Cloud computing: pueblo county shared services partnership.

• Author: Mauro, Dan

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One of the big expenses for counties is the cost of purchasing and supporting enterprise software. In 2007, when small municipalities were already struggling to survive on their shrinking revenue base, several counties in Colorado were informed by their property assessment management software vendor that a new version was being released, and their costs were going to increase substantially. By sheer necessity, the counties began looking for more cost effective options. At the Fall Assessor Conference of 2007, the assessors of the southern Colorado region were discussing their plight when the assessor for Pueblo County, Colorado, came up with the idea of sharing Pueblo County's internally developed property assessment management system.

The assessor contacted Pueblo County's Information Systems Department to see if the idea was feasible. After a couple of brainstorming sessions, it was determined that just making the software available as open source software would not be an adequate solution for small counties. Enterprise software requires substantial support, and the quality of that support directly determines the success of the software.

And thus, the idea of a shared service was born. For this project to be successful, Pueblo County would need to provide full-time support for the software, and that would require hiring employees. The county would have to come up with a business model and funding structure to support not only the shared services but also to help reduce Pueblo County's cost of providing the infrastructure necessary to host the shared software.

THE CLOUD COMPUTING APPROACH

Pueblo County's approach was to eliminate all forms of duplication in the service delivery process in order to maximize the cost savings potential for each agency participating in the shared services partnership. It was decided that a cloud computing delivery method (Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like a public utility) would keep the hardware costs at a minimum. At present, Pueblo County offers the following hosted software services (SaaS) as part of the shared services partnership: property assessment management for assessor offices, property taxation management for treasurer offices, geographic information service (GIS) data warehousing, GIS application server hosting, and Web-based query for the public to access information from the property management systems and the GIS system. Pueblo County's GIS services include hosting of data layers with multi-user editing capabilities and full featured ArcGIS server-based Web service hosting to make the map layers...