Despite post-flood upgrade, Linn County computer system still playing catch-up

CEDAR RAPIDS - When Linn County updated its computer system in 1986, it went state of the art: a $507,445 Burroughs V340 mainframe running 20 megabytes of memory.

“Kind of large for its day,” said Phil Lowder, the county's information technology director.

Linn County's system is like many older computers in the public and private sectors that are still plugging along, managing public records, mailing bills, operating machines and performing a multitude of functions.

“You get popular perceptions of, ‘Gee, computers are cheap and fast and any computer more than 5 years old is junk,” said Doug Jones, associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa.

“There's a huge amount of legacy software out there that's still used by Fortune 500 companies,” Jones said. “There's no rush to replace equipment if it works.”

Linn County's system, which received a $770,000 upgrade in 2001, stores property tax information for the county Treasurer's Office and survived, sort of, the June 2008 flood that overran its basement installation at the county's administrative office building on First Street SW.

The flood destroyed the big cabinets containing the devices that read data off reels of tape. With the Cedar River edging nearer, Lowder and his staff shut down the system and took its tapes to an upper floor late June 11, two days before the river's crest.

“Being a mainframe, the doggone thing took 45 minutes to an hour just to shut itself down,” Lowder recalled. “The backup took hours.”

After the flood, designers from Unisys helped Lowder and his staff develop a server-based system to access the property tax information.

It works, but a long-term solution should be in place by September.

Lowder's staff is working with vendor Manatron and their counterparts in Polk County to develop the system, which will include a Web portal allowing residents to check their valuations, appraisals, and tax history online. Now they must call the Treasurer's Office, which prints a report for pickup or mailing.

Linn County's share of the system will cost $1.16 million. It will run on the county's existing servers, and data will be backed up in real time to a server at the Emergency Management Center on the Kirkwood Community College campus.

“Once this gets ramped up and running, I think other counties will be interested,” Lowder said.

The improvised post-flood system is something of a relic, but not unusual said Jones, the UI computer science professor.

In the case of Linn County “it's the database formats which required them to keep using the system,” said Jones. “You have to be able to recover that data, and the data's on tapes - it requires you keep those tape drives functioning.”

Older systems are also found on shop floors, where computer controls installed in the 1970s run lathes and milling machines, Jones said. And aircraft instrumentation is designed to outlive a laptop.

“The commercial marketplace is happy with a five-year life cycle, but if you made people recertify their plane every five years you couldn't afford to fly,” said Jones. “The reliability standards for aircraft instrumentation are so much higher than they are for commercial computing.”

No neighboring county has a system of Linn County's vintage, but the state Department of Human Services manages its Medicaid accounts on a 1970s-vintage mainframe, said department spokesman Roger Munns.

The Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS) processes more than 23 million claims for 656,000 Iowans to more than 38,000 doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, labs, and other providers.

MMIS is stable but “the system is very rigid, difficult to change, and requires programmers to do time-consuming programming for even the most routine changes,” Munns wrote in an email.

Even basic changes such as a provider's new rate can take hours to enter into the system and can cause errors requiring claims to be resubmitted, according.

“It's very reliable, but it's very expensive to maintain it's just not as flexible as we need it,” said Jennifer Vermeer, the state's Medicaid director. “There are a lot of new federal changes coming that it's not going to be able to do very well.”

So DHS officials are seeking legislative approval to begin research and design work on a new system. The appropriation has passed the House, and Vermeer hopes Gov. Terry Branstad's support will keep it in the final infrastructure spending bill.

“New systems do have a positive return on investment,” she said. “Over the longer term it will have cost savings to Medicaid.”