Maricopa County mtg report

[der.hans]

Am 09. Jul, 2002 schwätzte der.hans so:

> 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

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A quick note about how we carried ourselves. Most of us dressed up to some
extent. I think that helped. I'm certain they realized that was a concession
on our side. Also getting 23 people in on less than a week's notice after a
holiday weekend first thing on a Mon morning was certainly impressive. I
personally know of many people who couldn't go because 08:30 or thereabouts
today was their first opportunity to ask for time off.

Most of us ( though not necessarily smooth public speakers ) did quite
well interacting with the county staff. Only one person was seen as
being confrontational. I don't know how well I did. I think I wasn't
confrontational, but there was definitely a point during one of my questions
that Paul was visibly upset.

> Initially Paul Allsing was at the podium with a welcome. He also introd a

It was a good, friendly welcome.

> 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.

We need to research what these domains are.

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

This means, provided I understood what he was saying, that each 'domain'
has some autonomy in choosing what they use. The relationship between the
domains and each other and the domains and the CIO as well as the nature of
the autonomy aren't clear to me, though.

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

Lin seemed to be very proud of this award. We need to find out what the
award was and why Maricopa County was chosen. It should give us some civic
pride that the county won an award they consider prestigious.

> Maricopa County is a premier customer of the Gartner Group. The county has

What's our take on the Gartner Group?

> 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

.NET, again, is a problem due to single-vendor probs. There are several
platforms available for J2EE. Do we really think they're all distinct enough
to not include Sun as a single-vendor, therefore tainting java the same way
as Microsoft control taints .NET?

> 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.

I asked Matt to write a case-study type of paper for us to use as a local
success story. We have other groups using LTSP that might be able to add to
that.

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

This is important. It is quite possibly where we need to concentrate our
efforts with the Maricapa County CIO's office.

> 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.

This means they're acknowledging it's nearly impossible to pry them away
from Microsoft.

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

That means Microsoft gets at least 10% of the budget used for products and
services. We need to get somewhat detailed copies of the budgets for the
last couple of years.

For the most part I think we're barking up the wrong tree if we try to use
budget as a way to sway Lin's staff. They've made their decisions and are
willing to accept what Microsoft gives them. They're also confident they
will continue getting good deals from Microsoft.

> 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.

This is a possible opening for us. It only works well together as long as
Microsoft decides it's in Microsoft's favor to work well together. Free
Software can fixed to continue working well together. Free Software doesn't
use the 'embrace and extend' attack to not work well with others.

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

This is an important aspect to the overall campaign. We need to remind every
group that their requirements for Microsoft are furthering the monopoly. The
monopoly is not in the best interests of the citizens of this country or in
the best interests of our economy.

> 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.

They own the boxen at the end of the rotation, so they should be getting
plenty of 'older' boxen that will work quite mightily with GNU/Linux.

> 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.

This can be the killer for the domains approach :(.

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

Lin didn't state who the 'average person' is. We need to seek clarification.
This might well be up on Maricopa County's web site.

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

Which makes it interesting that they adopted IIS in 1997 when that was
definitely bleeding even if not on the forward edge.

> Maricopa County tries to keep software on the box as long as possible. They

They definitely should use debian ;-).

> mentioned that the IT group works very hard to be 'vendor neutral'.

You can't be vendor neutral if you're supporting an exclusive contract
guaranteeing a monopoly. I'm not saying that they're biased. I'm just saying
that signing a contract that locks them into a particular company violates
their neutrality for the life of that contract and probably longer.

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

We need to find out what these items are and evaluate where we can help.

> 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.

This is a start. Are these servers only? Probably.

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

Maybe we need to provide alternatives to those commercial back ends.

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

Something else that we might be able to help them provide.

> 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.

We should seek to get updates on how these experiments are going. We might
be able to offer some assistance.

> 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.

We need to see these. They will give us insight into what the county is
asking for and how the county's asking for it.

> 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.

How much are they spending on virus protection?

> 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.

They would be very happy if we could convince the state to allow electronic
formats for archival. This is something we should push regardless of the
other issues. I wonder how much the paper storage is costing the state. Is
it just increasing every year as more papers get locked into the vaults?
What is storage cost for all that paperwork?

> 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.

Excellent opportunity for us to provide education and solutions that work.

> 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.

Knowing about these two cases might help us, but Wes was basically saying
debarment is only for extreme cases and they don't consider the Microsoft
violations to be extreme.

> 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$.

The offices of the various attorney generals is probably where we need to be
asking the debarment questions.

> 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.

They seemed genuine about wanting the meeting. After the meeting I once
again let Paul know we appreciated it. They are not the only group that's
gotten letters from us.  They're the only ones who responded by asking us
in for a meeting. I explained that to Paul. They are correct in that they
didn't have to do that. I'm certain it was probably somewhat inspired by a
wish for damage control.

> der.hans interrupted Lin as he was closing after the last question in order

I hated to interrupt him, but thought it was important to get the thank you
in before he wrapped up.

> Maricopa County is larger, by population, than 17 states.

That helps show the size of Maricopa County's role.

> 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.

This points us at the state gov't if we really want to see any change.

> Maricapa County's IT budget is approximately $100 million.

At $5 million every 3 years Microsoft can afford a lot of legal fees to make
sure the county stays with Microsoft as a single-source vendor.

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ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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#  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
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#  I, OTOH, prefer to just go stomping through the desert... - der.hans