City Briefing

I attended the city’s briefing Wednesday night and the presentation that CIO Gail Roper made to the City Council on Thursday.  PDF of slides from Wednesday meeting.

Some encouraging items:

• They apparently understand that the data for the site is coming from a variety of disparate systems. Gail referred to the Website as the “lipstick” and the legacy systems as the “pig.”
• They also understand that there is a good deal of process re-design that must be undertaken
• The RFP is going to be written so that small payments are made for individual deliveries.  But they are still expecting the winning bidder to be a single company.  They said the RFP will “encourage” extensive use of sub-contractors, but they did not say how it would do that.
• There RFP will not require the use of any specific product or technology (e.g. Plone).
• They understand the importance of providing data to the community so that mashups and other uses can be made of it.  They are enamored with a Washington, D.C. project called Apps for Democracy that aims to stimulate the community to make apps from city data.  (See the Digital Public Square – very impressive.)  The Portland, OR and Seattle, WA sites were also cited as good models.  (Check out Krime Labb to see a current mashup with city data.)
• There wining vendor will not be required to post a bond.
• They are working with a local advisory group (including Gary Chapman of U.T.) and Gartner Group to get feedback on the RFP before releasing it.
• They plan on using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
• They said change in “IT governance” is required to make this plan work, but did not give specifics.
• Mick Osborne is the purchasing person on this project.  The RFP will be available to those registered on the city’s vendor Web site.

Some questions and concerns:

• It is not clear whether the city intends to do all the process re-engineering and SOA work themselves, or whether this effort will be part of the RFP.  It would be a mistake if the RFP is for a project to build the front-end onto a back-end that is being re-engineered and SOA’ed by the city in parallel.
• Gail said the RFP would be out next week, with a vendor selection by mid-August.  But Matthew Esquibel said  the scope of the RFP has not yet been determined.  Also they are talking as if the advisory group that has yet to be constituted.  They also said they would be soliciting more requirements input from real estate developers, and youth and neighborhood groups.  These statements seem to contradict one another.
• The RFP will include an evaluation matrix.  Will the evaluation criteria give any preferential treatment to: (1) bids that use a lot of sub-contractors versus ones that will do all the work in house; (2) bids that include a lot of the work being done in Austin; or (3) bids that include a good deal of open source software?