies, albeit the master pathway or you know land use that they give data back to us in usable form that would be compatible with the software applications that we do have. You have multiple data entries and we want to Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24. 2006 Page 9 of 16 start consolidating that, but even to those contracts that we put out so on our master pathway plan or if we even did a tree inventory that we would ask the consultant to bring it back in an application that we could do an overlay that would be compatible with our GIS programs and so that is some of the discussion that we are having preliminary, but it would be in conjunction with something like this. Pease: That is good because you can put (inaudible) on your suppliers to say give it to me like this so it fits your system and it just makes things a lot easier and they will do it. But you have to tell them otherwise they will just give you the standard format. So, we looked at physical security a little bit and that is one of your weaker areas. This city as a whole there is limited protection, so I am recommending almost immediately putting sort of an arm in an electronic entry. It is not too expensive. But things like your server cupboards (inaudible) for all your departments are here. There is no security on them and there is no real security on the city as whole and for (inaudible) for a $1,000 or whatever the number is - I would sleep much better if you just did something. So, that is a recommendation, like a (inaudible) recommendation. On the disaster recovery side, there is some disaster recovery in place, planned - there is a document that I saw, but it is focused more on if a server self destructs you can restore from the backups to another server. What I mean by disaster recovery is in the even of a disaster then you look at a department there are a set of services that they are expected to deliver day in and day out - if they (inaudible) out for five days for whatever reason, which of those services must continue and do we have a contingency plan to make sure that it can? So what I am recommending here is that each department sits down and looks at all of their services and sees what - I mean some of the backups could be a manual process, but at least make sure you have one. Tied into that it may be a greater use of (inaudible) generators where you identify you have to do some things to keep the services running. I looked at compliance and there is no compliance policies from a data perspective, so what I am recommending here is - if you look at all the legal systems there are a number of rules and regulations depending on from which view you look at it, but from a legal perspective quite often if you have a policy and you follow it, you are covered. So, I am recommending you put a policy into place and follow it and the policy may initiate and document what you do right now, but at least you have a policy that you follow and then you need to look at are there some rules from the government or from an audit perspective that you need to keep data for a certain amount of time, like financials and I think you covered that already - you have got like four years of financials. Once you determine the retention you require by document type then implement, archive and retrieval mechanisms such that you can get it if you need to and annual backups, which you don't have right now, but I am guessing you will need those. Support policies - there is no support policy right now. So, what I am suggesting you do is implement a service level agreement and a service level agreement and what that does is says the users have an agreement with IT and they will get a problem which they raise with IT turn around (inaudible) amount of time Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 10 of 16 depending upon the severity of the problem. Like if it is a critical problem, four hour turnaround; if it is a medium problem two day or whatever, but at least it is defined and part of that is what are the hours of support? At same stage you will need to go to (inaudible) hour support as the city gets bigger. You already have a number of people that work 24 hours, so you need to develop an on-call policy of some kind and then the last one there is there are silos of applications licenses, there are a bunch of them that Terry has and them some of the departments or finance may have the others. There should be a central point where you keep all the application licenses. So for development of applications then there are some standards that need developing and they are listed there. IT staffing - so competitive situation here and the current recruiting that Terry is trying to do - he is trying to get some people on board, so I am just recommending a salary benchmark here in this area. Bear in mind when you have a small IT Department you are trying to get the best people you can because you want somebody that knows all of these different things, so you need to attract and keep them - given the competitive nature of this geography with people like Micron and HP and Microsoft, but Micron particularly (inaudible) happening right now for IT - IT to plan the projects and staff and then we are going to introduce a technical questionnaire and practical to make sure you can recruit the right people and what I am suggesting from a budget perspective is you look at your permanent staff to cover 80 percent of your activities, the permanent activities that you need to cover internally, but for the peripheral activities, budget contract stuff don't try to staff it all with IT, it will just get too big and it is not cost effective to do it that way. Review the training that you give IT to try and build their skills so they can cover more of those things. (Inaudible--) Plan IT time, start using time sheets because right now it is react, fix the problem and then go onto next one. So, okay determine how much time is spent on these activities so that we can plan better and as the work goes out see how many more people we need or what we can cope with. Try and do progress reports and give back to departments. I think the situation where you are now, which is to turn it around in a day will not keep on going there will be a backlog, but when you get there you will be able to keep the departments informed on what the status of their issues are. Then prioritization of projects - projects are bigger things and as of right now they sort of sit there in a list of things that IT will get to if they can - typically they can't. What I am suggesting there is do department's need to be prioritized with the projects between them, so we know what is number one. Because if you ask one department it is theirs and if you ask another it will be theirs, but if there is a group they may agree on one. I think you will need to replace your help desk system next budget year. In the short term Terry has done some changes to try and capture time and do some of the things in the current system. IT profile - a number of activities here to try and push out where some of the activities that currently (inaudible). So, MIS Committee needs reforming - I think the IT Manager should be required to attend department meetings. I talked to Terry about visiting each department monthly to try and get a better relationship with the department managers and try and understand how his service is perceived and try and talk about the future and the things coming Meridian City Pre.Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 11 of 16 down the pike and what pain the department is experiencing so that Terry could go back and provide a better service. I think to require IT involvement in the strategic management team, which may be the same as the MIS, I am not sure. I would guess that you don't need two. A more medium term is to look to raise the profile of IT, partly because technology is so important to all companies now a days and it needs to be there on every discussion point when you talk about where am I going and you really have to bring technology input into those discussions. This (inaudible) for consolidated applications IT are going to be your lead. So the next steps - confirm recommendation to be adopted. I suggest you appoint an owner for a set of recommendations because they tend to group themselves into areas. Establish -- if you need additional resource needs - dollars, staff, external help and create a communication plan and execute. I rushed through that. Questions? Wardle: Thank you, Kerrin. Council any questions? Okay one of the questions I have are what are standard contracts or services which could be utilized as opposed to adding a permanent staff member? Are there standards in the industries, such as cabling or install or is it all across the board? Pease: You can get in with anything you like. I mean, a supplier will put an agreement together with you for a number of hours per week for a particular type of scale set. You just have to be very careful in whom you select and that you believe they will give a good service to you. But, you can cover anything from programming to IT activities to - be careful with programming because that is sort of scary in trying to build up because if you do something and they go away again you lose the knowledge. So you have to be very careful on where you pick and choose these peripheral activities. I am guessing there will be a number of different suppliers and that would be part of Terry's job to find the best supplier for these types of jobs. Paternoster: I think that currently we (inaudible) some peripheral (inaudible). De Weerd: I am sorry, but you need to speak into the microphone. Paternoster: I think what I was saying is that we do use some peripheral suppliers at this point. I think four years ago when I started in this position, we didn't use as many peripheral suppliers as we do today, but we have gotten to the point that it is no longer feasible for the IT staff, given our current workload to go off and run cables. We don't typically do like our high end routers. We typically contract that out and it is quite expensive. I mean, we are looking - usually it is around $175 to $200 an hour to get somebody in, but typically to do that it is a very specialized skill and we need them probably less than 15 hours over a year, maybe 20 hours. So, it is worth spending $4,000 for that verses going and hiring somebody. So, I do think that we augment certain skill sets. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 12 of 16 Pease: I have just suggested that you know when you budget for the year then you identify which things you really are going to outsource and then get the best supplier for that. Rountree: Mr. President. Wardle: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: You had mentioned a couple of words that raised red flags to me. One was customizing and the other was that we need to develop development skills and I guess my concern is to what level that you anticipate because it would be my preference to lean towards cuts as much as we can and stay in support mode as opposed to getting off in the leading edge of the development and customization area. Pease: Yeah. So, the best approach is if you can get a package of everything you like. The chance of you getting that is pretty remote because you have so many different specialized departments to deal with and there may be some government type of solutions out there and I guess they will charge you an arm and a leg and they will give you 90 percent of what you want. There is a balance of being do I want to throw out everything I have got and replace it with a package? It is very expensive and very long time, two or three years to do that to move from where you are to a high rate of - there is some product that I brought in and then I will use some of my existing systems, which is what you do anyhow when you move to another (inaudible) system, but you have steps of integration. You may find in five years' time to replace it all. But, I wouldn't suggest you replace it right now. It is just too expensive and I don't think you could justify it, but what I am suggesting is you should move toward an integrated solution and the most effective manner from a cost perspective and a practical perspective. To me, customization could mean just a report. So, I think it is important to set some standards which says we won't modify a package that we brought in at all. I mean that could be a standard that you set. I used to be in a (inaudible) that provide packages, but we always used to recommend don't modify the package because when we bring an upgrade or something else, you can just upgrade it. But, you can (inaudible) around the edges to get different information out in your format. So, when I use customization I really think more of that rather than change the heart of the package. Does that make sense? Rountree: You identified 35 applications. How many individual data bases support that or do you have a bunch of little access data bases out there making all this stuff work and none of it talks to one another or do we have (inaudible)- Pease: Terry can probably talk better about that, right Terry? Paternoster: I think that out of those 35 applications, some of them don't have data bases at all. I think a lot of them - if I was probably to do the mix, I would Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24,2006 Page 13 of 16 say that we have probably 10 applications that connect with sequel server data base back end of some sort. We have in that 35 applications, there are (inaudible) applications that aren't identified because we use volunteers. I mean Public Works uses a volunteer, they use Bob Fields and so does the Police Department and he is developing applications that don't necessarily integrate with anything else and so I think that that kind of goes along with what Kerrin was stating is that at some point the city needs to set a direction so that we say if we are going to use a volunteer, we are going to define how that will be programmed so we make sure that it goes forward verses taking us sideways, which is what is happening right now. It solves one problem, but it doesn't really take us any closer to city wide integration and making sure that the applications talk and that we can really use that information outside of that single application. Rountree: So developing that architecture is part of your strategic planning process that you are recommending to go through? Paternoster: Right. Pease: I think you need to know where you are going. I mean that is one of the decisions that you make, isn't it? I mean, that is part of the planning thing of recommendations. De Weerd: Mr. President. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: I think that was a big piece of the discussion that was around the budget request in the Building Department is looking at something that was integrated and communicated with each other and that is one thing that MIS really needs to sit down and put a structure to. Wardle: Okay, Council, additional questions? Bird: I have none. Paternoster: I was just going to say a quick wrap up just to - Wardle: Okay, go ahead. Paternoster: There is two things that I wanted to just make remarks for. The first one is about packaged applications is that when Public Works had the Hansen people come in and give us a demonstration of that application that they were looking at, the interesting thing that I found was that the application was basically -let's say if you had a package that was $500,000, one third of that cost was the application. The rest of it was paying their programmers to custom develop it to fit into your organization, but there would always be a continued process of Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24,2006 Page 14 of 16 integration and customization that would have to take place in order for us to really utilize it and so I think that that vision of where we are going is just critical to make sure that we aren't wasting money and we are getting the most out of the money that we are spending. The other thing as far as these recommendations that Kerrin made is it is my plan to go back and if you look at the break out there are two different ways that Kerrin broke out the recommendations. He broke them out by city and then by IT. So, if - starting on page 32, he listed out recommendations that are city recommendations that the city really has to kind of take ownership of and then on page 33, it lists out information technology recommendations of things that the IT Department really needs to change and implement in order to make us more effective in the communication process. I think the one thing that, you know, I will admit freely is that the IT Department hasn't been very good at communicating with departments and I don't think departments have been very good with communicating with us, which I think a lot of this strategy is trying to address those communication issues so that we are not surprised with projects. I think that getting these two new staff members that we got approved through the budget last year will help because it will help allow me to offload some of those day to day issues of fixing people's printers, resetting passwords and those other things so that I have adequate time to devote towards really managing the department verses being the person who is providing the support, which I think has been lacking and so I think a lot of the recommendations in the IT portion that you will see are specific to more management type activities in order to make sure that we are driving it in the right direction because it is a much more effective use of my time. We can get interns to do help desk stuff, but really my training is in business. I have two business degrees. You know, my staff that I higher typically have business degrees because we are really focused on how to make business better, how to find efficiencies. So, my plan is to go back, devise a plan for we will implement these things and report back in a couple of months and just kind of lay it out for where we are at because some of them we already started the process, like with the IT Support form. I have already made marginal changes in order to make it more effective so at least we could get reporting out of it and track our time better. But there is other things that will take more time to really get into place and so if it is okay with the Council I would like to request to come back in a couple of months to discuss it further. Rountree: That would be great. Bird: I would agree with that. I would like to have the time to read through the information also and then be a little more knowledgeable when you do come back Terry. But, I think that is a very good idea. Wardle: I would agree Terry that two of the things that has jumped out at me and one is security and I think we need to address that and I am sure you are addressing that soon. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24.2006 Page 15 of 16 Paternoster: I do want to make a comment is that you know when Kerrin said we don't have security - it's not that we don't have some security, but the security maybe isn't up to the level that it needs to be. There probably could be some physical changes that could be made. Wardle: I understand that. The fiscal security recommendation for what seems a cost benefit to me would be something I am sure this Council would entertain on an amendment standpoint. The second is data retention. As you are very well aware of we have been in a very high growth mode in the city and we are acquiring data at a rapid rate and so I think we definitely need to have some policies to tell us how we react to that data, where it is found, how long we keep it, when it is available, especially in regard to public records request and things like that. Paternoster: Absolutely. De Weerd: Mr. President. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: We do have a subgroup that is formed, Terry is on it that will start looking at it and have something, some sideboards in place to have a discussion in January and a draft of a policy in January or it is scheduled in December and drafted in January. I know the Clerk's Office has been working on a number of things too. We do have a good group that is coming together and starting to really nail some key details to that. Wardle: Terry one of the questions that I have and you don't have to answer now, but how much of our data such as customer information is (inaudible)? I know that certain programs - I don't know the specific system, but certain programs don't have the ability to look back after an account has been changed and I wonder how much of that is happening and how much of that can affect our ability to look back from the future and see what is going on? Paternoster: I think that there is definitely data retention issues that need to be addressed from the electronic standpoint. We can talk about it - (Tape turned over) Paternoster: -- Kerrin has identified right now is from an IT perspective. Our real goal is to make sure that if the system was to crash today, can we get it back? If it was to crash - if we needed something from a month ago can we get it back? But, if you want something a year ago, we are not going to get it back. We don't have anything in place to get it back and I think that that goes along with this data retention policy as do we need to get it back? I think that needs to be determined. I appreciate your time. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 24, 2006 Page 16 of 16 Wardle: Sure. Thank you, Kerrin. That brings us to end of our Pre-Council discussion. Is there anything further Council? Bird: Mr. President. Wardle: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we adjourn. Rountree: Second. Wardle: It has been moved and seconded to adjourn. All those in favor. THREE AYES. ONE ABSENT. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:49 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: /2-, ~,t76 DATE APPROVED SEAL -y :'rth~STED~ < {)'<"~ lS;"'(' C'/, '1 C\ ---~ " -~".' --<'i.>>{t'''{ \ \\ "!>//I"~::;.~:.;t :~)I\i\I\,'.\\\