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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 04/07/03 issue

Best is yet to come for Houston e-gov

By Trudy Walsh, GCN Staff

Although Houston had some memorable moments in the last century—does July 20, 1969, ring a bell?—its best times lie ahead, Houston CIO Richard Lewis said.

But the challenges that lie ahead for Houston also are many—among them, a depressed business cycle and winds of war blowing around the globe, Lewis said. Every city and county is under tremendous fiscal stress.

“That makes it incumbent on me as a CIO to make a clear case for what we should be using our technology for,” he said. “Sometimes the return on investment is saving money. Sometimes it’s preventing a breakdown in services. Sometimes it means deferring assets until potholes become sinkholes.”

Houston has some IT problems left over from the 20th century. One of Lewis’ chief objectives as CIO is to develop a collaborative approach to citywide IT management.

One of the first things he did was to designate officials in nine city departments as chief technology officers of business units.

Telephony’s the answer

The city is also developing a plan for using emerging technologies to improve services to citizens. Last month Lewis and his team finished a preliminary review of nine proposals for a voice over IP telephony system and narrowed them down to three.

The existing data network in Houston has more than 400 routers, which were set up around different information silos, Lewis said. The network is slow, lacks security, and has some main components that are no longer being manufactured, such as a switch at city hall.

Lewis estimated the VOIP system will not only give the city a faster, more secure data network, but will save Houston more than $50 million over 20 years.

According to Lewis, the SimHouston project is achieving its objective of bridging the digital divide [GCN, Jan. 13, Page 8]. More than 71,000 Houstonians are using SimHouston, and that number is growing every day, he said.

The suite of free e-mail, Internet browser and desktop applications is available to all of Houston’s 1.9 million residents through a library card.

More news on related topics: E-Government, Management, State & Local