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GCN Home > 11/24/03 issue

Frugality pays off for Georgia county

By Trudy Walsh, GCN Staff

DeKalb County, Ga., could teach a thing or two to some state and local governments swimming in red ink.

East of Atlanta, the county is taking an aggressive approach to modernizing its IT while keeping its budget balanced.

“We’re no longer Mayberry,” county chief executive officer Vernon Jones said.

The county of more than 700,000 recently received a AAA bond credit rating from Moody’s Corp. of New York, meaning it was judged to have the smallest degree of investment risk.

“It means we pay our bills on time,” Jones said. The county’s low debt levels and reserve funds also helped it earn the rating, which only 37 of 3,066 counties nationwide received.

Effective use of information systems helped DeKalb earn such a high rating. Jones said he studied information systems at North Carolina Central University in Durham, N.C., and later worked in telecommunications and data processing for WorldCom Inc. and BellSouth Corp.

“Because of my background, I realized that spending money on IT was a temporary expense, that it would come back sevenfold,” Jones said. “We’d have better data and make better decisions.”

The cornerstone of the county’s IT upgrade is I-Net, a new Gigabit Ethernet. The network is being rolled out in phases, said Mike Amato, director of the county’s Information Systems Department. I-Net will be fully operational throughout the county by the end of 2005, he said.

The fastest the county’s legacy WAN could go was 10 Mbps, Amato said. With the new network, the county will be able to transmit voice, video and data at gigabit speed, he said. “We’ll also be able to consolidate servers and enable new applications,” he said.

More upgrades coming

The new network will pave the way for other upgrades. For example, the county’s financial system, written in Cobol, ran on a 22-year-old mainframe. Although it was “very functional for its time,” it couldn’t interact with other county systems, Amato said.

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