During last night’s Town
Council meeting, The Town Manager and the Finance Director talked about
changing over from the current TRIO system to MUIS. There
were several reasons for this request but the primary reason was the lack of technical
support in a timely manner.
According to the Town Manager, there are 17 requests dating back to
2010 that are not yet resolved.
According to the Finance Director, TRIO makes it very difficult to
control the cash flow, and other accounting items. The people have known this for years but
Stephen Eldridge, former Town Manager, switched from Northern Data to
TRIO. I believe it was because it was
easier to hide money.
The Finance Director talked
for nearly an hour about how TRIO does not do the job it needs to and how MUNIS
will solve most of those problems. Prior
to TRIO, the employees of the town were more than satisfied with Northern
Data. Anytime you migrate to a new system, it is always a nightmare. According to the Finance Director, the town
wants to keep two TRIO – Assessing and Vehicle.
This means the town is going to pay for two systems at the same
time. This is always a bad idea to split
technical support contracts. Think about how
much money the people are going to have to pay for two systems. Generally, if you try and use 2 modules from
one company they are going to jack up the price for these two modules and you
will get no technical support. If the
town has 17 open technical support request dating back to 2010, how much technical support can you
expect on these two modules.
These two modules may have
better bells and whistles right now but what about in the future. Trying to keep these two modules updated will cost two to
three times more than converting all modules over to Munis and working with
fewer bells and whistles. This
will enable one technical support contract and will make it easier to negotiate
a better contract. Any time a
company knows you are interested in switching to their system, they will
promise you the world in order to get your business. This would be a perfect opportunity to try in get both the
assessing and vehicle modules in Munis up to the way the town thinks it should
work.
I have had extensive
experience in converting over to numerous systems and I can tell you that it is
imperative that you make sure before you start that you back-up the old system and make sure you
have a solid back-up copy before you start. Also, every
day, week month, depending on volume of data entered, the system you have not
converted the town needs to back-up and verify a good copy until everything is
converted and verified. Before you begin
a conversion make sure the conversion
table is correct so that the data goes into the right position, such as
date goes in as month, day, year into the same or you will have month, day,
year on one system going into day, month, year on the other. There should be a lot of time spend on the
preparation to ensure a smooth conversion.
It is
critical to keep a copy of the back-up off-site even after the conversion is
completed just in case of an unidentified problem comes up later.
None of this information was
brought up during the discussion. Which do you
think is going to be easier to receive:
technical support from TRIO on these two modules or having the
programmers tailor the modules to how the town wants it to work in Minus?
This is a prime example as to
how ridiculous the concept of only allowing the audience to speak during
Audience Participation. The residents
have no idea what is going on until the Sponsor explains the reason for the
change and the Councilors have their discussion. There are
residents that have experience in many areas and can contribute to the process BEFORE a vote is taken. This will enable the Councilors to have many
more facts in order to make a reasonable decision. This is why I have argued against the Council
Working Rules.
Larry Fillmore
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