A new year brought a new IT office for Ventura County when its doors opened in December. The previous office had not been changed since it was set up in the 1970s, the furniture and limited windows included.
“Recognizing that our workforce is going to be changing substantially over the coming years, we needed to modernize our facility to really create an environment that is more conducive to millennials and the generation beyond,” Chief Information Officer Mike Pettit said.
Officials wanted a more open office plan with dedicated collaborative work spaces. Over $1 million had been saved toward the remodel.
The county had been saving for several years to remodel the space, but it was cost-prohibitive and “really hard to justify spending taxpayer dollars,” Pettit said.
Searching near the county’s government center, the IT department found a mostly furnished space that fit the county’s needs. It was less expensive to move into the office that used to serve as a multimedia company’s headquarters.
An open-concept break room, glass-walled conference rooms and the right color scheme enhanced the collaborative feel, according to Pettit.
“The first day I stepped in the lobby and some candidates came in. They made some statements like, ‘This isn’t what I expected in government,’ and, ‘This looks like Google in here.’ We knew we had hit the mark,” he said.
The county installed video screens and clear, glass whiteboards where employees can write ideas.
“Formerly, whenever we would recruit people, I wouldn’t meet with them in our office space in the basement, because I didn’t want them to form their opinion of government first by seeing the office,” Pettit said.
The cost was less than $400,000 to move into the new space while a remodel of the previous space would have cost several million.
The lease for the new building is a 10-year contract and is similar to the cost of where the department was housed at $1.55 per square foot.
The county does not house any data in the server space on site. Instead, data is housed at several data centers throughout the county or in cloud services, such as the health records system.
“Our data center is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking," said Pettit. "Over time, we’re continually decreasing that footprint; it’s just a natural occurrence."
