Microsoft .NET helps Los Angeles agency tackle critical housing needs
By Lane F. Cooper, editorial director for Business Technology Reports
Los Angeles is a magnet city that attracts people from all over the world. Every year, masses flock to the city, causing the population of 3.8 million people to keep growing quickly.
Some of the city's new citizens are rich (and sometimes even famous) and so have no problems finding housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States. Others aren't that fortunate and need to turn to the Los Angeles Housing Department (LAHD) to help them find affordable housing.
The city's continuous rapid growth has placed enormous stress on the LAHD and its information systems. LAHD needs technology that allows it to respond faster to resident needs while at same time enabling information sharing with other government agencies. With those requirements in mind, when LAHD launched a technology initiative to help it meet current and future needs, the department turned to Microsoft .NET technology. Here's why.
 | Our mission is to provide decent and affordable housing to the residents of the city of Los Angeles by leveraging private and public financial resources to create new housing and preserve the existing housing stock. |  | | Ying Ku
Senior system analyst,
Los Angeles Housing Department | |
|
LAHD maps technology to its mission
"Our mission is to provide decent and affordable housing to the residents of the city of Los Angeles by leveraging private and public financial resources to create new housing and preserve the existing housing stock," explains Ying Ku, a senior system analyst with LAHD.
For a growing number of people, LAHD also offers a path to home ownership and affordable rental housing, making loans and other financial resources available to as wide a swath of the citizenry as possible. "In our loan portfolio we have $750 million servicing about 6,000 active loans at this time," Greg Kung, director of systems at LAHD.
To manage the loan portfolio, the department works with federal, state, and county organizations to ensure it takes full advantage of all resources available to clients as they make the transition from renting homes to owning them. But to accomplish this objective, the department has had to overcome several technology challenges.
Facing the challenge of legacy system limitations
Like many large public and private sector organizations that have been around for a while, the LAHD has several generations of information technology (IT) systems that inhibit the ability of staffers in different parts of the organization to access, share, and manage information. This situation has also made it difficult for the department to optimize its digital relationships with organizations outside of its boundaries.
"Because of the way our department has evolved over the years, we have a highly unique set of business processes associated with each aspect of our daily operations. Managing those [different] processes are a challenge for us," says Ku.
The main legacy system that was in place for many years was a client/server application first installed by a vendor who later sold its assets -- and its client-base -- to a large technology systems provider. The limitations associated with the client/server approach to automation -- which at the time of purchase represented the state-of-the art in government enterprise computing -- revolved around a fundamental lack of flexibility.
For example, once a basic process was automated using the legacy system, it was very difficult to adapt it to any changes in workflow. It was also difficult to reconcile the various operational requirements among the different offices within the department.
"As a result, many programs were accessed using manual processes that were not captured by the client/server system," says Ku.
| Because of the way our Department has evolved over the years, we have a highly unique set of business processes associated with each aspect of our daily operations. Managing those [different] processes are a challenge for us. | | | Ying Ku
Senior system analyst,
Los Angeles Housing Department | |
|
This meant that many critical pieces of information about clients, loans, and available properties were locked away in information silos, making it nearly impossible for staffers to get a complete picture of the resources that could be brought to bear to help clients.
"Just to do a simple inquiry…to see basic reports, users would have to get on to multiple systems…a spreadsheet here…an access database there," says Ku.
Harnessing workflow modeling in .NET
What was needed, says Kung, was an overhaul that would take advantage of the latest technology. The goal was to make it possible to share, manage, and process mission-critical information while automating the entire array of business processes that were currently being jerry-rigged because of the limitations of the old legacy environment.
"We were looking for technology that could integrate systems and migrate data into different environments. That would enable us to better understand and gain insights from historical data that was -- and is -- in place in all of our databases. We knew that this would make it possible to better project where our financial resources are going to be needed, as well as to provide our users [department staffers] with a much higher level of operational support," says Kung.
Kung had already had significant experience working with Microsoft .NET technology in the division of the department that dealt with housing codes and rent enforcement. Based on the successes he had been able to document there, he and Ku launched an integration initiative based on the latest version of .NET.
"The first step is to bring the existing data on the legacy systems into the new .NET environment," says Ku. "We then need to identify all of the current manual processes and use the .NET workflow modeling capabilities to automate and integrate them."
The LAHD expects the new system to not only provide new internal functionality as the legacy system is completely replaced, but to also significantly improve system integration with sources outside of the agency.
"We expect to have much better communication and collaboration with other organizations, such as the city-wide financial database and several federal and state databases," says Ku.
Most important of all, however, will be the ability to better understand how the agency can address the needs of its clients.
"Implementing this system will give us a good sense of how many people are using our services and what their specific needs are. Keeping track of this type of information is very challenging because we are not currently integrated across our different business operations. That will change with the move to .NET," he says.
Author bio :
Lane Cooper is editorial director for Business Technology Reports. He is responsible for developing consultative communications campaigns that describe specific technology applications in real-world business contexts that decision-makers in end-user organizations can understand and appreciate.
