The expense is in response to last summer’s critical IT outage that took down the E911 center and other county functions. The discussion is a continuation from the first board meeting of the year Jan. 6.
It's been patchwork of fixes since to hold the fragile network together, creating a sense of urgency to upgrade to a new, more secure system, the county’s IT consultant Jesse Martin told the board on Jan. 20. Supervisors heard presentations in open session from two major vendors in the field of financial and HR systems — OpenGov and Workday. Board members, in addition, were slated to receive on-the-ground demonstrations over the following two days.
The go live target date for the new software is July 1.
“The County's current financial system operates on legacy IBM iSeries architecture that cannot support modern integration capabilities, real-time reporting, or contemporary security standards,” according to a county report. “This long-overdue capital improvement project will replace antiquated systems with a modern, secure, and transparent unified platform.”
Staff recommended a competitive RFP process, and board incumbents spoke up to ensure that process was followed.
If the county opted to go with OpenGov, it would be the first locality in the state to use the company, a potential concern, County Administrator Sam McLearen said. Officials from the company assured that their software has been in used in other states for a decade, saying “success is the only option.”
The Workday representative noted the project has been on the county’s radar for 10 years or so. It’s a big investment, she added, saying the catalyst was the county’s catastrophic outage last year. Their system would provide a unified cloud solution for finance and HR, according to the rep.
As more concerns were raised about following procurement policy and possibly delaying choosing a vendor, Martin indicated effort needs to be immediately put into the antiquated systems, which in some places are not set up properly, causing issues, errors, staff rework and extra burden, he said.
Jefferson District Supervisor Keith Farrish spoke up saying the two vendors that presented seemed to be the best two in the field. Farrish, who took office this month, said the previous board has kicked the can down the road on upgrading the software for the past 10 years.
“You did your job, filtered out two of the best in the industry, came here and gave a presentation and now there is a concerted effort by Supervisors Lee, Bates and Deal to push this down the road. It’s blowing my mind. It just seems we’ve done everything right … we got a horrible system that is fractured, and are right on the cusp of doing exactly what the voters wanted us to do and we are getting a lot of resistance,” Farrish said.
Supervisor Gary Deal responded he had been on the board for 10 years and the county has a procurement process in place. The board ultimately moved the matter forward approving appropriations for the chosen vendor, using a cooperative contract, as permitted, and not the traditional RFP process.
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