Progress by Association in North Dakota

The North Dakota Association of Counties is playing a different sort of role in the state by helping county governments and the state itself with a variety of technology needs.

By Shane Peterson – govtech.net

For the last 10 years, counties in North Dakota have turned to a friend for technology assistance: the North Dakota Association of Counties.

The NDACo helps counties with IT planning, tech support, electronic-government projects and implementing state-mandated electronic programs, said Mark Johnson, executive director of the NDACo.

"There really was need out there, and our goal was to get started in the area of technology planning because that seemed to be the big vacuum," Johnson said. "Counties were moving ahead — and being urged by a number of vendors to purchase and to engage in technology in their counties — but there were no real plans in place."

From Above and Below
It didn’t take long before the NDACo realized it needed to work with the North Dakota Information Technology Department.

"We met with the ITD, and said, ‘If you are moving down a road to move the state into a technology position, the counties are children of the state, and, if we’re expected to react to state agencies and provide information and disseminate information from state agencies through the county structure, we’re going to have to be at least close to as technically qualified with computers and software as the state,’" Johnson said.

"They agreed with us, and we quickly developed a contract with the ITD in which they would support our association in providing additional staff to work directly with state agencies that had technology needs that needed to be placed out in the counties and, also, to assist the counties," he continued.

After that, the NDACo began establishing contracts with individual counties under which the counties would pay the NDACo for IT services. The contracts guaranteed 24-hour response time, one or two visits to the county per year and phone support, and created a priority status for particular situations or implementations.

The NDACo currently has contracts with 30 of the state’s 53 counties, and the contracts typically cost the counties $1,200 per year for basic services. If the county wants services over and above what the contract sets forth, the county pays the NDACo $50 per hour. Counties without a contract with the NDACo pay $53 per hour.

Initially, some counties balked at entering into contracts with the NDACo, Johnson said.

"We saw some resistance from counties in a willingness to use our services because we had so much windshield time to start with," he said. "We began talking with the six, and, now, eight, major regional centers in North Dakota — Williston, Dickinson, Jamestown, Devils Lake, Grand Forks and Fargo — and we’ve gone into a shared employee arrangement.

"We hired the employee and place that employee out in Dickinson, and that employee works for Stark County and is housed in Stark County," he said. "Stark County’s contribution is that they provide the facility, the office. We purchase the computers and the hardware, and the employee works on an arrangement that’s anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of their time is spent working with that county."

The remaining percentage of the employee’s time is spent working with surrounding counties as the NDACo’s IT specialist for that region.

Model Behavior
Johnson said what the NDACo does could be duplicated by other associations, though not without difficulty.

"I don’t know how I would get started doing what we’re doing now if I just decided to do it today," he said. "It’s been an evolutionary process. We’ve built this up over time; we’ve built the partnerships; we’ve got close relationships with the state, with some of the area vendors, consulting engineers and people that are doing GIS.

"We’ve developed this network of relationships, so we have a niche," he said. "I just don’t know how I would drop myself into the existing mix — if we just dropped in with our 10 staff members who are working in this area, we’d probably be viewed as a competitive force and might even be resented."

County associations in other states could find a way to make this model work, he said, especially if they take the time to understand their counties’ technology needs.

"There are a number of niches out there that state associations could find to provide direct services to counties," he said. "The relationship is already there, and, in most states, the counties trust the state association."

Agents of the State
Mike Ressler, director of the ITD, appreciates the benefits of the relationship between the association and the state.

"For us, the biggest advantage is that finding full-time equivalent positions is difficult because there’s no governor that wants government to grow — and that’s one way they measure how government is growing, by how many people [are employed] — so we never have enough bodies," Ressler said.

"They [NDACo] have the relationship with counties, and they’re a good interface between the state applications and counties," he said. "They work a lot with human-service applications at the county level because the county administers a number of the state’s human-service applications."

North Dakota isn’t immune from the traditional tension between state and local governments caused, at times, by mandates that come from the state, and the NDACo’s role does play a part in reducing some of that tension. Ressler said he and his staff talk with the NDACo before going out to speak with counties so they have a better appreciation of county officials’ concerns and don’t say the wrong things to county officials.

"Counties can be frustrated with understanding what their role really is, and, on the other side, the state sits up here and says, ‘Hey, it’s a county function, and they’re supposed to get that done,’" he said. "The communication isn’t always the best. It’s not easy for counties to come to Bismarck to have meetings with the state."

Though counties realize technology can help them with electronic government, they also fear what technology could bring.

"In North Dakota, one of the real fears in the counties is that the rural communities seem to be decreasing in population," Ressler said. "With technology having the ability to do more consolidation, there’s a fear that the state is going to take business away from the county. If you take a motor-vehicle registration building, today, with technology the way it is, that could all be housed here at the capital — or any city, for that matter — and a lot of those functions could be done electronically."

The NDACo plays the role of advocating for the counties and advocating for the state, he said, especially when it comes to certain technologies, such as networking, where the state wants to consolidate on a specific product; consolidate IP addresses; or go from token ring to Ethernet.

"The NDACo understands what the state’s vision is," Ressler said. "Then, when they’re out there working with the counties, they’ll say, ‘This is the direction you need to go.’ It’s just like having our staff out there working with the counties. We meet with the NDACo once a month to make sure we’re all on the same page. They don’t always do everything we want them to; I don’t want to carry that too far."

The NDACo also performs contract work for the state, though the work is focused on desktop support for state agencies. The ITD used to provide that service to state agencies, but eventually most ITD personnel was transferred to maintaining agencies’ servers.

"We went to the NDACo and told them, ‘We still have a need for somebody to get out to these agencies when they come in and their PCs aren’t working,’" Ressler said. "We contract that through the NDACo. Technically, they’re just as good as we are."

Making Applications Work
That go-between role is very important to counties, said Dan Richter, director of social services of Ward County.

"It’s difficult for the state to communicate out to 53 counties," he said. "You’re communicating from state government to local government, which can be two different worlds. The NDACo is equipped to be sensitive to that and have the expertise in dealing with the two levels of government; providing the assistance and translating the messages, not only technical questions but political questions and considerations."

For counties, this sort of help is most needed in the areas of social-service applications because counties deliver programs mandated by the state and programs that the federal government mandates that states deliver, Richter said.

The NDACo is also working with the North Dakota County Social Service Directors Association and the Department of Human Services’ Department of Information Technology to create a common approach to social-service technologies to present to the state’s Legislature, Richter said.

"Our technology is state driven because we’re delivering state programs," he said. "All of the systems that determine eligibility and do reporting are all state developed and mandated. As uses of technology increased, the Department of Human Services said they couldn’t support technology in the counties, and we had to seek another source of technical support. In government, there’s always close scrutiny of adding positions, so this was attractive to us — that we could seek technology assistance through a contract with the NDACo."

Richter’s agency is also one of the local government agencies that share an agency employee with the NDACo, and it’s an arrangement that’s helped him.

"He’s our primary computer technician and gives us some advice," Richter said. "In our case, we were behind the curve a little bit in getting computer support. We had a tremendous need for technology assistance."

Perception is Key
The ITD’s Ressler said the NDACo played a key role when the state was developing its statewide network — which handles video conferencing and data primarily. Though state law mandates that any county, city, K-12 school, higher education entity and state agencies must buy network access from the ITD, having a middleman out in the field explaining the benefits of the statewide network was important, he said.

"Them just being the communication point for questions to come through — they’re out there at the counties on a regular basis — and all the little issues that come up are funneled through the NDACo," he said.

Perception can become reality quickly, he said, and if counties perceive that the state is trying to ram a particular piece of technology down their throats; they aren’t happy about it.

"There was a lot of concern that when we got the statewide network started that here’s state government dictating to us who we can talk to and how we can talk to them," Ressler said. "Cost was a major concern, too, and counties wondered, ‘Are they just going to force fees on us that we could get cheaper if we just went and talked to the local telecommunications company?’"

The deployment went far more smoothly than the ITD thought it would, partly due to the NDACo’s role, he said.

"They’re the voice that goes back out to do the explanation," said Ressler. "I can’t tell you how much they’ve helped the success of the network at the county level. If it would have been the ITD staff to have to do that communication, we’d have failed because we just don’t have the bodies."

Shane Peterson

http://www.govtech.net/magazine/sup_story.phtml?magid=1005000000000007&id=3030000000021667.0