IT TRANSFORMATION
TONY WALTHAM
Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann. |
Three-and-a-half years ago, city and county officials in Honolulu, Hawaii were struggling to get by, supported by an antiquated IT system based on outdated mainframe computers and with 11 different telephone systems that were not interoperable: The police, fire department, ocean safety, ambulances, the military and the state government were unable to talk to each other in the event of an emergency.
Today, behind the scenes new IBM mainframes are in place and all these agencies share an interoperable communications system with all police cars wirelessly connected, while automated field reporting from police cars saves one hour's work each day for the officers.
Telemetry tracks ambulances so that when they pick up a patient, location data is sent to the hospitals, while in event of a fire, the fire department can immediately bring up current inspection data of the premises, while enhanced 911 services can pinpoint the location of a call to within 100 metres. There is also 360 satellite imagery to back all this up that has a resolution down to 10cm.
This transformation has been architected by Honolulu's Chief Information Officer, Gordon Bruce, who was in Bangkok recently to address a seminar entitled "21st Century Workforce in Government - Technology Forum", an event sponsored by Cisco Systems.
Bruce shared some of the details of the rapid transformation of the IT infrastructure of Honolulu with his audience, along with insights into how this was achieved and how governments did not need to be slow in implementing IT projects.
In a recent interview, the CIO and director of Honolulu's Department of Information Technology explained how a new mayor, Mufi Hannemann, had taken office in January 2005, bringing with him a new outlook - "a different, open philosophy."
The mayor had been eager to improve infrastructure and public utilities using technology and wanted to improve the transportation system and public accountability, said Bruce, who had been invited out of semi-retirement to head Honolulu's IT department.
Recalling a long career in IT, Bruce said that heading up Honolulu's department of IT had been his "best job ever" because it provided him with "the chance to make a difference."
Bruce, who first visited Bangkok 20 years ago, also said that he saw many similarities between Bangkok and Honolulu, both politically and in terms of infrastructure challenges.
And his message for Thai government officials attending the seminar was that governments could move quickly in IT deployment, but that leadership was the key. It was not technology that posed the challenge, it was much more of a people issue. People comprised 80 per cent of the overall challenge, he said.
He suggested that the best approach was to bring people together into the room and make everybody a partner in the success of a project, noting that "typically, the moment governments sign a contract with a vendor, the vendor and the government become enemies."
What he and the leaders of his 150-strong team did was to say "we want to be partners, let's get there."
For example, when his department dealt with Cisco or its products, it did so by dealing directly with the company, while purchasing the physical hardware from a reseller, Hawaiian Telecom, while the services and support were delivered by a third party, Envision Hawaii.
But, when there was an issue, he would bring all three players to the table and then work together to find out what was wrong, he explained.
Another project had been to provide free Internet access to avoid any digital divide problems, he said, and the city had identified Honolulu's Chinatown as a major revitalisation area, Bruce said.
Tasked with providing free wireless Internet access in all of Honolulu's Chinatown without the city spending any money, Bruce said he had approached an entrepreneur who said he would find the equipment "if we could provide Internet gateways in government buildings."
He then contacted shops within range and they installed equipment that received the signals and rebroadcast them, establishing a mesh network across the area, with minimal cost to each co-operating shop of an increased power bill of slightly over $3 a year.
He said the Internet access in Chinatown was filtered, and no music or video downloading was allowed; there was no access to pornography sites, while the IP address was refreshed every 30 minutes. But otherwise full Internet access was offered so users could access email or do searches and there were some 350 users each day, Bruce said.
On the back-end, three 35-year-old IBM mainframes - so old that there was no migration path for the data and over 100 applications - have been replaced by a leased IBM System z9 and his team, IBM and Sirius Computer Systems set up a z9 test system in a Sirius facility in Denver to port applications for testing in an IBM z/OS environment.
And in July last year, a new ERP system was introduced - an 18-month project that was delivered on-time and under budget, bringing a 26-year financial system into the 21st Century, Bruce said. This had been awarded to CGI-AMS and was implemented on IBM System p5 570 servers running AIX, with Sirius providing the hardware.
Cisco provides the fibre-optic backbone that criss-crosses Honolulu, the 13th largest county in the USA. Multiple fibre optic links provide almost full redundancy, and these had been installed through an agreement that meant the installers would provide free communications to the city and county, he said.
"We have done so much in three-and-a-half years, and we are looking at another two and a half years of projects," he said, noting that his department tended not to purchase equipment. He explained that his department leased, rather than bought equipment such as the IBM mainframe because he speculated that in three to four years' time IBM would no doubt come out with a new mainframe model and offer to upgrade the equipment for no extra charge.
That way, he could predict the operating budget, which was of the order of $20 million a year, 50 per cent of that being on salaries and wages, he said.
What's next? For public safety, there will be an 800MHz radio service piggy-backing on the microwave and fibre optic infrastructure, requiring the building of eight, hurricane Category 4 proof towers. Microwave communications would be the primary links, with IP as a backup for full redundancy, Bruce said, adding that when this was completed, five different asset management systems would be reduced to one.
There was also a $5 billion overhead rail system that was in the design phase and which would go from the west side of Oahu to downtown and the University of Hawaii, with 34 stations and linking the airport, while passing close to Waikiki, he said.
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