Tulsa's financial management systems would get upgrade with funding package

Source: Tulsa World, Okla.自存倉Sept. 30--The computer program responsible for tracking hundreds of millions of dollars in city spending appears on the screen entirely as plain text against a black background.It's the stuff of 1980s pride."Technology's just evolved quite a bit since the foundation for this system was put in place," Information Technology Director T.L. Cox said.The city's financial management system, which was launched in 1993 and still handles all purchasing and budget management through an interface similar to MS-DOS, would be replaced under Improve Our Tulsa, the $918.7 million capital funding package headed to voters Nov. 12.It's a $10 million chunk of $39.6 million in information technology software and equipment upgrades that would touch every city department and the services they offer residents."If you've got employees that have better and more effective technology at their disposal, they in turn can ... more effectively serve the citizens," Cox said."It's really impossible to effectively serve the citizens without relying on some kind of technological component."The financial system is used extensively by the city's 12 budget-making personnel and tracks almost every dollar of the city's $711 million budget. It's also used in every department to keep track of their own budgets throughout the year.As Finance Director Mike Kier puts it, the city wouldn't work without it."You cannot manually ... keep track of $700 million dollars worth of activities," he said. "If we didn't have automated systems, it would probably take 4,000 employees" to keep tabs on city spending.Unlike the 30-year-old police and courts records management system, which also would be replaced under Improve Our Tulsa, the finance tech isn't entirely outdated yet, Cox said.Its interface is clunky and slow, but its developer still provides maintenance support and it's still used in the private sector, he said.The problem from an IT management perspective is that it uses an aging code system that has fallen out of favor, meaning that increamini storageingly fewer IT professionals in the work force know its ins-and-outs, Cox said.For those who actually use the program, the problems go deeper than that, Kier said.Inadequacies in the system force budget personnel to do most of their work in Excel spreadsheets. Once the information is inputted into INFOR, errors are easy to overlook, he said."The fact that the people that are working in (city) finance as well as across this organization are using limiting tools to do their job is really kind of a disservice to those employees and therefore a disservice to the citizens," Kier said."The efficiency with which we can get our job done is really, I think, something that the average citizen might not be aware of but has great influence on city operations."Improve Our Tulsa would also fund $23.1 million in IT capital expenses identified in a 2012 equipment study.That includes fiber cables, servers, routers and data storage -- "things that frankly, aren't as interesting to read about" but are vital to the city's technology infrastructure, Cox said.That equipment will be cheaper to maintain and more efficient than existing equipment and will "enable the (IT) department to maintain and in some cases enhance the underlying technology that all of this other stuff is housed upon," he said.A consultant who recently criticized the IT department as inefficient determined at the same time that the city has failed to invest adequately in technology infrastructure over the years, Cox said.Improve Our Tulsa would begin to resolve that problem while allowing the city to implement some of the consultant's organizational recommendations by freeing up positions with savings in equipment maintenance costs, Cox said.Five-year equipment needs: $23.1 millionNew financial system: $10 millionNew police/courts records management systems: $6.53 millionZack Stoycoff 918-581-8486zack.stoycoff@tulsaworld.comCopyright: ___ (c)2013 Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) Visit Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) at .tulsaworld.com Distributed by MCT Information Services儲存