Fresno County Revamps IT for Better Service

Outdated technology has long proved to be a hindrance to any local government’s ability to efficiently serve its constituents. 

Fresno County, Calif., found itself in that predicament. The county needed an IT revamp to serve the community securely and reliably, but budgetary constraints limited its ability to follow through on a major tech refresh.

“Our job is to empower Fresno County employees with the technology and support they need to do their jobs,” Robert Bash, director of internal services and CIO of Fresno County, said in a statement describing the problem.

The county’s Internal Services operation had to overcome financial barriers that were getting in the way, including a strict annual budget that left it with antiquated IT solutions.

To break that logjam, Fresno County needed to move from the norm of procuring IT through large, upfront capital expenditures, and towards a new paradigm based on an operating expenditure strategy.

As a result of that shift in thinking, the county was able to partner with Dell Technologies to deploy the latest technology and lifecycle management strategies with regular refreshes in a cost-effective way via financial predictability and flexibility models.

“Whatever technology solutions we need, we can procure them through Dell Financial Services,” Bash said. He explained that when Fresno County’s decade-old networking infrastructure required a refresh, the county had to act fast to avoid a 10 percent price increase for their existing vendor’s installed solution.

For the county, this was truly critical infrastructure, but it didn’t have the budget available to undertake the update. Under its new partnership with Dell Technologies, the county received a customized technology payment solution proposal within five days of requesting one.

With the county’s new cost-effective plan – centered on the financial predictability and flexibility features that come with it, Fresno County found it was able to replace critical networking infrastructure before a tight deadline.

As a result, with updates ranging from networking to client devices, the county’s data center can advance its technology mission much faster and allow the county to better serve its constituents.  

Fresno County now has over 1,000 schedules with Dell Financial Services, including a custom payment solution for third-party IT and Technology Rotation, which provides a consistent and predictable refresh schedule for the county’s technology while lowering the total cost of usage.

“Even when we’re not using IT from Dell Technologies, we trust Dell Financial Services to quickly provide a leading financial solution that’s in our best interest,” Bash said, adding that with this budgetary approach, the county gains fiscal consistency and reliability, which are crucial for IT funding approval.