Sacramento County CIO Rami Zakaria gave an 80-minute presentation during a Techwire Industry Briefing on Tuesday morning, during which he described how the county's IT department is divided into divisions with five key goals (described below). Zakaria also introduced vendors to two key players in the department, IT chief of operations Debra Nadolna and Steve Baird, head of customer support services such as desktop and the employee payroll.
You can view and download the slide deck of his presentation here.
The department's divisions include the Operations Division, Corporate Support Division, E-Government and Business Services, Human Assistance Support Division, and Health and Human Services Support Division.
Within those capacities, the department hopes to:
Expand Electronic Access to County Services — The 311 app has become a cohesive reporting and information tool on mobile devices. Residents can also follow along as their construction permits move from division to division. Taxpayers can pay property taxes online as well. “It’s starting to become a significant amount of money, where you get $200 million or $300 million online,” Zakaria said.
Enhance the County IT Infrastructure — The county runs on one of the only private cloud networks in government with two redundant data centers built on a fiber network that is supported by AT&T. The servers will be upgraded to one-gigabyte connections.
"We're getting more and more cloud-based services," Baird said of county building management.
Manage Internal IT Service Delivery from a Countywide Perspective — Zakaria is attempting to automate everything that can be automated, including the employee payroll service. This was spurred on by the economic downturn and took almost two years. The county now requires employees to use direct deposit, further reducing cost.
Deliver IT Services in a Consistent Manner — Nadolna described the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone system the county hopes to roll out next year. The county also hopes to modernize its budget system within 18 months, including status reports of consolidations.
Support Community Outreach and Technology Enablement — ”In many of the consolidations that were done in the past, the story that I got was that it increases cost and did not increase service,” Zakaria said of people’s concerns as consolidation processes were started 2008. In that consolidation effort, the county has reached out to the community and sought application solutions. One of these efforts resulted in the Hack 4 Sac contest last year that led to more than 15 usable applications.
