Tale of two cities, a town and a county

When Chuck Keith reported to work on April 1, 1996 he inherited IT legacy systems and processes from two cities, a town and a county. And no, it wasn't an April Fool's joke.

As the director of information systems for the newly amalgamated Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), he was entrusted with the task of managing these wildly disparate systems.

"It was the biggest challenge I had every taken on," he recalls. "There was a mishmash of different systems, right from the servers to the desktop. We had Digital Alphas, IBM AS400s, an RS6000, as well as an NCR Criterion. The desktops were a hodgepodge of old VT terminals, 286 and 386 machines."

To complicate matters, the equipment was located in 60 offices spanning more than 5,600 square kilometres, from the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth to Bedford town and Halifax county. Redesigning a new computing department that would streamline the municipality's operations, and devising an asset management strategy to keep track of these new machines was critical. Paying for the project was another matter.

The city's financial officers might have considered a one-time capital investment, but were distressed when Keith informed them IT procurement wasn't a one-time proposition. If the city could arrange a flexible leasing deal - as opposed to a capitalized procurement arrangement - Keith suggested the costs could be added to his department's annual operating budget. This way the city would anticipate the ongoing costs and Keith wouldn't have to compete with other projects for funding from the city's ever-shrinking capital budget. The decision to acquire technology on an ongoing basis, as opposed to project by project, represented a new procurement strategy for the municipality, as it is for a growing number of government agencies in Canada.

"If IT acquisition proposals are part of the capital budget it would mean we were always competing with other high profile municipal projects," Keith explains. "Some of those projects, like road construction, are important to the public, whereas we're simply trying to provide the tools people need to do their job."

Finding a company that offered a competitive leasing arrangement as well as a managed approach to upgrading, replacing and tracking assets on the municipality's 1,500 desktops was Keith's next task. Six months later, after a careful review, he opted for the Evergreen Technology Asset Management plan from GE Capital Information Technology Solutions, which sets out the leasing structure, provides tools to manage assets and offers organizations the ability to continuously upgrade their technology.

"We could have gone to the Royal Bank and perhaps negotiated a slightly better deal on the financial side of the lease, but then we would have been responsible for managing these assets," explains Keith. "It's the overall process that GE brought to the table that made the difference for us. Now I don't have to worry about keeping track of assets. That's GE's problem. When it's time to upgrade our desktops every three years or our laptops every two years, they handle it. It's made my job much easier and frees me to do other more pressing tasks."

A year and a half into the project, more than half of the 1,500 desktops have been replaced. While some of the obsolete servers ended up as landfill, the desktop machines were shipped off to community groups and schools.

Keith says the total cost of ownership for each desktop, estimated by Stamford, CT-based consultancy Gartner Group to be $12,000 a year, has been reduced now that the systems are uniform and the upgrades and repairs are being handled by GE as part of its ongoing contract with the municipality.

"To date, I think we've achieved the goals we set for ourselves," says Keith.

Paul Heyman is manager of digital sales, Atlantic region for Mississauga-based GE Capital Information Technology Solutions Canada.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Jun 1998
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