UPDATED 13:47 EDT / OCTOBER 14 2014

Yes, you can deliver scalable cloud projects on time and on budget | #Inforum14 NEWS

Yes, you can deliver scalable cloud projects on time and on budget | #Inforum14

Yes, you can deliver scalable cloud projects on time and on budget | #Inforum14

Charles Thompson & Brian Anderson In theCUBE During Inforum 2014

When ReBuild Houston, an initiative to improve drainage and street infrastructure, was voted in on November 2010, the Texas city was tasked with installing a new billing system for the Public Utility Division’s 700,000 customers within six months. In an interview for theCUBE at Inforum 2014, City of Houston CIO Charles Thompson and Management Consultant Brian Anderson discussed how Infor, Inc. and Amazon.com, Inc.’s Web Services (AWS) helped the metropolis deliver on this assignment within the limited timeframe, and without accumulating any new debt.

Although the budget for ReBuild Houston’s project to implement a new billing system wasn’t disclosed in the interview, the city has a $5.2 billion total budget for its 22 departments. Some larger teams, like the Public Utility Division, have their own profit and loss (P&L). Anderson stated that “procurement barriers with some of the bureaucracy” had to be broken down because of the tight deadline.

The organization chose Infor Software as its front-end CRM for two reasons. One was to measure all of the city’s 700,000 properties using mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) spatial technology. The other was because of transparency. Citizens can now verify and dispute their charges on the organization’s website. There’s also a map application that shows how charges were calculated based on the amount of water that runs off a citizen’s property.

Amazon cloud services were used for this. The website had 60,000 citizens in one month visiting the domain. This major uptick in traffic meant that the City of Houston Public Utility Division had to scale up then scale back down on-demand, and Amazon allowed it to so. The organization is also using the Amazon cloud platform to affordably store and retrieve all of its billing transactions and records data. Additionally, customers can access this data and set up daily or monthly projectile usage alerts to their email, smart phone or even through phone call.

As about 60 percent of users access the website on a mobile device, the City of Houston Public Utility Division recently worked with Infor’s design team, Hook & Loop, on a new customer portal with a responsive design. “Hook & Loop did a great job… taking a lot of the functionality that was available, but making it user-friendly,” said Anderson. The redesign helped the organization increase its adoption rate.

Anderson stated that an IT team projected that it would take six months to provision the service needed at a cost of $250,000 and mounting. Going with Amazon ended up costing only $6,000 a month, and the organization can provision a server in a day through its normal change control. “When you’re a challenged as a city to give a better service at a lower or equal price, Lean Six Sigma concepts come into play,” said Thompson.

ReBuild Houston was done without any new debt. Any revenue received goes into maintaining Houston’s streets and drainage.

See the entire interview below.

 .


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU