Edited By Mary Ellen Bradley

Profile: Herb Potter | GILS Project Update | Month Board Meeting

Profile: Herb Potter

I was born in Spokane, but moved to western Washington at the age of seven. I lived in Centralia for a year, Tacoma for three years and back to Centralia, where I’ve called home for nearly thirty years. I graduated from Centralia High School in 1975 and joined the Air Force. This gave me the opportunity to travel around the U.S., and helped me realize that Washington State is the place to live.

While serving in the Air Force, I worked around computers. They weren’t anything like the desktop computers we enjoy today. They were small Hewlett Packard computers which were used to test inertial navigation and missile guidance systems. To program them, you had to enter binary coded commands into registers. Others I served with were programming Fortran into HP computers used to analyze test data. This gave me a glimpse into applications programming and provided me the incentive to look at college curricula.

After parting company with the Air Force, I found an excellent two-year degree program in Data Processing at Lower Columbia College in Longview. After graduating in 1981, I started my first programming job with Lewis County. I worked in a very small shop, which gave me many opportunities to work directly with end users in a very diverse business environment.

After three and a half years I had to opportunity to work at Centralia Mining Company. This presented quite a change - from county government to coal mining. There I was part of a team that developed a heavy equipment maintenance management system. The system was written on a Hewlett Packard 3000 using touch-screen technology. You haven’t lived until you’ve trained two-hundred mechanics and thirty welders, mostly first-time computer users. The cool thing about this was that after they overcame the initial fear and distrust of the system, they were hooked! If we had to take the system down for maintenance other than nightly backups, they whined like babies.

In February of 1989, I came to work for the Department of Information Services (DIS). For five years I worked with some wonderful people, supporting the various billing systems. I gained a lot of knowledge about the services DIS provides. This knowledge would prove to be valuable later.

By 1994, DIS had a new opportunity and solicited volunteers. The Dept. of Agriculture requested an information technology assessment. Most of my efforts focused on internal applications, but I had a taste of working with external customers during one project. It was a very positive experience, so the assessment project was one I quickly volunteered for. The assessment was successful and it led to another assessment opportunity, this time with the Liquor Control Board. That too was successful and I realized that this consulting thing was a lot of fun.

I continued to work on telecommunications billing projects, until I was invited to consult for the Attorney General’s Office. Their Information Systems manager had died unexpectedly and the Deputy Director for Administration needed someone to come in and help the staff until a new manager was hired. The Deputy Director was formerly the Deputy Director at the Department. of Agriculture (John King). It sometimes pays to volunteer! I spent thirteen months helping out the information systems. and fiscal staff. Along the way I applied for the manager position (see the February IPMA newsletter on the guy who got the job). Seriously, it was an honor and a pleasure to work with the AGO. I saw the information systems staff undergo tremendous growth ranging from dealing with the loss of Jim Martin to changes under the leadership of Jim Albert.

In October 1996, I became the Information Services Manager at (you guessed it) Dept. of Agriculture. I supervise a staff of nine (four applications developers and five hardware/network technicians). Over the past seven months I’ve focused effort in three areas: 1)customer relations, 2)helping the staff adjust to my (participatory) management style, and 3)technology planning based on the agency strategic plan. The strategic plan spearheaded by director Jim Jesernig provides the blueprint by which we’ll implement technology (a novel concept). In short, I get to live with the recommendations I made three years ago.

WSDA faces some daunting challenges. The agriculture industry is very diverse and we have some very tough customers to please. It’s literally supporting twenty-six self-supporting businesses and dealing with assorted “cultural” issues. There are thirty WSDA offices around the state, yet none of them are networked, we have some technical challenges to overcome. We can look forward to combinations of technology including client/server computing in the Natural Resources Building, mobile computing in eastern Washington, database inquiries from our International Marketing office in Tokyo (using Internet) electronic commerce, and GIS. The best part of all this is that Information Services has executive management support and people throughout the agency are excited about using technology to achieve agency business goals. The biggest challenge I face is managing expectations. Business is booming!

—Herb Potter

"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."

—Mark Twain

"Never let reality get in the way of your dreams."

—Unknown

GILS Project Update

GILS is an electronic library catalog which uses subject searches to link citizens to government information. The project calendar plans for an evaluation of the GILS pilot in May and to adopt the future system design. In July, GILS shifts from pilot to permanent status and Citizen can begin to use it.

Here is a current status report:

1. DIS has programmed the alpha version of the GILS server applications (database, server, search/results). It is currently undergoing module and logical testing. While it is accessible through a WWW URL, it is not expected to "go public" until June.

2. Agencies are submitting locator records on a variety of material from simple links to their agency web pages to more "exotic" references such as to publications and statutory program telephone contacts. The most amazing finding is that most agencies would like to use the locator service to browse other agencies' data. For example, one agency asked to have access to GILS immediately to start researching points of statistics on people entering the self-employed job market (found through state and local permitting / licensing steps).

3. The project has raised a significant issue: Why can't agencies benefit from the basic GILS attribute set for internal indexing and search/retrieval? This may prove to be a more important by-product of the locator project (setting up an Intranet-based indexing scheme just in time to catch the material as it is published on intranets!). If a "metadata summary" points to information that may have Public value, it can be so tagged and arrangements could be made to copy it to a server outside of an agency's firewall. But there appears to be support for establishing some core element set to order information going onto an Intranet. Maybe we caught this problem in time, since only a few agencies have started up Intranets.

The benefit to the public is that identifying information with public value could become a by-product of a routine "internal" procedure to index electronic information. It has become clear to us that creating a catalog of metadata records just to serve the public competes with the more operational activities in running a government agency. Perhaps we can combine the drills and get a win-win.

We hope to work this idea through our stakeholder group, the Library Commission (charged with advocating a statewide indexing standard), the Customer Advisory Board, and ultimately, the ISB. Representatives from DIS are on our Team and are a substantial resource to keep us honest and responsive.

I would jump at the opportunity to draw from the membership of the IPMA. Perhaps you could suggest a forum?

—Phil Coombs

April Board Meeting

IPMA Board Meeting Minutes

April 10, 1997

Members Present: Jim Albert, Bob Monn, Shelagh Taylor, Phil Coates, Al Bloomberg, Phil Grigg, Dennis Laine.

The Board Chair, Al Bloomberg, opened the meeting at 7:35 a.m. April 10, 1997.

Report from the Chair:

The minutes from the March Board meeting were approved

Treasurer's Report:

Phil Coates presented the Treasurer's report which was approved. The Board approved Phil's request to be reimbursed for mileage costs incurred when traveling for business purposes between his home and the IPMA office.

The following committee reports were made:

Business and Finance Committee— Jim Albert reported he has planning spread sheets developed for the various committees to use in the development of their annual budgets. Al Bloomberg will be scheduling a separate Board meeting to discuss investment research he and Jim Albert have concluded.

Executive Seminar— Phil Grigg reported that a contract has been signed with the Shilo Inn at Ocean Shores for the September seminar. A meeting of the corporate sponsors was held to review the agendas and schedules of the Executive Seminar and the Forum. Phil Grigg and Dennis Laine met with the group to discuss improvement ideas, identify possible keynote speakers for both events, and confirm the corporate sponsor renewal process. Phil reported the sponsors were pleased with the meeting. They want to continue their involvement in both the Executive Seminar and the Forum, and are willing to be presenters or panelists in future Professional Development programs.

Forum— Dennis Laine has mailed the invitation to vendors for Forum '97 booths. The Forum planning group has met and decided on topics which they have shared with the corporate sponsors. The planning group is working to improve multi-media preparations, and is developing a more comprehensive marketing approach. They plan to have posters distributed to state agencies in mid-summer, with a direct mailing to last year's attendees and other interested parties in August.

Communications Committee— Al Bloomberg reported that Joe Coogan will be out on medical leave for approximately three weeks. Bob Monn will check Home Page activity until Joe gets back.

Professional Development— No activities to report this month.

Al Bloomberg adjourned the meeting at 8:50 a.m.

—Shelagh Taylor

IPMA, P.O. Box 1943, Olympia, WA 98507-1943