← Back to results
Case study

Systems that never learned to talk to each other.

Wilsonville is a fast-growing city in the Portland metropolitan area, home to a concentration of high-tech businesses. Its own enterprise systems ran without automated integration between them.

The brief

Every unintegrated system is a person somewhere retyping what another system already knows.

Located in the Portland metropolitan area, Wilsonville is a progressive, fast-growing, medium-sized city with a population of approximately 20,000 and a significant high-tech business base.

Its Information Services division was running without automated integration between permitting and utility billing, without leveraged integration to the ERP and financial system, and with duplication as the predictable result.

There were no formalized IT policies and no procurement process for technology purchases that fell outside the strategic planning cycle — which is how unplanned spend happens.

What the work produced

The deliverables.

Integration between core systems

Addressing the absence of automated integration with permitting and utility billing, and the unleveraged integration to the ERP and financial system, which together were the source of the duplication.

Formalized IT policies

Establishing the IT policies the division had been operating without, so decisions have a documented basis.

A procurement process

Defining how technology gets bought when the request falls outside the strategic planning process — the gap through which unplanned purchases arrive.

Support capacity

A help desk support position, without which the division could not deliver consistent service to end users city-wide.

Email platform

The self-hosted Microsoft Exchange installation had reached end of life, lacked archiving, and was constrained by message and attachment size limits.

Where it stands

Status and outlook.

Where it stands

Avèro delivered a comprehensive IT strategic plan for the Information Services division with prioritized recommendations.

Why integration led

The duplication was the most expensive problem and the least visible one, because it showed up as staff time rather than as a line item.

Next step

Thirty minutes.
No pitch.

Tell us where you are. We'll say honestly whether we can help. If we can't, we'll point you to someone who can.