2014-09-04 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Ms. Kierkiewicz: Why is like the support maintenance spread out? Why isn’t it not consolidated? Mr. Jacobs: I think it’s a historical situation, we’re actually looking at that right now, I mean… Ms. Kierkiewicz: So you’re saying there’s like an IT technician within each department? Mr. Jacobs: Not within each department, there are what I would say are five separate agencies within the County that have their own IT personnel in them. There’s the County of Hawai‘i in general, which is the larger core, we’ve got about twenty people on staff. There’s a separate IT group of people for Police they have, I think they have three positions and one is full the other two are vacant right now. There’s two people for Prosecutor’s, one for Housing and one for Aging and I’ve trying to been doing some research on that because it’s always been that way since I’ve been here and it kind of, typically what happens in the IT world is, fifteen, twenty years ago it was a centralized IT kind of thing with a main frame and there was one place that managed all of that. When PCs started to come along the centralized IT departments and this is not just the County, this would be anywhere in general. They couldn’t react fast enough to put PCs out there and so departments saw a need for a piece of software application so they spun up their own IT to support that particular need and I think that may have been what happened here as well, but what we’re seeing now I think on the industry side is because we’re starting to share information like email it can be shared globally. We’re starting to see those things starting to collapse back down into a single support. I think there’s still a need for each of those agencies maybe to have somebody embedded within them because they do have specialized technologies and security requirements so it’s helpful to have an embedded person, but if they were all part of a larger IT whole I think it would be a little bit more efficient because you don’t have to duplicate things like email and file shares you can use, the economy’s of scale and share those sort of things. So that’s kind of, I think that’s kind of why we’re there and we are looking at that. We work very closely together, but it is difficult to have a long plan, a long term plan or direction to take the technology as a whole if you got five different entities and they are all trying to do the same thing or something slightly different then there may be some compatibility problems, but if they’re working together it’s a lot more efficient and we can still meet everybody’s needs but do it in a much more organize fashion. And that’s the one thing that I’ve seen that I think would be very, very helpful as we go on. Ms. Kierkiewicz: And that’s something that you’re working on? Mr. Jacobs: We are working on that yeah, we’ve been having discussions about that we, because of this new exchange project we’ve been working together so there may not be an official change to the way that we are organized right now, but there’s an organizational or structural change you know there’s no problem when there’s a need from central IT to say okay we need to go this direction that the other people they agree with that and they start to come in so we just you know we’re working our way through the process it’s a change that is going to take quite some time it’s quite complicated to make that transition if we decided to collapse it all in a single one again. But no 3