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Orange County <br />Needs Assessment.Project <br />I. CURRENT SITUATION <br />Page 2 <br />Orange County's current financial and personnel systems operate in a legacy systems <br />environment. These software applications have been in use b3' the County since 1978. Over the <br />years, numerous programming changes have been made, by the County's Information Systems <br />staff, in an attempt to meet the County's needs. .These systems were designed as tools far <br />managing the various sets of data, not for the reporting or analysis of the information. The need <br />for various reports has grown over the years and the staff now find themselves in the position of <br />spending significant staff time to produce information requested by Commissioners, various task <br />forces and others. Further, the present system provides no flexibility for analyzing data, which <br />would provide valuable information to the management of County government., All requests for <br />new reports and data inquiries must be accomplished through additional customized <br />programming. The capabilities of the existing systems' technology have long, since .been <br />surpassed by the needs of the County. <br />A major weakness of .the existing systems is their use of batch processing for updating files and <br />posting transactions to the general ledger. Most business software applications on the mazket <br />utilize on-line transaction and edit processing. The use of batch processing delays the posting of <br />transactions, frequently causing user inquiries to be inaccurate because information is not <br />current. <br />The County's existing computer environment consists of three primary technologies: a <br />mainframe system, personal computers,, and the Orange County network. The desktop softwaze <br />is standazdized on the Microsoft Windows .95/98 operating system and Microsoft OfFice 97 for <br />its application software suite. <br />Recognizing the fixnctionality gap between the needs of the County and the technology <br />limitations of the existing mainframe system, the County has performed a preliminary needs <br />assessment and conducted informal surveys of other North Carolina counties. Identifying the <br />urgency to proceed towards a solution, SBS was engaged to perform an in-depth analysis of the <br />existing County needs to aid in determining the optimal systems solution for providing for these <br />needs: Our approach, that was used for. this analysis is presented below: <br />Sten 1: Conducted meetins with the Business Systems Management Team. <br />This initial step was designed to obtain a high level, strategic view of the project and its <br />intended direction. Additionally, this afforded SBS the opportunity to ascertain <br />Management's perspective of the existing technical and operating environments within <br />the primary functional departments. Periodic meetings were held with, the Management <br />team to provide updates on the project's status. <br />Ste 2: Reviewed internal meetin notes strafe 'c lane and other Coun documentation. <br />Internal documentation was gathered and examined to identify specific issues of concern <br />and the existing and planned infrastructure within the County. Some of the information <br />examined included: <br />• Strategic Automation Plan <br />• Information Technology Strategic Plan <br />