The Power to Do More

Gordon Eaken, director of Information Systems for the Village of Hoffman Estates, Ill., was a one-man IT maintenance operation when the village hired him 10 years ago. Brand, age and quality varied greatly among the city's desktops. With more than 300 employees, maintaining the city's myriad desktops was cumbersome.

Having no IT staff, Eaken knew he could drastically improve his productivity if he set a standard for all desktops. Two years after taking his job, he searched for a standard to provide the performance, hassle-free service and price that would empower one man to run IT for a city. That standard became Gateway. Eaken purchased 50 Gateway desktops and saw rapid productivity improvements.

"It was a challenge," Eaken said. "Gateway supported me significantly in that effort -- getting the new technology out there, in place and supported."

Being a one-man IT crew, Eaken said he dreaded enduring another three-month bidding process when the time came to purchase new machines. He already knew he wanted to continue purchasing Gateway desktops.

Eaken's Gateway representative helped him prepare a case for elected officials that would allow the village to enter a master license agreement, which waived the bidding process for future desktop purchases and drastically lowered prices.

"We had to do some paperwork. The mayor signed it. Once we were on that schedule, certain price points were available to us on different models," Eaken said. "We just used that process from then on."

Before the agreement, Eaken said computers were often used until they could no longer be fixed.

Now the village has a consistent four-year replacement cycle and uses a range of Gateway desktops.

"People find comfort in the fact that we have these standards. They know we have Gateway, and if an employee has to fill in for someone else in another department for a week, they know they're going to be working on a similar system," Eaken said.

Eaken recently purchased the village's first Gateway server, and he is considering including more in his next Gateway purchase.

Partnering with Gateway greatly simplifies the ordering and maintenance process for Eaken. The agreement also enables the village to implement technology where it wouldn't have otherwise been possible.

Finding a Way
Hoffman Estates recently partnered with Gateway on an emergency operations center for the Police Department's aging office building.

The village plans to replace the building in the next three to five years. Naturally the department wasn't allotted much money to set up a new center in the old building, but Eaken's IT staff -- now a six person team -- did the cabling for a scaled-down emergency operations center the department can use in the meantime.

"We wanted to put some sort of computer systems in it," Eaken said. "Initially we were going to have everybody who had a laptop grab their laptop and bring it over during emergencies. But then my Gateway representative talked about this portable classroom mobile cart that Gateway sells. It has 14 laptops in it. The laptops charge while they're in the case, and it rolls."

Eaken persuaded the police chief to secure enough funding to lease the mobile cart and buy a SMART Board through Gateway. The SMART Board, a large screen on wheels, displays data from a laptop.

"We connect it to our network and project our GIS system onto it, so if there's an incident in the village, we can get aerial photos of our village and drill down to look at the buildings on the SMART Board. The GIS also will snap pictures of the incident as people are deployed. You can capture those JPEGs so you essentially have a pictorial history of the event," Eaken said. "It's worked out well for us.