County Forum Questions

[Robert Bushman]

I think that the following questions capture
most of the points that have been brought up
over the past few days. Please help polish them
by, say, 8 PM tonight so I can format and print
copies. I will be at Maricopa County by 8:15 AM
tomorrow. I'm 6'2", 215, with a shaved head. I
should be easy to find :)


Introduction
------------
I would like to thank the Maricopa County CIO's
Office for inviting us to this meeting today. The
Phoenix Linux User Group is a community organization.
As such, we are dedicated to supporting our
government. We look forward to finding ways that
we can help Maricopa County to take advantage of,
and promote, competition in the information
technology marketplace.


Multisourcing
-------------
Single sourcing of technology products means accepting
the risk that the single source will become abusive.
Recently, Microsoft was found guilty by the Department
of Justice of abusing its monopoly power. Maricopa County
has a clause (MC1-902) in its procurment procedure to
deal with such vendors, but Maricopa County is currently
too dependant to even consider invoking the clause with
Microsoft. What efforts are being made to mitigate
Maricopa County's dependance on a single source which
has been found guilty of taking advantage of such
situations?


Open Data Formats
-----------------
In the mid 1990's, Maricopa County began a landmark
program to make all public documents available online.
These documents are published in Portable Document
Format, an open format from Adobe Systems. Maricopa
County uses Microsoft Office internally. Presumably,
this currently includes the use of Microsoft Word
and Excel formats. What steps are being taken to
move these documents to an open format to guarantee
future readability without dependance on Microsoft?


Experimental Migrations
-----------------------
Maricopa County has acheived an extremely high degree
of interoperability by using a single source for all
software systems. This is the most cost efficient
choice as the first step in connecting disparate
departments, and it requires accepting a single source
in the short run. Now that the initial effort of
integration is largely complete, when will experimental
migrations begin to eliminate the single-source
dependancy?


Competition Pricing
-------------------
It was quite easy to discover by looking around on
the Internet that Maricopa County is 100% Microsoft.
Surely Microsoft is aware of this, and its sales
representatives take this into account when negotiating
licensing agreements with Maricopa County. What efforts
are under way to demonstrate to Microsoft that going
forward it will have to compete for Maricopa County's
software budget?


Dependancy Spiral
-----------------
Using a single source for a few years in order to
establish integration is a great idea. The longer that
this continues, however, the more an organization
becomes dependant on a particular look and feel, and
the harder it is for employees to move productively
between similar products from competing vendors. What
steps is Maricopa County taking to prevent a dependancy
spiral and restore competition for its budget?


RFP?
----
How does Maricopa County guarantee competition in the
information technology acquisition process, does it
use RFPs? If so, what are the steps for providing a
competing proposal, and are any companies other than
Microsoft eligible to submit proposals?