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3 <br />Memorandum <br />To: Orange County Commissioners <br />CC: Dick Taylor, IS Director <br />From: Information Technology Committee <br />Date: October 9, 2000 <br />Re: Accela Permits Plus System <br />There is universal praise from the committee .for the hard work done by Craig Benedict and the rest of the <br />county staff involved in the Permits software selection process. They worked diligently to understand the <br />needs of their business processes and to recommend the software that they felt best met these criteria. The <br />committee concurs with their analysis in this area. Where .the committee members have differences in their <br />support of this project is in the degree to which this software package allows us to web-enable access to <br />permitting information for the citizens. This software package has great strength in workflow automation, the <br />ability of the package to help shepherd requests electronically through the county offices, making sure that <br />appropriate authorizations are received and the review is done in a timely, efficient fashion. This was the <br />number one evaluation metric used by the county staff. The committee feels strongly, however, that web <br />accessibility is a very important measurement. Indeed, the county staff placed this 5th out of 17 criteria they <br />used. <br />The Accela Permits Plus system provides the ability for certain stakeholders (contractors, legal professionals, <br />etc.) to access information via the web through the "Velocity Hall" application service provider (ASP) model. <br />However, this ASP model does not afford the county information technology (IT) staff the ability to modify and <br />extend Velocity Hall. However, the vendor is willing to share their database documentation with the IT staff <br />(and has provided such materials already)..The IT director believes that his staff has the ability to work with <br />this information to web-enable citizen access or provide basic web access in the event that the Velocity Hall <br />service becomes unavailable to the county (or to direct contractors in this endeavor). However, the scope and <br />cost of that effort is not well defined. <br />The county's IT Architecture states that we should move toward web-enabled access wherever possible and <br />avoid systems that require installation of client software on each desktop (to minimize support and <br />maintenance costs). None of the products met our architectural guidelines for web enablement. However, the <br />majority opinion of the committee is that we can, in this case, support acquisition and installation of this <br />software since it offers so much improvement in workflow processing, even if it does not present the degree of <br />web-enablement that we would like. The members that hold this opinion also believe that industry directions <br />will bring more web-enablement to this product in future releases, as this vendor attempts to keep this product <br />attractive for future customers. We believe that making the step to the Permits Plus system at this time is a <br />positive step for the county even if it does not completely meet the architectural guidelines that we have <br />established, and we are willing to make that compromise. Ta reiterate, however, this was not a. consensus <br />opinion from the committee. The dissenting opinion is that we should follow our architectural principals, even <br />if we forgo current benefits, so that we make the correct long term decision. <br />