City Council Intervenes in Software Procurement
At the meeting of March 13th, the City Council unanimously agreed to partially restart the selection process for new financial software. While not all members agreed, the action was taken in order to address an alleged conflict in the selection process and a disagreement over the age of the software architecture.
The company recommended by the staff, Springbrook Software of Portland Oregon, was challenged by several members of the Council, including myself, due to the outdated eighties software platform and the lack of city clients in the State except for Fruita. Springbrook’s software uses “.net” or what is commonly called client server based architecture.
This means a copy of the programs must be physically present on every desk top running the applications. They try to overcome this limitation by introducing “thin-clients” using terminal servers or Citrix servers. The City spent close to $250,000 trying to implement a thin-client solution previously but the strategy was abandoned in December of 2005.
The software company that was not carried through the entire process by the staff, Innoprise Software, Inc. of Broomfield’s package runs on Java (J2EE), which is the latest and greatest thing in client server software. They also use My-SQL as their database engine. Both of these technologies are state of the art. My-SQL is open source and that could save the City a considerable amount of money.
Neighboring Cities using Innoprise software include: Broomfield, Louisville, Lone Tree, Greenwood Village, Loveland, Littleton, and Erie. Cities seriously considering some Innoprise software besides the Northglenn Council include Brighton, Lakewood, Englewood, Sheridan, Greeley and Cheyenne, WY.
The top three software companies were contacted to participate in additional demos this last week. Springbrook declined in as much as they have appeared before the Council on two occasions. Munis/Tyler declined. Innoprise accepted. Arrangements are being made for a demo at the present time. The software purchased will be expected to serve the City for ten years. With a total cost of over half of a million dollars, we need to get it right.
I would like to acknowledge the technical expertise of Tom Pond for information previously received that I have used in this article.
Nice job!Thank you and all the council members who are working hard to keep Northglenn on the move.I believe the members on this council really do want to improve our city.I also believe we have the best people in position to make the many hard decisions that lay ahead of our town.Thank you again.
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Gene I would like to thank you and all other city council members for looking into many of the city's past and future contracts.I'm not saying they all need to be changed, but at this time they should definitely be revisited.As long as they are solid contracts and in the best interest of the city why would anyone be upset? As far as council members being upset with each other,I say big deal,in these hard financial times the last thing we need is a bunch of yes people .Being hard to get along with just for the sake of arguing is way out of line.However if you feel a matter is headed in the wrong direction you must take a stand even if feelings are hurt.I say this is the group we need to move Northglenn forward,no matter what some of our emotional citizens think.Again thank all of you,for your time and wisdom on these matters.
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