2009-2010 Corporate Partner Recognition Program Winners
Each year PTI recognizes members of the PTI corporate partner program for outstanding contributions to improving government operations and services, and enhancing the quality of life in our communities.
For 2009-2010, PTI was pleased to recognize Motorola and Microsoft at the PTI Technology Solutions and Innovations Conference, March 25, 2010 in Washington DC.
Your staff contact for the Corporate Partner Program is .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), PTI Executive Director, 202-626-2445.
Motorola
Cities and counties across the U.S. continue to struggle with providing the services that their residents and businesses need while in the midst of ongoing budget cuts and reduced revenues.
Faced with these challenges, some rural counties and municipalities have developed creative ways to implement wireless broadband solutions in order to provide needed services to their community and do so in a cost effective manner.
Wireless broadband connectivity provides a means for local governments to improve connectivity. These secure, reliable connections can be used for public administration, public safety and public access. Wireless technology means that connections can be made in hours rather than weeks that are typically required for trenching and laying cable. Also, installation is a fraction of the cost of wired alternatives.
Wireless broadband connectivity can be used for:
- Replacing costly leased T1 lines
- Enabling video surveillance at 1/10th the cost of wired video alternatives
- Providing rapid connectivity in the event of disasters when wired communications are not available
- Providing cost effective broadband connectivity for rural areas
Demonstrate how the solution or practice helped a local government to improve service delivery and/or reduce operating costs
Franklin County VA uses these solutions to reduce government operational communication costs while enabling businesses and residents with broadband connectivity. Coshocton County OH uses these solutions to keep local businesses viable with connectivity, enable online learning for community members and provide broadband connectivity options to local residents.
Green Bay WI uses these solutions to provide video surveillance of bridges and secure communications to government manufacturers in the region. Motorola wireless broadband networks have been used to provide rapid connectivity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.
Eugene OR uses Motorola wireless broadband connectivity for video, voice and data connectivity in HAZMAT response activities.
Explain how the solution or practice could be used by other local governments
Local governments can use Motorola wireless broadband solutions to:
- Provide video surveillance feeds to first responders enroute to an incident
- Provide HIPAA compliant secure information transfer between government administration buildings
- Reduce the cost of expensive T1 leased line subscriptions and pay for the system in 6 months of operation
- Provide remote command and control functions to public facilities (water reservoir, traffic control, etc.)
- Provide broadband connectivity to rural or sparsely populated locations within their jurisdiction
Microsoft
Klamath County Oregon Streamlines IT Operations by Migrating to Microsoft Cloud Based Messaging Environment
Klamath County, Oregon, faces information technology challenges typical in many local governments in the Western United States. It is home to an array of aging hardware and software infrastructure, faces intense budget pressures, and must support an increasingly networked workforce for whom always-available computing resources are a mission necessity.
The county’s mission is to continuously provide services, even in the face of snowstorms, earthquakes – or even terrorist events. This makes reliability and fault-tolerance a key requirement. The county implemented Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) messaging solution to address these challenges.
In addition to increasing the reliability and responsiveness of the county’s IT infrastructure, the county is realizing administrative savings while delivering robust, dependable E-mail services to county agencies.
Situation
Klamath, with 70,000 residents, is among Oregon’s more populous counties. Most of the county’s 600 or so employees regularly use E-mail in their duties. Rugged environmental conditions in Klamath County add to the challenges faced by the county’s IT department.
In addition to working across difficult terrain and over long distances, Klamath County must be on guard for earthquakes and severe winter weather. To adapt, several county agencies – particularly law enforcement and planning units – have relied on a patchwork of video conferencing services from a variety of vendors to provide communications and management across the county’s far-flung offices. The demands for the delivery of increasingly reliable messaging and connectivity services, however strained the county’s old IT messaging infrastructure.
“Our legacy E-mail server was not bad, all things considered,” explains Randy Paul, Klamath County’s Director of Information Technology. “But it was stretched to capacity and needed an upgrade.” Among the shortcomings of Klamath’s existing legacy environment was a tangible decrease in the messaging systems reliability.
“We were down to two nines of performance, which wasn’t acceptable,” says Paul. “We needed two servers, not just for E-mail, but also for the collaborative services that our agencies have been planning to start using in the next few years.”
Moreover, different county departments purchased teleconferencing services from a variety of vendors resulting in a hodgepodge of services, service quality, and business terms. This contributed to significant management complexity to the system administration workload of Paul’s IT team.
Solution
Klamath County’s budget pinch drove Paul’s decision to implement a solution based on Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). BPOS is a set of Microsoft hosted messaging and collaboration solutions that include Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Microsoft Office Communications Online.
These online services are designed to provide agencies with access to streamlined communication capabilities that feature high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified IT management.
Paul, a veteran IT manager with a significant small business background in the private sector, knew the advantages of a hosted solution like BPOS over running dedicated applications in-house. He was especially aware of how BPOS could free his staff’s time by reducing the administrative burdens and human resource requirements for managing a dedicated E-mail system.
“It was taking up a lot resources from our small IT team. E-mail alone was consuming 1.75 FTE (full time equivalent) workers under our old solution,” explains Paul. He felt that the intense administrative effort required to keep the old E-mail system up and running created a significant vulnerability for the county. For example, if one of Paul’s staff didn’t come to work because of illness – or because of one of those dreaded Oregon blizzards – then system performance would suffer.
While there were some concerns about ceding so much control over the county’s E-mail system to a hosted service, Paul made the case for the BPOS hosted solution on two fronts. Costs would be reduced significantly; and performance and dependability would improve significantly.
He had noted from previous experience how a reputable hosting provider often has more domain expertise to address the details of things like spam and phishing – and for ensuring appropriate redundancy and back-up capacity.
In addition to the standard Microsoft BPOS suite, Klamath County’s installation includes an archiving module that helps to ensures that the county is compliant with federal and state record-keeping and retention mandates.
“Our new Microsoft archiving is far more elegant than what we have had in the past,” observes Paul. “And the BPOS system administration has allowed us to take the resources needed to manage E-mail down to about .25 FTE.”
Cutover from the old Exchange 2003-based E-mail to the new BPOS-based solution took a total of ten weeks. “We spent about two weeks or so in a testing and configuration phase,” explains Paul. “Then users were phased in over the following eight weeks.”
Benefits
In the final analysis, Paul and his staff are bullish on their new system.
“BPOS has helped us achieve our goal of moving toward a highly managed IT service,” explains Paul. The BPOS deployment vastly simplified Klamath County’s internal management initiative to implement a fee-for-service scheme to better rationalize support services, including IT. The result has been a modest reduction in seats served by Paul’s staff, but more importantly, smarter allocation of scarce resources at a time of flat county revenues.
Progress in reducing and streamlining the administrative and management cost structure of Klamath County’s IT organization is prompting officials to expand the number of BPOS collaborative tools the county will deploy in the coming year, including: SharePoint group workspaces and Live Meeting teleconferencing.
County law enforcement and planning agencies that have already deployed and integrated video conferencing into their business processes from a variety of vendors will begin migrating toward BPOS-based solutions.
“Those legacy systems will be phased out by attrition. We will move those offices over to Live Meeting as their existing service agreements come up for renewal,” explained Paul.
He plans to expand the presence of SharePoint throughout the county to enhance collaboration and effective information sharing within and between offices.
03-23-2010 Send a link Corporate Partner Recognition Corporate Partners Print version
