How does supporting such a wide variety of city services impact your organization?
It becomes quite complex, but from a centralized point, it offers a lot of opportunity too. Deregulation of the electrical industry in the late 1990s caused us to beef up our technology. That was probably good for the overall organization because as we did that, it spilled over into other areas. We saw the need for putting a strong infrastructure in place throughout the city, whether it was our LAN or WAN, or standardizing on platforms and databases.
Roseville is a growing and relatively affluent community. What pressures does that create?
With all of the new infrastructure going in -- roads, water, electric -- we saw a strong need for GIS we could use to present information in a spatial manner, not just on paper in a text environment. Showing things visually and having parcel-based information readily available would allow us to deal with that growth more efficiently. About five years ago, we set off to implement an enterprise GIS, and we're pretty mature with that now. We present some of that informationon the Internet for the community, and they like being able to look at that information on a map-oriented presentation.
Do citizens tend to expect online services now?
How has the economic downturn impacted Roseville's IT budget?
Our budget stayed the same for the last two years, but we're doing more. We decided to go into a thin client environment next budget year, which will help us reduce technology expenditures. We tested it last year in our parks department. This year, we're asking the City Council to approve going enterprisewide. The thin client will save us $1.5 million over five years. Those are the flat-out hard savings, and we know there are soft savings and cost avoidances we didn't factor in.