What are the benefits of the city's Web applications, besides the obvious?
We don't have an overwhelming number of customers who pay their water bills online, but for some customers, that's a very critical opportunity and need that they have.
Bringing parking tickets and that type of enforcement activity online caused us to re-evaluate our entire process of parking enforcement. So it's much more efficient, costs less money for the city, we have a higher level of compliance -- all of those sorts of things -- as we've gone about redesigning what we do.
Talk about the IT effort that went into getting ready to host the 2002 Winter Olympics and the results.
What's your biggest challenge upcoming?
Probably enterprise application integration. We've redone our business licensing structure. For the first time, we're going to license single-family and duplex rentals. That's going to increase our business licensing volume by about 40 percent.
We're coupling that with our new business license fees and disproportionate impact fees. There is a significantly greater usage for, say, public safety services from rental properties than from owner-occupied properties. So we've adjusted our licensing rates to reflect that.
We've launched our good landlord program. So if a landlord will take an eight-hour class and agree to some terms -- basic business practices that most rental management companies would do anyway -- essentially their increase in disproportionate business license fee will be credited to the landlords' properties. If they're not going to be good landlords, they pay a whole lot more than they used to.
In that context, here's the IT problem. I'm responsible now for taking data out of our water-billing systems, our police and fire records management systems, and our zoning enforcement and planning databases, and tying all that together in a way that we can verify compliance with our good landlord program.