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HomeMy WebLinkAboutIntegrated Technology Applications Information Services Guiding Principles Project 1 Information Services Guiding Principles Project Final Report August 27, 2010 Table of Contents I. Project Introduction II. Project Scope III. Project Discovery a.. Interview and Surveys b. Business Drivers and Objectives c. Organizational Dynamics IV. Project Results and Analysis a. Guiding Principles b. IS Priorities Defined c. Best Practices Recommendations d. IS Project Evaluation Process V. Conclusions and General Comments a. Implementation Recommendations Appendices: Attachments -IS Guiding Principles Results Internal and External Survey Results ATI Rationalization and Priorities 2 I. Project Introduction: The mission of the Franklin County Information Services Team is to provide reliable, secure, useful and easily accessible information resources and related services that empower their vendors, constituents, and staff by focusing on customer needs and innovative, coordinated and cost-effective service delivery. To support this mission, the Information Services Team (IS) along with Integrated Technology Applications (ITA) embarked on an 8-week project to develop a set of IS guiding principles. These guiding principles will act as a compass to the team in the overall approach for delivering services and “best value” to the county. II. Project Scope Franklin County initiated a project to coordinate communication and common objectives between management, the Information Services (IS) Department, and the expectations and needs of the community and employees. To accomplish this task, county management wants to articulate information technology goals in a precise way with well established established guiding principles. ITA assisted with aligning information technology needs and initiatives with the overall business strategy and guiding principles of Franklin County. III. Project Discovery a. Interviews and Surveys Engagement Strategy for collecting data inputs GROUP NAME GROUP DEFINITION ENGAGEMENT METHOD CURRENT STATUS RESPONSES Board Commissioners, John Facilitated Group Sessions 1 June Meeting Completed 4 participants Judges Judges Face to Face and Group Sessions 25 June Completed 6 interviews DL's Division Leaders Facilitated Group Sessions 25 May Meeting Completed 8 participants EO's Elected Officials Face to Face or Possible Group Session 10 June Completed 7 participants ISSC IS Steering Committee Facilitated Group Sessions 9 June Meeting Completed 6 participants IS Staff Noll's Team Meeting Scheduled 30 June 8 participants End Users Remaining County Employees Online Survey Survey Completed 169 responses Vendors County Vendors Online Survey Survey Completed 5 responses Public General Public Online Survey Survey Posted TBD 3 b. Methodology/Collaboration Methods Used : Group Facilitation and Ideation Sessions/Clustering Interviewed over 30 management and staff Online surveys for internal and external respondents Collected over 275 combined inputs Distilled them down to 7 common themes (Clustering) o Business Operations and Change Management o Internal public facing customer service o Systems and Process relevance/availability o Information sharing and data integration o IS relationship/Service Levels o Training o Communications Created 15-20 potential Guiding Principle candidates Developed short-list of Guiding Principles candidates c. Franklin County IS Business Drivers and Objectives: ● Customer Focused: Focus on customer service above all other priorities. Utilize customer feedback to develop strategic direction based in part upon desired new services and feedback on improving existing services. ● Accessible/Reliable: Require reliability and accessibility from county-wide information technology systems and services. These values rely upon each other; you cannot jeopardize reliability for accessibility and vice-versa. ● Innovation: Promote new and improved ways to solve technology problems without sacrificing other guiding principles. Think beyond perceived constraints. ● Value: Implement new information services that represent value to our customers as compared with other public service providers. Value requires containing costs while optimizing usefulness. ● Continuous Improvement: Incorporate metrics to measure performance and verify effectiveness of information technology. Utilize metrics along with customer feedback, direct or through surveys, to identify training and/or resource deficiencies. Incorporate the feedback into the Franklin County effectiveness process. d. Organizational Dynamics at work: All the interviewees clearly articulated a vision as critical for successfully achieving an alignment of business strategy and IT strategy. One interviewee noted that, "I think we've got to do a better job overall of understanding what, as an organization, we're trying to do and then how we're trying to do it with technology.” 4 When asked how this organization could improve alignment of business strategy and IT strategy, interviewees identified many ongoing efforts. These included the IS Steering Committee, and its role as a Business/IT mediator and facilitator; joint Business and IT leadership of IT initiatives; IT initiative prioritization efforts; establishment of executive technology committees; development of a business architecture; improved business requirements; prototyping and iterative development; as well as cross-training of Business and IT personnel. The interviewees suggested several solutions to improving the alignment of IT strategy and business strategy. The first solution was to improve the strategy development process. Another suggested solution for improving strategy alignment was to include the key county stakeholders in the process of developing business strategy. One interviewee summarized IT involvement in business strategy development as "Systems figuring out at what cost, at what risk, at what timeframe." The consensus during the interview session was the ISSC should create a higher level of understanding at the leadership levels of what are the collective IS issues (so) that management can get their arms around them. IV. Project Results and Analysis a. Information Services Guiding Principles: Objectives and scope: ● Facilitate working sessions to develop a set of IS Guiding Principles that align with the county’s business drivers ● Align IS priorities with the user/business requirements and overall Guiding Principles ● Validate the specific IS needs and challenges in comparison to previous ATI Study ● Select/Prioritize technology initiatives that achieve short and long term goals IS Guiding Principles Definition: ● The IS Guiding principles are the key drivers that serve as a basis for reasoning; evaluation, action, and business conduct for the Information Services Group. They help guide the decision-making movements of IS organization as it relates to efficient delivery of services and technology countywide. Final Guiding Principles: ● The County IS Department will utilize industry standard information technology best practices to implement and manage systems in a coordinated manner inclusive of all units of county government and partners with common or related business goals. ● The County IS Department will use an established evaluation process to support sound capital decision making, common business applications and shared services for all future IS initiatives brought forward to the County Commissioners. ● The County IS Department will expand web site e-Government services, features and functionality for future projects. 5 ● The County IS Department will be the catalyst for communication related to technology enhancements that impact the county systems and user-community. ● The County IS Department will employ flexible and interoperable technology for changing business needs in a quick and efficient manner. ● The County IS Department will make information access, analysis and distribution of key information available across multiple organizations as a critical element of their standard business operations. ● The County IS Department will provide the critical information and tools necessary for county leadership to make timely business decisions. ● The County IS Department will strive to hire future and train current workforce with the skills required to develop, manage, and fully utilize Franklin County's technology investment. ● The County IS Department will ensure that recurring and ongoing end-user training is accounted for in all current and new software applications. b. Information Services Priorities: ITA applied the IS Guiding Principles to the ATI Study Provided a process to re-prioritize remaining ATI and IS items Methodology Coordinated with ISSC for current status of ATI evaluation Created spreadsheet with information from the ATI study Eliminated recommendations that were completed or specific to personnel actions Coded the list of items based on Guiding Principles categories o Training o Communication o Information Sharing o Process and Decision Making o Best Practices o Enterprise Support Assigned a Priority to the items based on Guiding Principles Results --Top Ten Recommendations (with ATI Study Reference) Robust network-management software (256 IX.B.5. 236) Follow best practice in all procurements of IT (281 XII.B.5. 281) Update County’s disaster recovery and business continuity plan (285 XII.B.9. 285) Develop written plan for e-government (247 VIII.A.17.b.(2). 224) Strategic positioning enveloping IT decision-making (267 X.B.4 255) Establish new staffing and service paradigm (26 VII.B.7. 35) Written process re: decision-making for networking (254 IX.B.3. 234) Develop specific criteria for evaluating IT-related investments (265 X.B.2 253) Fund training at an appropriate level (283 XII.B.7. 282) Deploy all products at a common version and release level (50 VII.B.14. 52) 6 c. IS Best Practice Recommendations from ITA: CHANGE MANAGEMENT: A process to minimize service downtime by ensuring that requests for changes are recorded and then evaluated, authorized, prioritized, planned, tested, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled and consistent manner Driver for Recommendation: Observation on current process for changes and upgrades. Manual effort and Test Phase Best Practice Outline: All authorized changes support business needs and goals Standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes Ensure that Requests for Changes (RFCs) are recorded and then evaluated RFCs should be authorized, prioritized, planned, tested and then implemented Implemented changes should be documented and reviewed in a controlled and consistent manner Business risk is managed and minimized Minimize Service Downtime Be successful on the first attempt Reference White Paper: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/technologies/collateral/tk869/tk769/white_paper_c11-c11-458050.html NEW SOLUTION DEPLOYMENT: The planning, design, and implementation practices for deploying new solutions in an enterprise Driver for Recommendation: The need for a process to prioritize and approve Information Technology initiatives Best Practice Outline: ● Plan in advance to minimize impact to existing network and systems ● Detailed and documented solution design ● Well planned implementation to include test and validation 7 A recommended workflow diagram follows: Reference White Paper: www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk869/tk769/technologies_white_paper09186a008014f908.shtml NETWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: A network architecture component deployed in the enterprise to manage an infrastructure consisting of multivendor network elements Driver for Recommendation: A need to optimize efforts for network monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting Best Practice Outline: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) network management model defines five functional areas of network management. Focus on these areas will increase the overall effectiveness of current management tools and practices. They also provide for design guidelines to assist in future implementations of network management tools and technologies. The five functional areas are: ● Fault Management – Detect, isolate, notify and correct faults encountered in the network ● Configuration Management -Configuration aspects of network devices such as configuration file management, inventory management, and software management ● Performance Management -Monitor and measure various aspects of performance so that overall performance can be maintained at an acceptable level ● Security Management – Provide access to network devices and corporate resources to authorized individuals ● Accounting Management – Track usage information of network resources Reference White Paper: www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk869/tk769/technologies_white_paper09186a00800aea9c.s html 8 DATA CENTER – STORAGE: Providing network resources to store and protect data Driver for Recommendation: Recognized need for an updated Disaster Recovery (DR) and Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) Best Practice Outline: ● Design to optimize network performance ● Make security a priority ● Ensure high availability and customer satisfaction Reference White Paper: http://www.echomount ain.com/pdfs/CiscoBestPractices.pdf SECURITY: Protection of network resources and data from both internal and external threats Driver for Recommendation: Ongoing need to address network security Best Practice Outline: ● Assess Your Environment ● Protect Your Network ● Protect Your Servers and Clients ● Monitor Your Environment Reference White Paper: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-u s/library/dd277328.aspx V. Conclusion and General Comments a. Implementation Recommendations: ● ITA would recommend developing the County's strategic plan for information technology (i.e. the county IS playbook). The "County IS Playbook" would provide the County technology direction and guidance for all internal agencies, and supply a foundation upon which to base technology investment decisions supporting Franklin County's business direction, while accounting for all of the Commonwealth’s statutory requirements for technology and applications. This plan could be designed to be incorporated into Franklin County's existing 2020 strategic visioning, planning and budgeting processes, and be available as another tool to the county as guidance on the direction of information technology countywide. 9 ● ITA has identified and validated priorities from the ATI study. Recommended areas include: o E-Government Plan o Review IS Service Paradigm (Moving to Shared Services model and eliminate inter-departmental charge-backs) o Data Warehousing /Storage Initiatives o Change Management /Network Management ● ITA would recommend that the county quickly develop an IT decision making process for future initiatives, such as the new courthouse project. The county should have expertise in the areas of technology transformation, business process re-engineering, requirements definition and validation, and RFP/RFQ support. ● ITA identified the following needs to help reduce the alignment gap between business strategies and IS strategy going forward: (1) A strong business need for strategic alignment. (2) A clearly articulated IS vision. (3) A realization by the Business departments that IT is critical to enabling the execution of business strategy. (5) Highly talented Business and IT people should be assigned to the strategy alignment efforts. (6) Courage and commitment by all parties to deal with the issues that would arise with the introduction of any new technology idea.