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The Office of the CIO’s largest accomplishment to date is not design and consolidation of the Network Architecture. Not the consolidation of State Agency data centers. Not the elimination of more than 20% of the State’s servers. Not the high availability of our two Data Center strategy. Not the consolidation of State-owned servers in 93 counties. Not the reduced time to resolve issues. Not the reduced travel from moving to regional support centers.
I don’t think we fully envisioned our ability to achieve the largest accomplishment before we reached most of these major milestones. What we did gave us the ability to be accountable, reliable technology partners for government entities in the local and county sectors. As of July 2018, a total of 70 counties with 429 installed apps have migrated to the State AS/400 servers, which are replicated across the State’s two data centers. By doing so, we fulfill our mission statement, “Respect for the taxpayers of the State of Nebraska” and demonstrate our renewed focus on customer service. This is an example of the work we do, which makes a difference in the lives of the citizens of the State of Nebraska. In this instance, the achievement is the result of a cooperative effort between three entities: Stanton County, the Multi-County Information and Programming Services (MIPS), and the OCIO.
The facts tend to speak for themselves, and below is the conversation as it occurred between the Office of the CIO and Stanton County Clerk via email last month.
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2018 9:59 AM
Subject: Stanton County AS/400 Migration to the State
Stanton County Clerk just called and informed me that their county own AS/400 has been down since Friday.
The County decided to migrate all MIPS (Multi-County Information and Programming Services) applications to the State AS/400. Since they are down and no longer have access to all their applications, they are asking that we get their applications migrated as soon as possible.
Let’s see what we can do to get them back in service soon as possible.
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2018 2:45 PM
Subject: RE: Stanton County AS/400 Migration to the State
Great job! I just called and they are already up and running on the State box! Everything is working for them now.
Thanks for an amazingly fast response to get Stanton County up and running!
Providing Accountability in Partnership with Stanton County:
- All applications hosted on the county server had been unavailable since the county server went down (approximately two business days). The county requested to be migrated to the State AS/400 server ASAP to recover business operations efficiently in the short-term for a more effective infrastructure in the long-term.
- The OCIO Midrange team and the MIPS team (NACO’s technology division) began restoring and migrating data from the latest backup to quickly get business back to normal.
- MIPS and OCIO worked together to install the apps on the State AS/400, then migrated the county data. In the meantime they set up User ID’s and configured County printers on the State hosted server. Vital records, legal certificates, and property documents are all transactions that are dealt with through the county.
- By 2:45 p.m. Stanton County was on the State-hosted server. All apps were recovered and functioning, and the county was able to resume business as usual.
The Cost
- Charges to the county for the above services and maintenance including 24/7 support from the OCIO amount to $370.56/year
- Previously the county paid for server maintenance at the cost of $3,466.77/year
This resulted in nearly a 90% reduction in annual costs for the county.
As always, I appreciate all you do each and every day for the State of Nebraska. I also want to recognize the very special spirit of cooperation and partnership that we have with public entities across the State. This teamwork could not have been accomplished without the business acumen and assistance of our partners at Stanton County and the team at MIPS.
Ed