Applications are at the heart of our operations, and drive our critical activities. Every day, we share information and communicate with employees, customers, vendors, and the public. You need to access, manage, and interpret information to make fast, effective business decisions.
Focused on helping ensure maximum value for your IT investments, the Department of Information Technology / Business Applications division has the experience you need to develop, build, integrate, manage, and evolve your applications with greater speed and ease. Whatever the application, our goal is the same: to help you solve business problems, not just deploy new technologies.
You have business problems and it is our job to help you fix them. This is what we do. We work with our supported departments to determine their needs, establish their goals, and offer a strategy that is rooted in business - not just technology. We analyze your processes, brainstorm ideas, study your problems, and offer expert advice.
As you would expect, we are experts in technology too. Because of our years of experience, we can implement several technologies as determined by the business requirements. We’ve been a mainframe shop for a long time but we’re learning more of the new technologies as we take on projects that require them.
We are acquiring skills to support the County’s vision to migrate from a mainframe to an open systems environment. Part of that vision is to “buy when we can, build when we have to”. This means that we will use commercially available or “packaged” software when it is possible and when it is not we will build the application ourselves.
Some of you have already seen what we can do with Java applications and Crystal Reports that deliver data to your desktop in an easy-to-use format. In some cases the data you are getting is copied from the mainframe to an Oracle database in real-time. This replication is one of the tools we use to help us convert application data for packaged software implementations. It has been particularly helpful on the Revenue and Tax system migrations.
But the applications and reports that come out of these projects are just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the scenes we are learning and using formal processes for project management and object oriented design. We’re doing it through a mixture of education, mentoring, and acquisition of staff with the new skills. It’s an exciting time and we’re up to the challenge.
