Ira Levy has difficulty determining which project excites him the most.
Plans for an Internet phone system, a program to link each county department?s capabilities and an enhanced Web site are a few initiatives in the works at Howard County?s Department of Technology and Communications.
Since taking the helm as technology director in December, Levy has reorganized the department and created a technology plan for the next couple of years.
Levy met with The Examiner to reflect on the job and what residents can expect in the coming months.
Q When you took the post, you began assessing the county?s technology needs. What have you found?
A I did find that most of the original assessments were pretty accurate, which includes a couple key areas that lacked a lot of progress. One is our wide area network. The connectivity between all our different sites was really at a bandwidth level that is unacceptable. Besides the bandwidth levels itself, it wasn?t set up for stability and reliability long term, so there was a lot of added risk we can mitigate by changing our architecture.
Along the networking side are the telephones which are still ? even with e-mail ? a key way to communicate with people. I found we are very dependent on carrier-based services [such as Verizon,] and we have a real opportunity to leave may of the carrier-based services behind, saving us a significant amount of money and putting in a lot of key features we don?t have now.
Q Improving the technology systems are expected to boost customer service. Can you point to where residents are seeing improved service?
A: One area is in the Web site. Even though we are planning on doing a full-look change and reorganization of the site, we implemented in the short term some very enhanced searching capabilities that allow the public to search not only on our Web site but also many of the key agencies [such as the] school system, community college and quasi-nonprofits in the county.
The biggest area that will make a change … is an ERP [enterprise resources planning program] which is a very, very large program that brings together usually very separate systems in the county.
Each department has its own function and we need a cross-functional platform. This is all in order to get to a point where you can have shared services, so someone from the public who wants to come and do something with us, they don?t need to go to every separate department.
Traditionally what is done in other places, they redo the Web site and say we are now doing e-government and it sits on top of very separate systems. They don?t fix the infrastructure. They just take the Web site and make it pretty, but it?s still cumbersome and doesn?t work.
So our opportunity here is to solve the infrastructure problem and make sure all the systems talk and then to follow it up with the Web portal, e-government part.
Q: What has been the hardest part of taking this position?
A: I would say the hardest part is really figuring out who is OK with change and who has a more difficult time with it and making sure we can get resources to those who have the challenges, so they don?t feel like they can?t be part of the solution.
It?s very important that everyone on my team feels like they can add value to the projects we do.
