Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Executive Summary
• Issues and Opportunities
• Recommendations
• Summary
• Appendices/Attachments
  • Committee Assignment
  • Interview Questions
  • Unisys Report "Taking Akron Public Safety Into the Future" Executive Summary
  • UNISYS Report "The Road to Technology Planning"
  • Dr. Gaylord’s presentation to the committee "Building the Next Generation Collaborative e-Learning Environment"

INTRODUCTION

The Mayor of the City of Akron, Donald Plusquellic, chartered the Committee for the purpose of examining issues related to the City’s deployment of technology and to make recommendations to enhance the value of those investments now and looking to the future.

Mr. John Conti, Councilman-At-Large, City of Akron

Dr. Tom Gaylord, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, University of Akron

Captain James Harris, Akron Police Department

Mr. Stephen Morgan (Chairman), Vice President, FirstEnergy Corp.

Ms. Sharon Rosche, Comptroller, Greater Akron Chamber of Commerce

Mr. Richard Stall, President/CEO, Info Line Inc.

Ms. Cathy Watson, Director of Finance, City of Akron

Ms. Diane Miller-Dawson, Deputy Director of Finance, City of Akron

Mr. John Dagilis, VP Administration, Info Line Inc. (for Mr. Stahl)

Mr. Mike Giannone, Communications Officer, University of Akron (for Dr. Gaylord)

The committee, with the guidance of the Administration, refined its charter to be as follows:

Technology, as intended by this committee, includes all forms of higher technology, including but not limited to: telecommunications systems; computer and information systems; and all related infrastructure necessary to conduct the business of the City and its various departments, bureaus, and divisions. The committee’s particular focus was on the processes whereby technology initiatives can be conceptualized, defined, authorized, and implemented in a way to leverage existing investments, minimize life cycle costs, and satisfy the needs of the ultimate end-use customers, the citizens of Akron.

Consideration was also given to the growth of technology. As the needs of the City change, the technology needs to be adaptable as the use of systems, applications, and technology itself evolves over time.

The committee reviewed existing and proposed major applications of technology in various Departments, Bureaus, and Divisions of Akron City Government. The committee solicited input from a diverse group including the report of Imagine.Akron 2025, as well as through personal discussions with administration and council officials, and employees of the City. The committee reviewed the work output of the City’s consultants UNISYS and EMA, in addition to the experiences of the businesses and institutions represented by the committee members. Finally, the committee reviewed the organizational structure of several City governments across the country.

The committee’s inquiry focused on:

Gaps between user expectations or needs and technology/ system performance Opportunities to improve the administration of technology throughout City government

Opportunities to improve utilization of technology/systems or leverage them across other work groups

Identification of processes and framework to ensure that technology investments are made to keep City government current with the state of the art, cost-effective, and responsive to the needs of the citizens of Akron

Identification of a process to ensure that the users of technology are the owners of the technology, fully responsible and accountable for the effective deployment and utilization of the technology, but with project initiation, development, and operational support provided by a competent technology staff.

The committee did not get into a detailed review of any particular technology or project although our inquiry did encompass a review of the work of others with regard to several specific projects. We necessarily maintained a high level process-view in an attempt to meet the charter and scope of work.

The genesis of this committee can be found on page 29 of the report Imagine.Akron 2025, which states that…"The City should review its deployment of technology on all levels."

In April 2002, Mayor Plusquellic appointed the members of the Technology Committee for the City of Akron. Members of the committee brought experience from business, higher education, Community-based organizations and City government, both elected and appointed.

While clearly the emphasis of the Imagine.Akron report has been on the so-called growth of the information economy and its likely impacts looking forward to 2025, it is also clear that the underlying infrastructure and service delivery processes rely on a wide array of technology also subject to rapid change over the coming decades.

The use of information to service customer demands; make quicker, more accurate and/or more cost-effective decisions on their behalf; and to educate or inform them on a pro-active basis have become, as in the business community, the key drivers of technology deployment in the City.

The scope on an inquiry into such a broad topic must necessarily be limited to identification of the gaps and impediments to achieving the vision. While certain technical and business expertise existed on the committee, it was not composed, nor was it intended, to be a technical consultation engagement. Where possible, however, we have leveraged the work of technical consultants previously engaged by the City and considered their work as appropriate inputs into our recommendations.

In making our inquiry, we approached the subject from the perspectives of the various stakeholders: namely technology users, customers (citizens), and technology support staffs. In addition, our questions (listed in the appendices) were designed to identify current issues or problems as well as likely future issues.

Before proceeding with a discussion of the identified gaps and issues, however, it must be recognized that at every turn we were impressed with the results that have been achieved to date by the employees of the City despite the gaps and opportunities for improvement that we have identified. This is obviously testimony to their dedication and hard work, and the committee wishes to acknowledge their efforts. Additionally, we believe that same dedication, given some redirection of priority and leadership in the technology area, will help the City achieve the vision articulated in Imagine.Akron 2025.

Interviews were held with members of the Mayor’s cabinet, City Council Leadership, and representatives and heads of the Finance, Health, Public Service, Public Safety, Planning, Law, and Personnel departments. In addition, presentations were made by representatives of EMA Inc. and UNISYS, two companies involved in support of the City’s IT initiatives and systems over a significant period of time and with experience in the government segment of their industry.

The issues which surfaced were common to all of our discussions and are summarized below:

Strategic Plan for technology deployment is needed.

Standardization of hardware and/or software is needed across all of the department, divisions and bureaus of the City.

Documentation of existing systems is inadequate.

Inter-departmental coordination of technology initiatives can increase the leverage of existing systems and direct the allocation of limited resources to the highest value applications.

Accountability for application implementation and ongoing operational activities needs strengthened.

Training support for new users and new systems needs strengthened.

Support structure for technology development, deployment, operation, and maintenance is fragmented and at risk due to employee demographics and market forces.

Existing systems and/or data are not generally shared across department boundaries.

Formalized cross functional budget prioritization process for allocation of scarce resources is necessary to ensure that limited resources are spent on projects creating the greatest value.

Disaster Recovery Strategy needs updated and strengthened.

Security of existing systems needs to be assured.

As with most businesses and other organizations, many of the current systems and IT applications grew out of discrete solutions to then current problems. Most initiatives grew out of department level solutions focused on the immediate needs of that particular unit. There is no overarching strategic plan to guide technology deployment initiatives. In addition, there are no Citywide standards to guide development, procurement and ongoing operation of these solutions. The result tends to be a number of one-off, customized applications of technology driven by the champions within each department.

The resulting islands of technological innovation and specialized solutions, while solving immediate problems, do not allow for maximizing the use of the investment across the City for other users. The lack of a City-wide process to prioritize and rank order technology investments by quantifiable, objective operational and financial measures cause us to question whether the City’s limited resources are going to the most valuable projects first. An opportunity exists to leverage existing applications, technology, and infrastructure currently deployed in one department to solve operational needs in other departments with only incremental additional costs, but this will require users to give up preferred new solutions in some cases and share access to equipment, software, and/or data.

Opportunities exist through standardization to levelize expenditures and minimize the risk inherent in procuring specialized stand-alone hardware or software. Risk exists also in the area of ongoing system maintenance and support, as local specialized expertise is lost to retirement and/or the market place.

The lack of a robust training program for users and maintenance staff, lack of up-to-date detailed documentation for IT and infrastructure systems, and the lack of a current disaster recovery protocol only serve to increase the risk that when something fails (and experience suggests something will fail), the City’s operation will be adversely impacted.

The committee agrees with the UNISYS report "Taking Akron Public Safety Into The Future" that the current decentralized management of technology and information will not sustain Akron’s progress going forward for Public Safety or for any other segment of City government. However, their recommendation was designed to resolve the issues only from a Public Safety Department standpoint. We believe that the logical extension of those recommendations is to create a single Information and Technology Management (I&TM) Department in the City to pull together the disparate parts and pieces under a single structure with common platforms, processes, and capabilities.

We agree that the head of this organization should rank on a peer level with other Directors. Other organizations have adopted the title of Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to describe the position. The exact title is of secondary importance. To be effective the person leading this effort needs access at the highest levels of the administration and as an equal partner in the management of the City. Our preference is to create a Director of Information and Technology Management (Director, I&TM) reporting directly to the Mayor, as do the other Department heads and Cabinet members.

This department should be vested with the responsibility for the development, deployment, operation, and maintenance management of all technology deployed throughout the City departments. All of the technical support and application development staffs currently deployed throughout the other departments should be assigned to this Director I&TM. The ownership of systems, technology, and core infrastructure deployed across multiple departments such as telecommunications, computers, LAN/WAN, etc. should reside with this Director. The management of outside service contractors and technology consultants should be handled in this department.

The ownership of information system applications or specialized technology should reside with the appropriate department head but be operated, maintained, and supported by the technical staff in the I&TM Department. Responsibility for the creation of system architecture, hardware and software standards, and guidelines should be vested in the Director I&TM but with input from the entire leadership team composed of Department heads and Cabinet Officers to ensure that they align with the City’s long-term strategic goals and that architecture and hardware standards are enforced.

Responsibility for hardware and/or application specific user training should be vested in the I&TM Department but utilize the user community to perform ongoing or new system rollout training employing a "train-the-trainer" approach. Utilization of the user community to facilitate this training is an important change management practice which has been shown to improve acceptance of new tools and processes as well as minimize downstream requests for technical support staff help in answering questions or follow-on modifications to the systems.

The City should adopt a rigorous project management strategy for each and every technology initiative. The technical management should be assigned to the application owner’s representative assigned the responsibility to manage the project team. The core project team should be involved in the development of the business case for the project and shepherding the project through the funding process. The project team should be involved in the qualification and selection of potential vendors and/or products with support from the I&TM technical staffs to ensure that project decisions conform to the strategic vision, architecture, and equipment standards, and can deliver the expected benefits on the necessary timeline. The project team should be held accountable for the expected deliverables to ensure that schedules, costs to achieve, and anticipated benefits are in fact realized.

In his essay Imagining Akron, Dave Lieberth observed that "…the City is not prepared to manage advanced technology, let alone the ethical issues that accompany the application of some innovations. The City has no coherent means for receiving, reviewing, and implementing the array of scientific change that will continue to assault our traditional systems over the next 25 years."

In our discussions with the employees and Directors of the City, City Council Leadership and the vendors’ representatives, it became clear that there is no technology deployment plan for the City. Not surprisingly, as in the experience of other organizations and companies, most of the deployment of technology within the City has been initiated at the department level and designed to address immediate needs of the user community within that organizational unit. These implementations are necessarily one-off purpose-built or semi-customized commercial applications of technology.

While the City can be proud of its accomplishments to date, the pace of technological change as well as the complexity and inter-relatedness that it spawns suggests that the City needs to consider a more integrated approach to technology decisions.

Such an endeavor should start with articulating an overarching strategic vision for the City’s deployment of technology. To be effective, the planning activity must factor in the needs of the stakeholders versus the benefits to be derived, the resources available, as well as the state of the art and where it is headed.

This process must involve participation of the business owners (Department Directors and their staffs), technology experts (internal and external), and input from the ultimate customers (as to their needs, expectations, and ability to pay as a minimum) provided by the leadership of the City.

In a resource-constrained environment, not every need can be met simultaneously. This necessarily places stakeholders in a position of competing for scarce resources to get their projects adopted, funded, and implemented. The planning process therefore needs to address the optimization of technology spending across the whole organization not department by department.

Optimization, as it is used here, is defined as the maximization of benefits to the ultimate customer (citizens of Akron) while simultaneously minimizing the life cycle cost (not just the first cost of implementation) to the City.

Carried to its logical conclusion, such a process begins to define a role for a separate technology department with responsibility to facilitate, not control, the identification of needs, help to define viable solutions, and ensure that the benefits intended are in fact derived from the investments in new or enhanced technology deployments.

The current budget authorization process could be strengthened by requiring the development of a supporting business case for each major expenditure of money and/or labor resources. Currently, those projects from revenue producing divisions rely on savings or revenue enhancements to justify their expense. However, other departments and divisions generally represent cost centers and as a result do not have the ability to drive such direct cost vs. benefits comparisons.

Nonetheless, we believe that all projects, even those mandated by other divisions of government such as the State and Federally mandated programs, should undergo the same degree of scrutiny with an eye towards maximizing the benefits while minimizing the life-cycle costs. This will require a fundamental culture change that can be enhanced by the implementation of a rigorous project initiation assessment and authorization process.

This process should be managed outside of the unit requesting the initiative to ensure its rigor and to guarantee that the quantification of benefits and costs are portrayed consistently so that all such competing initiatives can be fairly rank-ordered and prioritized with respect to how the City expends its critical resources.

To be effective, the process must be collaborative with the key involvement of the owners, developers, and users of the application as well as the appropriate fiscal leaders of the City. Consistent guidance on the financial, operational, and customer service returns from project to project will make the process of arbitrating between competing demands much more straight forward, though clearly not simple.

Standardization

Much like the experience of other organizations, the deployment of technology in the City has occurred over time and in response to local departmental needs. As a result of this local view of the roles and benefits of technology, there has developed resistance to standardization of hardware and software as well as adoption of common applications development tools and methodologies across the City.

Some of the obvious benefits to be derived from standardization come from:

• reduced project implementation costs and time by using standard, off-the-shelf commercial products,
• procurement volume discounts,
• leveraging available technology to solve new or redefined problems,
• reduced operational and ongoing system support costs,
• improved user community training and support,
• spare equipment to support equipment failures or growth,
• long-term stability and predictability of system performance and reduced risk of catastrophic failure,
• increased system security,
• improved vendor support.

Some less obvious benefits are derived from increased flexibility in the deployment of technology specialists and the improved employee moral that derives from working in a creative, developmentally rich and growing environment, not to mention minimizing the effect of attrition and marketplace demands for talent.

Any organization struggling with the issue of standardization might ask why, if these benefits were so obvious, it does not occur more naturally. Our experiences suggest that standards constrain the expression of personal preferences and individual decision making and so are resisted as a normal expression of human nature. The implications for process and organizational design then are equally obvious and the drive to standardize must be tempered by ensuring that the real needs of the user or process for specialized tools are accommodated within the framework of standard setting. This then argues for user participation in developing those standards.

A technology support organization, focused on collaboratively driving maximum value for its customers at minimum cost, supported with rational hardware, software and applications development standards, holds the greatest promise of realizing these benefits on behalf of the City.

Accountability

The committee’s review uncovered opportunities to improve accountability in several key areas such as budgeting, operations, disaster recovery, training, and documentation. In some cases, users argued that they were asked to bear the impacts of systems designed to solve someone else’s problem(s). In others, poor preparation or follow-on training was cited as the reason why people struggled with particular applications or systems deployed in the City. The committee believes that these and other issues revolve more around ambiguity in or lack of accountability for the results.

An opportunity exists to more clearly identify accountability for the quality and cost of ongoing technology operations and support. The cost of enterprise-wide systems (desktop hardware, networks, telecommunications infrastructure, personnel system, etc.) should be known to, but not adversely impact the cost of operation for, individual user organizations.

These costs and the impact of these systems need to be managed high in the organization of City government to ensure that the decision-making process involves collaborative input from all of the affected users who must train their people and use the tools provided.

Importantly, the service providing organization should be held accountable for delivering the benefits, as well as for the potential adverse impacts such decisions and operations may generate in the user organizations. The internal owners of specialized technology deployments should be fully accountable for delivering the benefits promised in their initiative as well as for any adverse impacts on other organizations to ensure that the design considers impacts outside of the immediate business process.

The internal owner of the technology, system, or application should be accountable for the quality of the training, security, documentation and disaster recovery planning essential for the development and ongoing operational integrity of the City’s investments.

Human Resources

The use of internal subject matter experts to develop and implement technology initiatives has previously been effective for the City. However, as the rate of technology change accelerates, it has become difficult to keep pace, let alone stay ahead of the developments. At the same time, there has evolved in the industry more of an integrated "systems" approach to managing a diverse enterprise such as City government or business. As technology systems become more complex, the core skills and competencies of technology support staffs have shifted from subject matter experts with some technical know-how to technical experts with understanding of basic business concepts and processes.

The City currently relies on small, department specific technology groups to support existing systems, provide application specific maintenance, and develop new initiatives. The MIS division in the Finance Department provides mainframe and network support services except for specialized networks. External vendor and consultant resources augment these limited resources but are managed within the unit.

This approach locks the City into silos of decision making which focus solutions only on the immediate work group or department problem. The strategy places the City at some risk due to employee demographics and market forces, and does not provide the flexibility and development potential that a technology organization would normally provide. Typically, employees in a technology support organization would be expected to leverage their time, knowledge, and skills across many applications or systems.

The current system of job classifications for technical support staffs was developed in an age when computers consisted of large mainframes, infrastructure meant telephony, and hardware was composed of discrete replaceable or repairable components. The state of the art has advanced to the point where this approach encumbers decision making and makes cross-functional developmental work assignments difficult to achieve. The rigid classification of these jobs impedes the movement of personnel to support new projects or initiatives in other areas.

Flexibility to move personnel from the development of an application to system maintenance or a project team and vice versa will be essential if the City is to simultaneously reduce costs, improve performance, and manage risk.

Sharing resources across City departments is not a current focus. Several examples of duplicate effort were discussed with the committee.

For example, the safety dispatchers do not have access to geographic information, the Public Service Department is considering a Geographic Information System (GIS) project for its engineering bureau, but Summit County has already implemented one which could be leveraged by both to minimize development costs.

Despite a computer-aided dispatch system, records management still relies on paper input and many departments which might benefit from a common set of information, such as Police, Fire/EMS, Health, Public Service and Planning, do not share information. There are no data base standards or information transfer protocols which would facilitate the sharing of information across the departments of the City.

There is a need to do an objective assessment of the security of the City’s networks and data sources. An initiative is currently underway to perform that assessment and so the committee has not done any in-depth investigation in this area. However, we do note that there does not seem to be an overall policy regarding system security or data integrity.

Application owners are left to define the security requirements on their own. This necessarily creates islands of information that become inaccessible to potential users in other parts of the City or the public in general.

If the vision articulated in Imagine.Akron 2025 is to be realized, much more open access to information will be required across departments, divisions, and bureaus, as well as by the citizens of Akron. This will require both active and passive management of the security of the networks, hardware, applications, and data sources.

The management of technology in the City has evolved over time to its present state. The MIS Division of the Finance Department has become a de-facto Information Technology Department but without the capability or organizational responsibilities for fully managing deployment of technology across the City units. The various departments, divisions, and bureaus of the City therefore rely on internal resources to sponsor, develop, and operate the technology deployed in their areas.

The committee agrees with the UNISYS report "Taking Akron Public Safety Into The Future" that the current decentralized management of technology and information will not sustain Akron’s progress going forward for Public Safety or for any other segment of City government. However, their recommendation was designed to resolve the issues only from a Public Safety Department standpoint. We believe that the logical extension of those recommendations is to create a single Information and Technology Management (I&TM) Department in the City to pull together the disparate parts and pieces under a single structure with common platforms, processes, and capabilities.

It is not the intent of this recommendation to create totally centralized control of technology. Rather, it is our belief, based upon the input and experiences reviewed during our inquiry, that this structure has the greatest chance in the shortest time of preparing the City to face the issues confronting it. We believe that such an organization, focused on providing superior service to its internal customers and operating collaboratively with those customers, can address all of the issues and opportunities previously identified and position the City to extract the maximum benefit from its technology investments now and in the future.

To accomplish this, we believe that the head of this department needs to be on a peer level with the other department heads, reporting directly to the Mayor. In many organizations, this position is titled "Chief Information Officer" (CIO) or "Chief Technology Officer" (CTO). The exact title is of secondary importance. To be effective, the person leading this effort needs access at the highest levels of the organization and as an equal partner. Our preference is to create a Director of Information and Technology Management (Director, I&TM) reporting directly to the Mayor.

We envision this department and its staff serving in a role to support all of the other City units. We believe that, to be effective, this Director must be well-grounded in technology and information management, have proven business management experience, and be customer service focused.

This department should be responsible for the overall process of development, deployment, operation, and maintenance of all technology utilized throughout the City departments. All of the technical support and applications development personnel currently deployed throughout the other departments should be reassigned to this department reporting to the Director of I&TM.

The ownership and control of all systems, technology, or core infrastructure deployed over multiple departments such as telecommunications, mobile radio, computers and peripherals, LAN/WAN, etc., should reside with this I&TM department.

The responsibility for the creation of the City’s strategic vision for technology and the resultant system architecture, hardware and software standards, and guidelines should be vested in this department. This effort, however, should be based upon collaboration with the other department heads and cabinet officers to ensure that they align with the City’s long-term strategic goals and vision.

The responsibility for initiating new projects will remain with the sponsoring unit but with the technical guidance and direction provided to the project team from the I&TM Department staff as discussed more fully in recommendation No. 3 "Project Management".

As previously noted, the many successes of the City with regard to its technology deployment have resulted from the dedication and initiative of its employees. Many of these employees were not trained as technology specialists but have developed their skills and competencies on the job as well as on their own time.

The state of technology development and the rate of change suggests that a different approach will be required going forward. Those employees familiar with the operation and maintenance of the legacy systems should continue to support those systems as part of the new I&TM Department. To the extent those personnel have the capability to grow their skills and competencies over time, they should be afforded the opportunity to expand their responsibilities and duties to include new technology as it is placed into service.

Future hires into this department, however, should be based upon the expectation that technology is advancing rapidly which will require flexibility and agility among the support staff. This argues that these positions be re-evaluated for job content and skills and that the positions be moved out of the classified, civil service structure to unclassified positions.

Attraction and retention of qualified technology professionals will require more attention to development of career paths and skills of the staff. The organization proposed provides the opportunity for learning assignments, challenges, and change necessary to create an attractive work environment. Other issues such as wages, benefits, education growth, and development are beyond the scope of our work but are critical ingredients in attracting and retaining technically competent professionals which must be factored into the staffing decisions for this organization.

Project Management

Experience has shown that as systems become more complex, rigorous project management is an essential success factor. The City should adopt a project management strategy for each new technology initiative. Each project should have a named project manager who will be responsible for the project from inception to adoption and rollout. This person may be from that department or from the I&TM Department but should be selected by the project’s sponsoring department head.

The project manager will be that single point of contact throughout the City responsible for ensuring that the project team:

• identifies the real costs and benefits to be derived from the initiative
• leverages the existing technology investments in solving the problems at hand
• is aligned to the City’s architecture and infrastructure standards to the maximum extent possible
• meets it promised deliverables on time and on budget, and that the final product as deployed achieves the promised benefits to the organization

The project team should include the necessary personnel from the affected organizational units, as well as technical resources from the I&TM Department, to support the initial investigation and may well change in composition as the initiative moves from the inquiry stage to the project development and on to the deployment/rollout stages. The salient point of the recommendation is that the project team should have clear leadership with clearly defined objectives and accountability for the results of the project to ensure that the City’s larger interests are preserved.

The project management methodology should be consistent from project to project. Project managers should be provided the relevant information, tools, and resources to effectively manage the project they are responsible for, including the control of the project team, budget, and internal and external application development and deployment resources.

The project management methodology should include a rigorous financial analysis of costs vs. benefits expected to result from the project. This analysis should include objective financial, as well as operational targets to be met. These metrics, in addition to supporting the business case for going forward, should form the basis for assessing the success of the project manager and the project team. This accountability for results is crucial to successful deployment of any complex project but especially in the technology arena.

Management of the project team(s) day to day should be a function of the Director I&TM. This obviously needs to be a collaborative effort since in most cases the project manager and members of the team will actually come from the various departments of the City and may well be only assigned on a part-time basis to a project. Such an approach supports both the need for rigor and adherence to standards while engaging the people affected most by the initiative--the user community.

The City, through the I&TM Department needs to establish clear standards for application architecture, data interchange protocols, software, and hardware to increase its purchasing leverage and minimize project, as well as on-going operation and maintenance costs.

The Director I&TM, to ensure that the product(s) and/or service(s) align with the City’s standards and strategic vision, should approve procurement of technology and professional services to support existing or new technology before a request is released to the Purchasing Division.

Contract management responsibility should be assigned to this department with support provided from the Purchasing Division as necessary.

When acquiring technology, consideration should be given to adapting to standard commercial offerings as opposed to customizing a product or developing it in-house. While adapting a process to fit an application may cause concerns for the users, it greatly simplifies future operation, maintenance, and vendor supported upgrades of the product.

As is the case in some of our experiences, part of the frustration expressed by the user community can be attributed to lack of input into the design of a particular solution, which later affected their work. For example, the Banner deployment was widely cited as an example where a solution was created that actually increased the work of the users or drove additional complexity in the necessary financial processes.

Closer examination suggests that the training effort was not as effective as it could have been—in part because of user non-acceptance. Follow-up training has been spotty at best and as a result, the users struggle with day-to-day activities which then is attributed to poor system performance and/or design.

Use of off-the-shelf or commercially available products with little customization often requires changes to existing business processes. Changes to those processes may be resisted by the personnel assigned the task unless there is some buy-in to the new or changed process and the overall benefit of the change is seen as valuable.

Clearly, successful implementation of new technology relies not only on user acceptance but the further development of skills and abilities that the technology enables. This requires not only robust initial training of users but periodic follow-up training. That training effort itself requires the use of modern technology for its effective deployment. It is for these reasons, that the committee recommends that all training responsibilities related to technology be managed by the I&TM Department.

This recommendation does not intend to suggest the need for a large or permanent training staff. In fact, our experiences suggest that some of the most effective training for new system deployments can be provided by users from the development team who effectively "train the trainers" in the organization.

In the case of vendor specific technology or industry standard offerings such as desktop business software, the training is usually commercially available and may even be acquired as part of the original purchase. In either case, we believe that it is a critical dimension of success and therefore needs to be managed, as is the critical technology it supports, by the I&TM Department.

A number of discussions centered on the work necessary to make temporary patches to legacy systems to keep them running. In some cases, the original vendor no longer supports systems. Some software is so archaic that there are few professionals left who are competent with the technology or computer language. Some of the applications software has been customized and patched over time so that it is no longer the same product supplied by the original vendor.

All of this creates added risk of failure. While some have suggested that the City embark on an immediate replacement strategy, this committee believes that the more immediate need is to identify those mission critical systems, their most likely cause(s) of failure, and develop a plan to work around the failure and/or mitigate the consequences of failure. This should be a high priority effort of the new I&TM Department.

With mitigation plans in place, the City can then begin to embark on a thoughtful, planned replacement strategy designed to minimize its investments and seek maximum leverage across the organization. This approach will allow the City to levelize its expenditures over a longer period of time.

Part of this strategy needs to consider the cost and implications of failure as part of any new project deployment. As technology becomes an enabler of improved process efficiencies, it can also ensnare users who become captive to the technology and totally dependent upon it for their performance. Avoiding this pitfall is a subject that is beyond the scope of this committee’s work.

However, we know from personal experience that organizations which embark on process re-design, enabled by technological tools have a much better track record than those which adopt the latest technology expecting it to solve their problem(s). In fact, the work of the Public Service Department and its team-based WCO initiatives is a good internal example of how technology can be leveraged as one element in the solution of identified problems. This is a model that should be adopted throughout the departments of the City since it provides a process basis for failure mitigation.

Partly due to the age of some of the legacy systems, partly due to lack of cross-departmental standards, partly due to the pressures of keeping legacy systems up and running, the documentation of existing systems is inadequate.

The I&TM Department should work quickly to establish standards for documentation of new systems as well as to control changes to existing systems. Documentation is as critical going forward as training users or assuring that the benefits expected are, in fact, derived. Lack of standards defining how changes are executed and controlled can quickly render even the best technology useless. Changes to a system which nobody can understand will, at the least, make operation and maintenance of the system more expensive going forward and may, in fact, render the product useless or unsupportable by the vendor.

Implementation of a change control process along with rigorous documentation requirements for all approved changes can actually lessen the risk of system failures and provides an opportunity to reduce future operations and maintenance costs.

Security

Much has been written in the days since 911 regarding security. Without adding to the hype, the committee believes that it is essential that an assessment of the security of the City’s critical technology be undertaken immediately. At the same time, we recommend that the effort not be used to close down accessibility of systems and data to a wider user community but rather should result in prudent management oversight of that access to ensure that system integrity is maintained and that the operation of City government is not compromised.

Methods currently exist in business and government to provide wide access to data by diverse customers while still maintaining data integrity and essential confidentiality.

Functional responsibility for assuring the integrity of these systems should reside with the Director, I&TM Department. However, as access to systems and data increase, all areas of the City will have to become engaged in managing security of technology and the data residing in computer applications and databases.

The Director, I&TM should be responsible for development of the annual technology spending plan for the administration. Development of this technology budget should include the input of new initiatives as approved by the Technology Steering Committee described later.

While individual project budgets will be delegated to the project team to manage, ultimate accountability for control of project spending to authorized limits should be assigned to this Director.

The budget should include sufficient detail to segregate operation and maintenance costs for major systems from capital expenses for new additions or enhancements. The actual expenditures should be tracked relative to the budget in sufficient detail to allow system owners to assess the on-going cost of those systems to ensure value continues to be derived.

Technology Steering Committee

A Technology Steering Committee, composed of the department heads and cabinet members and chaired by the Director I&TM should be convened for the purpose of:

Reviewing and approving the business case for new technology initiatives (or additions to existing systems) before budget authorization is requested

Monitoring and overseeing the progress of authorized projects including cost, schedule, and deliverables

Review Citywide technology standards, practices, and policies recommended by the I&TM Director to ensure alignment with the needs and mission of the units of City government

These recommendations, taken as a set, address the critical gaps and opportunities identified by the committee during its inquiry. Any number of these recommendations could be implemented on a stand-alone basis and provide some degree of improvement. However, the larger issue, we believe, is the need for a totally integrated approach to the technology business for the City of Akron. It is for this reason that we believe these recommendations should be adopted together beginning with the reorganization of responsibilities.

The remaining recommendations are listed in the order of priority that we believe necessary to address the remaining gaps and opportunities. We imagine that some time will be required to search for and select the Director. That person should participate in the remaining decisions.

Personnel, selecting the right people with the right skills, is a long-term recommendation but one which needs attention very early on since it has broad reaching implications for current as well as future staff.

The I&TM organization needs to be up and running before the other recommendations are finalized. Obviously, there are many stakeholders who need to be consulted before the design of those recommendations can be finalized. The Technology Steering Committee should be in place in time to begin reviewing the changes to processes, policies, and procedures before they are adopted and rolled out to the rest of the City employees to ensure that they further the vision and mission of the City.