Fiscal Year 2011-2012 Adopted Budget - County of Sonoma

RECOMMENDED BUDGET
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Ken Hightower, Director
The recommended budget reflects overall expenditures of $44 million, a $1.6 million decrease from FY 10-11. Recommended
expenditures are supported by $37.1 million in revenues and internal reimbursements for services provided to other departments and
agencies and County General Fund support of $1.2 million. Revenues and reimbursements decreased about $2.4 million and overall
County General Fund net cost decreased as a result by nearly $221,000 from FY 10-11. This equates to a 25% reduction in County
General Fund support for continuing programs from the prior year. Reductions in County General Fund support were made primarily in
Salaries and Benefits and Services and Supplies. The significant decreases in revenues and reimbursements were charges for services
and contributions to equipment replacement funds.
Core Services Maintained
ISD will be focusing on initiatives to maintain core services while reducing costs and improving the efficiency of County employees.
ISD surveyed and met with each County department to assess service needs. With a few exceptions, ISD is reducing rather than
eliminating services that will meet the core needs of departments.
• Computer services to General Fund departments are reduced by $2.5 million dollars. More than half of these savings came from
reducing the staffing assigned to running the IBM mainframe. With the successful implementation of the payroll module of the new
HRMS system, the only remaining major system running on the mainframe is FAMIS, the County’s financial system. Through
retirements and cross training, the number of technical staff supporting the mainframe been reduced to 3 along with a few outside
consultants. In 2001, twenty staff supported the mainframe, but it was clear at the time systems were moving to modern server
technology. ISD is working closely with ACTTC and CAO to replace FAMIS. ISD will also be participating in an ongoing redesign
effort among all internal administrative departments to look at consolidations and realignments between these departments.
• Records Management, Reprographics and Radio services will be maintained. Savings in these divisions will be achieved by
consolidating the management of ISD’s Records and Reprographics divisions under one manager. The Telephone and Radio divisions
are also under one manager. The reduction in the number of managers is consistent with the recommendations in the Archstone
management performance review.
• Courier services will be charged directly to departments on a per stop basis rather than under the General Fund and recovered through
the County’s cost. The Records manager has been successful in selling courier services to other governments such as Santa Rosa. The
managers of these three areas have been given the goal and the opportunity to be more entrepreneurial
Services Eliminated or Reduced
Savings will come from eliminating or reducing services, and by charging for services that are covered by county-wide shared computer
service costs. These were chosen based on the cost, less expensive alternatives in the market, and service value.
These include the following services:
o The Radio division will no longer provide repair and maintenance of mobile and portable radios. Eliminating this workload will
allow the Radio Technicians to focus on critically important FCC mandated upgrades to the public safety radio system.
Departments will rely on commercial vendors for this service.
o Several non-critical computer services will be eliminated including support for WordPerfect and new development in Microsoft
Access databases. Also, the laptop loaner program will be eliminated resulting in labor savings for maintenance as well as for
wireless subscriptions. In addition, Mainframe reports will be available electronically through the intranet and no longer printed
reducing staff and supply resources
o Programming support for the more than 100 systems ISD supports will now be prioritized. ISD will be testing the reduction of
desktop and laptop support and working with departments to make their usage of this service more efficient.
o Mainframe direct access hours will be reduced to standard business hours: 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday creating
savings in staff time and premium pay.
o Custom Geographic Information Systems and Web services will be done on a fee for service basis.
Strategic Plan Focus
ISD provides foundational services to facilitate County departments’ Strategic Plan goals. ISD Objectives support the Strategic Plan
mission by using its resources to provide superior services.
• The Strategic Plan focus of Investment in the Future is supported by development of process improvements including automation and
innovation. ISD is developing productivity improvement systems such as electronic document management, web content
County of Sonoma
FY 2011-2012 Adopted Budget
58
Administrative Support & Fiscal Services