IT Shake-up

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Found in: Case Studies

Individual agencies in San Juan County, N.M., no longer bother with the computer purchasing process, thanks to a countywide purchasing consolidation project devised by Ellen Bristow, county IT administrator and Joni Kelsey, PC service technician for the county.

Purchasing Power
San Juan County transferred computer purchasing control from every agency to the county's IT department, allowing Bristow and Kelsey to drastically cut costs through bulk purchases of Gateway equipment for the county's 600 users.

Bristow said frequent budget cuts repeatedly prompted department heads to slash PC budgets. Lower prices generated by the consolidated purchasing project enabled the county to implement a consistent three-year PC replacement cycle, regardless of budget cuts. The county strategically spreads cuts across all agencies when belt-tightening is unavoidable, reducing their impact for every agency.

Before the county's purchasing consolidation project, county employees performing mission-critical tasks were often stuck using antiquated systems.

"We'd end up with machines on desks that were six or seven years old -- old technology that could not keep up with the pace of what's required of our workers," Kelsey said.

Kelsey put together a business case that persuaded the San Juan County Commission to approve the consolidation. The county's Gateway representative helped Kelsey find information she needed to make the case.

"He provided any kind of support or information we needed," Kelsey said. "He did searches for us to find how other organizations worked. He gave us statistics. He gave us dollar figures and a white paper we could take to sell this to the commissioners."

San Juan County implemented the consolidation project in 2005 and has saved roughly $45,000 so far while increasing performance.

"The response has been really good; especially from the management part of the county -- the commissioners, the CEO, the department heads and elected officials. Everybody's been very supportive of centralizing the purchase of workstations. Department heads have better computers for their people, and the cost savings for the county -- that's been huge," Bristow said.

She said a few department heads were concerned about relinquishing their purchasing control at first but eventually supported the project because it freed them to devote more resources to their agencies' core functions, instead of the tools used to perform those functions.

Standardizing on Gateway computers also allows IT staff to focus their repair skills on just a few types of systems, reducing repair time and increasing employee productivity, said Kelsey, adding that that was one detail that persuaded the county commission to approve the consolidation.

Replacement Cycle
Bristow and Kelsey did a priority analysis revealing the county had 300 mission-critical users whose computers should never exceed three years old. The county started the replacement cycle by purchasing 159 Gateway PCs in 2005 to make up for sluggish buying the prior year. The county now purchases 100 Gateway PCs every year to continue the three-year rotation. When a system reaches three years old, it is passed to a station that performs a less critical function, such as kiosk positions and maintenance locations. After three years in the less critical locations, more three-year-old Gateway machines replace the six-year-old machines, and the cycle continues.

Kelsey said the IT department's control over all PCs eliminated the problem of some agencies letting usable PCs sit idle.

"They would take and stick them on the shelf, and let them rot for four more years and not use them anywhere else," she said. "This way, we get them all back, and we redeploy them where they're needed."

Sometimes the county has a surplus of older Gateway computers and lends them to nonprofit organizations in the community, like senior-citizen centers, Head Start and the Extended Care Health Option, which assists individuals with disabilities.

Catching Up With the Times
Kelsey used the consolidation process as an opportunity to upgrade the graphics computers used by county mapping technicians.

"I was looking at graphics machines for all of our mapping people, and I was only thinking along the lines of 2 gigs of RAM. I talked to Santa Fe County, and they were putting 4 gigs in their machines. I thought, 'My goodness, I'm in the Dark Ages. I need to pull us out of that because these mappers, if it takes them 10 minutes to pull up a project, they're not being productive," Kelsey said.

The county purchased Gateway E-6500 desktops, with Intel