Outsourcing information management ...

Outsourcing information management has enabled the city of Evansville and Vanderburgh shire Ind., to reduce costs in their jointly operated Computer Services Department by the agency of 23 percent.

The brace governing bodies found themselves in a familiar predicament in the late 1980 as federal program cutbacks forced them to consume less money while providing increased services.

Hindering efforts to improve efficiency was an increasingly unreliable information management a whole plagued by excessive downtime, an outdated mainframe, limited application software, inaccurate and redundant data and incomplete or outdated reports.

The city and shire targeted technology as an area ripe for improvement and hired hypothesiss and Computer Technology Corp., Malvern, Pa., to build a completely recent information system.

The first gradation toward revamping data processing involved acquisition of a fresh generation of computing hardware — a leading-edge multi-platform Digital Equipment Corp. configuration — and implementing integrated application packages that would dwindle the redundancy of data,