State & local

St. Petersburg deploys Oracle
St. Petersburg, Fla., stands to earn a 213 percent net return on its investment in an Oracle-based enterprise systems integration project.

That’s the analysis of Shack & Tullock, which recently studied the city’s deployment of Oracle E-Business Suite. According to the consulting firm, St. Petersburg will gain an estimated $16.8 million in net present-value benefits from the Oracle investment. In addition, the project is expected to generate positive cash flow this year.

The city worked with Solbourne, an Oracle partner, to install Oracle E-Business Suite. In doing so, it retired 100 existing systems in a process that took a year. The project kicked off in August 2003 and went live in August 2004, according to the city. The installation took about 18 months to stabilize.

“We continue to maintenance patch regularly and have implemented new functionality along the way,” said Christine West, Oracle E-Business Solutions manager for the city.

The Unix-based deployment involves several pieces of Oracle software.

Oracle Human Resources Management and Oracle Self-Service Human Resources, for example, let employees go online to update their records, enroll in benefits and check payslips.

“A big jump in efficiency resulted from the city’s switch to Oracle’s online benefits enrollment system, which eliminated paper signup forms and a significant amount of back-office data entry,” the Shack & Tullock report states.

Santa Barbara County taps PilotWorks
Santa Barbara County, Calif., has selected Pilot Software’s performance management system, PilotWorks. The county will deploy the company’s Advanced Management of Performance and Projects system, which will incorporate a performance-measuring system and a project-reporting system.

Pilot Software’s government customers include Sarasota County, Fla., the General Services Administration and the Agriculture Department.

Input: Social services contracts to top $500M in 2007 and 2008
The 10 largest state social services information technology contracts will be worth more than $500 million to vendors in 2007 and 2008, according to market researcher Input.

The majority of the funds will be invested in upgrading and modernizing existing systems. Many of the vendor opportunities involve upgrading statewide automated child welfare information systems.