I’m interested in what steps government agencies are taking to modernize legacy applications. I understand that it’s a major issue on several public sector IT decision maker’s agendas, but would like to hear about progress, success stories, speed-bumps, etc.
Some of the things that we are working on at the County of San Diego are deploying an integrated proprety tax system, which will replace around 100 legacy applications and almost completely transition us away from mainframe usage. We are also looking to deploy a new e-recording suite of applications that will replace our vital records applications, integrate redaction and index searching capabilities in the next 2 years, and facilitate information sharing (e.g. titles) with nearby Counties in Southern California. We just built new Citrix farm, which will support our older applications as efficiently as possible until we are in a position to get rid of them.
A lot of the ‘infrastructure’ work (remote datacenters, server modernization, etc.) has been done over the past 5 years, as our County leadership wisely spent some of the increased tax revenues from property taxes on modernizing our IT environment. Now that the revenues are falling, of course we will have to begin to evaluate projects more carefully…