Jersey City's Blueprint For Technology Success

This is unacceptable to John Mercer, CIO of Jersey City, N.J. "No matter how many times you say, 'Don't turn off the air conditioning,' someone has to turn it off," he says. Mercer also gets frequent calls from city council members and their aides when e-mails aren't being sent or are getting caught up somewhere in the network. These are just a couple of the laundry list of problems the city encounters on a regular basis because of its outdated, piecemeal technology infrastructure.

Mercer has had it up to his eyeballs and is doing something different to revolutionize Jersey City's technology infrastructure to bring the growing city into the 21st century. His goals may be fairly straightforward to improve the technology and sharing of information for city employees, departments and citizens. But his means to an end are making the wide-ranging goals a reality.

Mercer has embarked on a broad-reaching project to improve the city's infrastructure, enlisting the help of Newark, N.J.-based CR Tech Solutions, a subsidiary of Carter and Partners, which is recommending a $2 million solution.

Mercer didn't want to just go out and pick a vendor to do all of the work. He first wanted an outside, unbiased opinion on what technologies he should look to implement and how to effectively upgrade his network infrastructure. "I have wonderful, knowledgeable people on staff here who, if I put them all in a room to work on a plan for three months, they could come up with something equal to what CR Tech did," Mercer explains. "But in the meantime, everything else would fall apart."

He says looking to third-party providers is something his IT department has to do, a trade-off that suits him well. "When you look at the trade-off in terms of people's time and existing commitments, it is really the only way to go," Mercer says.

A Piecemeal Architecture
What exactly is he dealing with? Mercer explains that Jersey City is the second largest city in New Jersey, but the network that supports it has grown by necessity, building by building. "We would put in a server and local area network at one location, then another, and we ended up with about 15 different LANs," he says. Ultimately, the LANs were connected into a wide area network (WAN) using a 256K frame relay connection. "The setup has worked pretty well, but basically some 90 percent of the data between our locations is just e-mails; there isn't much in the way of data sharing," Mercer says. "Now we're seeing there is a greater need to share data citywide."

Part of the reason the city's needs have changed recently is that Mercer has been upgrading the applications side as well, with new tax assessors and tax-collection systems, and a new financial system, tax map digitization and the addition of Geographic Information Systems capabilities.

In addition, Mercer says the city's servers are getting old and running out of capacity for things such as e-mail. "We felt it was time to take a step back and have an independent consultant come in and do a complete analysis of our network infrastructure," he adds. "We wanted someone to come in and talk to our users and technical staff to get a feeling of [where] we want to take the enterprise and let us know what the deficiencies are in our current network design and infrastructure that will take us where we want to go."

So Jersey City put out an RFP for an independent analysis, but it wasn't the usual bid process where the lowest bid is selected. The city of Jersey City went out with a competitive contracting process in which it specifies criteria for judging the proposals, with each criteria carrying its own weight.

"We didn't just want to award [a project like this] to the lowest bidder who might not be capable of providing the service," Mercer says. "We wanted to see what their project approach is, their time line, the personnel they are going to assign to the project and demonstrated experience in projects of the same size and complexity." Mercer adds that cost is always a component, but was weighted lower than other criteria. For example, he says, prior experience might carry a value of 35 points, whereas cost might only carry a weight of 10 points. "We wanted the best value for the city's tax dollars," he adds.

The city received 10 proposals, which were narrowed down to three for final presentation. The proposals were evaluated by a committee of members from the IT staff, as well as from business administration and other departments. "CR Tech Solutions was the clear winner," Mercer says.

The Analysis And Plan
CR Tech Solutions was the prime contractor, which engaged the help of fellow partners Business Technology Partners (BTP), a LAN/WAN and infrastructure systems design and implementation firm, and Headstrong, a global-management and technology consultancy.

"We looked at the current technology infrastructure, and it was very archaic, dating back about 20 years," says Rick Carter, managing member and co-founder of CR Tech Solutions. Ultimately, his team made the recommendations and outlined what needed to be done to modernize the city's technical infrastructure.

"We're finding that it's typical that the desire and the plan is there, but clients might not have the ability to do it under one implementation plan," Carter says. The cities, in turn, need a concerted vision and strategic plan. "Technology evolution happens very quickly, and if cities don't pay attention to it, the environment can become dated even quicker."

CR Tech Solutions responded to the RFP and assembled a team to address certain areas for which Jersey City required work. Carter says that BTP was tapped as the network architecture design expert, while Headstrong was selected for its program management expertise. CR Tech Solutions was able to exercise its operations-management skills as well, with one of the recommendations being how to change the organizational structure of the Jersey City IT department. "We looked to bring the best-of-breed from each partner to come up with one very strong solutions team," Carter says.

The 150-page proposal covered everything from how to change the IT organizational structure and culture through the recommendations for the technical infrastructure, Carter says. "We recommended moving from a strict hierarchical organization to an empowered horizontal, hub-based organization aligned with the user community—both the internal city departments and the citizens of Jersey City," he adds.

Partnering Is Key
What's important to see in technology partners? Mercer says he wants to see the project methodology and how the partner is going to manage risk. "In municipal government you have challenges, such as people not always being available or people fearing change and not always cooperating," he explains. "We wanted a sense of how the consultant would handle that."

Timeliness was also key to the decision process as Mercer was looking for an "aggressive time frame to complete this."

This technology evaluation is just one of several major steps Mercer is undertaking to modernize the city's overall IT infrastructure. The city leased 800 HP desktops directly from HP recently, with help from integrators, who will assist with the implementation and training around the new desktops. The application upgrades are another component, and the final aspect is the network infrastructure evaluation and eventual upgrade. Everything must be approved by the City Council before the funds can be spent.

On-site work with the various city departments also was an important aspect of the project. "We worked very closely with the city staff on the project," says Jacob Cane, principal at BTP. There was a team on-site in Jersey City, talking to each of the departments about their systems and processes in place, he says. "We wanted to learn how they work today and how they'd like to work in the future if more technology were available," Cane says, adding that interdepartmental collaboration was ultimately what the city and its employees wanted and needed.

"This is a lot for us to take on at once and not every project will finish at the same time, so we needed a clear plan," Mercer says. Mercer's challenge now is deciding what his priorities are moving forward with the resources available.

"Everyone basically goes to the City Council [which approves all tech projects] and asks for money," Mercer notes. "But the reality is there's a fixed amount of money to spend." He adds that he has built a good case around his technology needs and has gotten funding for most of what he has asked for from the council.

"I have to show them what they'll be able to do and how these initiatives move the city forward, rather than that they're just IT needs," he adds.

Mercer recounts a caucus meeting when the presiding council member asked when the last time was that the city had undertaken an IT project like what Mercer presented from CR Tech Solutions' plan.

"I said never, partly because we've never had a plan before," Mercer says. "Now we have accurate, unbiased information showing the findings, the weaknesses in our current infrastructure, and that they can understand."

The resulting CR Tech Solutions blueprint is the next step in the city's plans, Mercer says. Although he's still defining the scope of the project, he says CR Tech's recommendations are so comprehensive, the RFP will pretty much write itself.

"They broke everything down, saying you need X amount of this Cisco switch; here are the server specs you need," Mercer explains. "It's kind of an inventory of what we need to purchase."

More specifically, Mercer says he has some decisions to make around the e-mail recommendations. CR Tech "made a compelling case" for moving to Microsoft Windows 2003 and Microsoft Xchange for e-mail, which usually go hand in hand. But Mercer says he might opt to stay with Novell's GroupWise e-mail solution, which they are currently running, purely to avoid having to retrain his 800 users on a new system.

CR Tech Solutions also recommended that the city move to a centralized model, which Mercer agrees with. "Right now, we have 15 different servers and 15 LANs, and every time Novell issues a patch or we have to do an upgrade, that's 15 after-hours or weekend projects," Mercer says. The recommendations also called for replacing the city's existing Dell PowerEdge servers that are 5 to 6 years old. The network recommendations called for a move away from frame relay to other options offered by Verizon, specifically the Transparent LAN Service (TLS), Verizon Optical Networking (VON) and the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET).

In terms of the partner ultimately chosen to help Jersey City follow through with the recommendations, Mercer says, "obviously they will have to have experience dealing with vendors like Microsoft and Verizon." What are the keys for this implementation partner? Mercer points to project management, prior experience and technical ability.

And once again, the ability to manage risk associated with the implementation will come into play. "We'll have the final three come in and we'll throw questions at them like, 'Your team is on site to configure the server and connect to this data line. What happens if the data line isn't there? How do you manage that risk?' And we'll see what they say," Mercer conjectures.