Agenda Package - 02-18-08 (Finance)

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IT Support Analyst - Justification Supplement Historical Timeline Department of Social Services has historically possessed a dedicated staff person for desktop support and will not be included in this analysis. However, significant time and resources from IT have been spent over the years supporting the approx. 90 DSS staff.) 1996 - MIS (IT) Department Formed: Need was justified as an extension of data processing services of the Tax department. Initially, department consisted of l director and 1 data processing technician. Also in '96, an IT consultant was hired bringing department total to (3) employees. Support included Tax, Finance, FIR, Administration, Library, Sheriff's Department Administration, and Elections. However, these departments mainly operated on "dumb terminals" with the entire Lee County government owning approximately 20 PCs. With the data processing technician supporting hosted or "mainframe" style operations, the user to desktop support ratio was approximately 20-1 1999 - Additional IT Consultant hired to handle added demand of County departments coming "online". At this time, several remote offices were networked via ISDN connections. PCs were acquired on a department by department basis. Main department application services still ran in a hosted environment with the data processing technician in support. The Public Health department, Senior Services, Public Works, and Jail became part of the wide area network and slowly acquired PCs for their operational services. PC device to desktop support ratio was approximately 100-2 (50-1) Present - In 2007, practically all County departments operate in a client server environment with PCs on employee's desktops. Beginning in 2004, major efforts were made to create a centralized administration. In 005, a standardization project was launched that created a unified user desktop with data stored on network rvers running one main operating system. The IT department now supports 18 departments, over 320 users, and 25 servers running applications that were traditionally housed in a hosted mainframe environment. Again, this does not include DSS operation which recently reacquired their desktop support technician. PC device to desktop support ratio is approximately 320-2 (160-1) Since 1996, IT has evolved beyond a department focused on maintaining the mainframe application processes. The data processing technician position has evolved to IT Systems/Telecommunication analyst who now supports the organization's main client/server applications in Tax, Finance, Administration, HR, General Services, Library, and Sheriff. Our Munis financial package extends to practically every department. This staff person also administers the County phone and voice systems. Unfortunately, this person spends many hours away from these services to cover helpdesk duties. It is not uncommon for 30 to 40 work requests to be in queue waiting for resolution at any given time. With average resolution times approaching 2 weeks, this creates many issues. The current staff operates at 100% capacity with no time for planning, scheduled updates, or even routine maintenance. The IT consultant positions have evolved to IT Systems/Network Administrators who are responsible for supporting the network infrastructure, security attacks, data integrity and redundancy, regulatory issues, web services, wireless services, remote services, various departmental applications, and enhanced messaging applications supporting customers in over 13 different locations across the county. In addition to providing these critical services, IT must also support helpdesk operations to the user base. These daily support and troubleshooting requests come from the entire organization and are often critical to allow employees the ability o do theirjob functions. Although the skill set and pay level are higher than thejob class necessary to perform is job function the helpdesk issues are fielded by the Systems/Network Administrators. These administrators a//lso deploy as many as 60 replacement PCs annually as part of the new PC replacement policy. At this time, it is estimated that these Network Administrators spend an average of 20 hours/each a week each to cover helpdesk duties.