Fundamental Principles

Six IT Fundamental Principles:

  1. Our ultimate goal is to provide citizens, the business community, and County employees with timely, convenient access to appropriate information and services through the use of technology.
  2. Business needs drive information technology solutions. Strategic plans will be established between the customer and County so that the benefits of IT are leveraged to maximize the productivity of County employees and improve customer services.
  3. Manage Information Technology as an investment:
    • Annually allocate funds sufficient to cover depreciation to replace systems and equipment before life-cycle end. Address project and infrastructure requirements through a multi-year planning and funding strategy.
    • Limit resources dedicated to "legacy systems" - hardware and software approaching the end of its useful life - to absolutely essential or mandated changes. Designate systems as "legacy" and schedule their replacement. This approach will help focus investments toward the future rather than the present of past.
    • Invest in education and training to ensure the technical staff in IT and user-agencies understand and can apply current and future technologies.
  4. Manage the enterprise network as a fundamental building block of the County's IT architecture. The network will connect modern workstations and servers; will provide both internal and external connectivity; will be flexible, expandable, and maintainable; be fully integrated using open standards and capable of providing for the free movement of data, graphics, image, video, and voice.
  5. Emphasize the purchase and integration of top quality, commercial-off-the-shelf software - with minimal customization - to speed the delivery of new business applications. This will require redesigning some existing work processes to be compatible with off-the-shelf software packages. Utilize modern efficient methods and laborsaving tools in a cooperative application development environment.
  6. Capture data once in order to avoid cost, duplication of effort and potential for error and share the data whenever possible. Establish and use common data and common databases to the fullest extent. The IT department will be responsible for establishing and enforcing data policy, data sharing and access, data standardization and data quality.