Maricopa County mtg report

[der.hans]

moin, moin,

OK, I took notes. Don't tell any of my profs, I'd hate to ruin my reputation
:).

This is meant to be a factual report as well as I can relate it. I'm trying
to avoid any personal coloring of what was said. There are likely to be
imperfections in my reporting, but it should be fairly accurate.



Initially Paul Allsing was at the podium with a welcome. He also introd a
few other people. First was Wes Baysinger who's in charge of procurement and
materials management.

Next was Jan Neal, who is an internal IT consultant.

Finally Paul introd Lin Thatcher, the CIO.

There were two other women from the county there, but they weren't introd.

We had 23, but with the almost 4 to 1 majority we foolishly didn't call for
a spot vote on what OS to use in the future :).

Both Paul and Lin have tech backgrounds. Paul used to code. Lin worked as a
system architect for McDonald-Douglas. He says he was the chief proponent
for McD-D to move to *NIX.

After the intros, Paul turned the podium over to Lin, who handled the
county's presentation and fielded most of our questions.

Lin mentioned that the current IT strategies go back about 7 years. He
mentioned that the county has 14 architectural domains. Example domains
would be the PC LAN architecture and the server architecture.

Lin said it is not the CIO office's perogative to force domains to use a
particular architecture.

Maricopa County shares top billing with Fairfax County, .va.us, for some
gov't efficiency award related to the IT group.

Maricopa County is a premier customer of the Gartner Group. The county has
access to contact any of the Gartner Group's consultants. Lin was recently
at a Gartner Group conference or something. At that conference he saw a
Star Office demo. He also was told that an enterprise the size of Maricopa
County should be using both J2EE and .NET. Maricopa County is planning on
using both. He said that he also learned a small company such as the one
Matt Alexander works at should be doing something like what Matt's done,
e.g. LTSP and run m$ apps via GNU/Linux emulators.

Maricopa County is considering using XML as a data storage format and as a
data presentation format, e.g. XML to the web browser.

Lin said every corporation has to pick out who it's strategic vendors
are. Maricopa County has, for instance, m$, HP and IBM. Lin also pointed out
that IBM uses m$ on their desktops and also lists m$ as a strategic vendor
as well as having a group based in Seattle.

m$ gets less than 5% of the total IT budget. 50% of that budget is for
labor, e.g. salaries.

The overriding architecture principle guiding Maricopa County's IT plans is:
it's more important that the pieces work together than it is to have the
best individual pieces.

Maricopa County has to hook up data internally and with other gov't bodies,
e.g state and fed ( FBI ).

Maricopa county plans on a 3 year life-cycle for desktops and 2 years for
laptops. That doesn't imply machines have to be replaced, though. Paul
mentioned current reasons for replacing machines include features like wake
on LAN cards to allow remote updates at night when the worker isn't using
the desktop.

Maricopa County has a 'sophisticated seat management strategy'. Each dept
gets one monthly bill for their computers that includes the computers, the
software and support from the IT dept.

Maricopa County averages less than 1% of the average persons salary for
software on the desktop.

Maricapa County tries to be in the moddle of the technology adoption curve,
e.g. behind the bleeding edge and early adopters.

Maricopa County tries to keep software on the box as long as possible. They
are currently standardized on m$ office 97.

Lin mentioned that they are almost constantly at war with m$. He also
mentioned that the IT group works very hard to be 'vendor neutral'.

Maricopa County wants to put it's efforts into things like business
processes, business design, horizontal workflow, and webs ( MC-speak for
intranet ).

Maricopa County uses 3 major *NIX flavors. They get *NIX from Data General,
HP and IBM. HP is predominant in justice and law enforcement, with Informix
as the database engine. The county uses HP OpenView.

Lin mentioned that many back end services available for purchase assume m$
on the desktop.

One of the emerging concerns for Maricapa County is e-learning. They
mentioned AICC and STORM ( SCORM? ).

Maricapa County has no GNU/Linux in production. During the Q and A period
they mentioned some internal experiments being lead by their 'Linux
champion', Derek Neighbors. Paul mentioned an internal web request system
and some file/print sharing experiments. There are no immediate plans to
deploy GNU/Linux to production, but the web request system looks like a good
candidate for the function it's supposed to implement.

Maricopa County sends out RFPs ( Request For Proposal ) seeking a certain
functionality. Vendors then respond with solutions that might require a
specific platform. The county has to have personel who know the platform.

Paul said there are thousands of potential attack attempts per day on
Maricopa County systems. Lin said the county has never been cracked or had a
major virus infection. He mentioned that the county goes to great effort to
prevent viruses.

Maricopa County is using IBM's websphere with versada. In other words
they're using J2EE. They will also using .NET.

Lin said the m$ enterprise agreement is negotiated by the state.

The average local gov't IT expenditure is 9% of the budget, but Maricopa
County only allocates about 5% of its budget to IT. Lin reminded us that
even with the percentage-wise small budget Maricopa County still won the IT
award mentioned earlier.

There were reiterations that m$ gives Maricopa County huge price breaks and
that Maricopa County is a large customer.

Bill Lindley brought the potential of not being able to read data in the
future because of obsolescence. He asked about not being able to read
proprietary formats in the future.

The response was that the only allowed 'archival' formats are paper and
microfiche, so electronic data format is irrelevant. Maricopa County has
many, many paper records stored by Iron Mountain.

der.hans asked about saving data in XML format, even when using m$
office. They were not aware that spreadsheet data could also be saved as
XML. der.hans mentioned that gnumeric uses compressed ( using an open
compression mechanism ) XML by default. He also mentioned he thought m$
excel could save as XML. This was all in reference to having data in open
formats, rather than proprietary binary formats.

Paul mentioned that updating from m$ office 97 might allow them to
standardize on XML as a data-storage format for internal use. Archive is
paper. Public use is currently PDF.

One person made a reference to not being able to fill out online PDF forms
except with m$ ie and Adobe acrobat for m$ operating systems. Paul said he
was unaware of that problem and would look into it. He said Maricopa County
had been getting quotes of $70,000 to make forms, but could pretty well do
it for 'free' with PDF. Free relies on the fact that Maricopa County has
already bought licenses for Adobe products allowing the creation of PDF
files as PDF is what the county has standardized on for publicly available
forms.

Wes said he had thought about the meeting over the weekend and said he only
remembers 2 debarments in his 15 years with Maricapa County.

Tpopped outhey mentioned that Maricapa County's attorney general's office was asked about debarment. That office asked the state's attorney general's office, which in turn asked an association for state attorney generals. The response that fed back down the chain was to wait. The case is going into the punishment phase. They don't know if there will be a case for debarment. They're afraid of being sued by m$.

Maricopa County's employees have spent years using the m$ desktop and that
is a significant expenditure of county resources to gain the proficiency
they have.

Maricopa County presumes that most people have m$ at home and have used it
at previous jobs. They require m$ proficiency to get a job. They do try
to make sure that public services are available for people using other
platforms.

Maricopa County leases to own the software from m$. They will most likely
be signing a 3 year enterprise agreement with m$. After that agreement the
county will own licenses ( e.g. not rentware ) for whatever the most recent
release available at the end of the lease is for those software seats and
titles. They own their current licenses and could stay with what they have
if they didn't have other reasons to update.

Matt Alexander summarized his experience with LTSP. That project was
started at the request of his employer as a result of the new m$ licensing
strategy. Matt pointed out the amount his employer has saved ( $20,000?
) and how Maricopa County could obviously save even more due to the much
larger scale. Lin and Paul once again pointed out that the amount of money
given to m$ is less than 5% of the IT budget and that they feel they have
been quite effective in purchasing the software they use.

Before the end of the meeting Paul had already cancelled a 10:00 appt he was
missing to be in with us. Lin had to leave by 10:30.

der.hans interrupted Lin as he was closing after the last question in order
to get in a thank you from the group for the time and response from the
CIO's office. He re-emphasized that the general consensus of those present
and those that had written was to learn about Maricopa County's situation
and to find out how they can help.

After Lin wrapped up by thanking those present for showing up a couple of
members of the staff stayed in the room to continue answering questions in
smaller groups. Paul Allsing didn't leave until everyone was finished with
their questions.

In conclusion, the CIO's team emphasized that they see m$ as the only
option for the desktop and see no reason at this time to try anything
else. They also do not feel it is appropriate at this time to seek to debar
m$ from being a contractor for Maricopa County. They do see m$ as one of
the possibly, but certainly not as the only viable, vendors for non-desktop
purposes.


The above started out roughly in chronological order of points made, but the
end is a jumble time-wise. Many comments got grouped together with similar
topics as the original topics were introduced. Most of the information came
from Lin.


Stats that came up:

Maricopa County is larger, by population, than 17 states.
Maricopa County has 12,000 desktops and laptops.
Maricopa County has approx 500 technologists working for it.
Maricopa County is a figment of our imagination. The county doesn't have a government. Maricopa County is a sub-group within the state government.
Maricopa County has 12,000 employees. The state government has 30,000.
Maricapa County's IT budget is approximately $100 million.
Gartner says enterprises with more than 5,000 employees should use both J2EE and .NET.

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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# The Internet is the front line of the battle
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