Howard County, Md., an outlying suburb of both Baltimore and Washington, D.C., grew extremely rapidly over the past 10 years, and its IT systems struggled to keep pace. There are approximately 3,500 internal users on the county's systems, a residential base ready and willing to use online services, and an IT staff of about 100.

Insufficient bandwidth, myriad "mom-and-pop" systems, and a dearth of best practices dogged the county until it hired Ira Levy as CIO about four years ago. In a recent interview with FierceCIO, Levy discussed his efforts to consolidate the county's IT systems, develop broadband partnerships with other organizations to address growing bandwidth needs, and lead a $115 million fiber deployment throughout the state.

FierceCIO: What was the main challenge you faced when you came on board, as CIO of Howard County?

Ira Levy: IT had become very splintered, with different departments doing different things. There were no standards. There was a help desk, but there were only 100 people designated as viable help desk requesters. Basically IT business practices and best practices just weren't there. 

The county grew much faster than the IT systems. The growth we have had is in a very highly technically skilled labor force. The requirements of our community have grown exponentially, even compared to the raw number of people. Our customer base has become extremely technical and demanding, in some ways over night. 

We spent the last three years trying to bring it up to today's standards for technology and systems. We've done everything from replacing hardware to running a large fiber initiative. We've reached out to make new partnerships, with the school system and community college, among others. 

FCIO: Have you found that there are IT challenges specific to county (or local) government?

Levy: Getting things done in a quick turn-around time tends to be critical when you're in an election cycle type of environment. Every four years there could be changed priorities. We always need to keep an eye on how long are projects are going to take. If, for some reason, priorities change, there might still be an emphasis on IT, but maybe not on the specific initiatives you're deploying. You have to be careful about what your exit strategies are. 

FCIO: Where did you begin to tackle the challenge of consolidating systems?

Levy: We started out with hardware standards. We put in a three and a half-year refresh rate cycle. We consolidated our backup systems. We had multiple email systems that we consolidated. Across a 30-facility network, we had no VLANs. We had to put in a network architecture, which included changing out every IP address.

From an application standpoint, the desktops weren't tied down in any capacity. Anybody could have anything. We really tried to be accommodating, but part of our IT mission is to make sure that what one user does, does not adversely impact another.

FCIO: What was the process for replacing hardware?

Levy: When I arrived, from an inventory standpoint there were, what I would call, rough guesses--not only as to how many computers or how many printers there were, but also where they were located. We had to find all the machines out there and where they were. We used technology from eTelemetry from a detective--almost forensic approach--to get some raw information about what we thought was out there. 

Then there were all these periphery type devices, and that's really where eTelemetry helped us the most--in identifying those systems that had very odd IP addresses or in giving us some transparency or insight as to what account is logging into the systems. 

FCIO: What kinds of bandwidth constraints does the county have?

Levy: When I started there were 10 [mbps] of bandwidth, which would max out somewhere around 8:03 in the morning. It ran almost at 100 percent capacity. Bandwidth, which was a problem and remains a problem, falls into two categories: Bandwidth among our 30 facilities and bandwidth to the outside.

Our parks and rec department, which runs the different [summer] camps, went online with registration four years ago. They would open it up at midnight, and it would crash every time at 12:10 a.m. 

We've gone to approximately 130 [mbps] now. We're working together with the community college and the school system on our broadband needs.  

FCIO: What applications were taking up so much bandwidth on a daily basis?

Levy: A lot of times, CIOs exist at the 10,000 foot level and we start to look just at the big services, but at the end of the day what you notice is that a very simple misconfiguration--or even just the way something works--can easily use up 10 percent of your bandwidth. 

An example of that is Google Chrome, which can potentially suck 10 percent of your bandwidth. Same thing with anti-virus updates. We had an internal server to hand out anti-virus updates. When we started to look, what we found was that there were a significant number of computers going to the outside for their updates. These were completely legitimate sites, but they were pulling major amounts of bandwidth, and pulling at the same time. Everyone comes in at 8 a.m. and starts pulling down their updates. We used eTelemetry's Metron technology from a forensic standpoint to look at what machines were inappropriately configured. 

FCIO: What other major projects are you working on?

Levy: As of Sept. 17, Maryland was awarded $115 million to implement 1600 miles of fiber throughout the state [in a project called the One Maryland Broadband Plan]. I put together a consortium of all the jurisdictions in central Maryland and reached out to the state. Howard County led the initiative on behalf of the state. Seventy-two million dollars is coming to Howard County, and another $40 million to the state itself. The grant has to be completed in 35 months.

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