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O U T O F P E R FO R M A N C E - BA S E D M A N A G E M E N T I N L A S V E G A S

A S O N E O F T H E FA S T E S T - G R O W I N G
cities in America in the last decade, Las Vegas has also seen
its information technology needs grow in leaps and bounds.
The city’s busy IT department today serves more than 2,500
municipal employees while catering to the burgeoning
online requirements of the citizenry with a user-friendly
Web site.
And like every other metropolis in the United States, Las
Vegas has had to wrestle with the twin challenges of grow-
ing IT demands and tight municipal budgets. Meeting these
challenges meant implementing an IT foundation that
would not only scale as seamlessly as possible to accommo-
date rapid growth, but also be flexible enough to support a
wide range of applications with open interfaces. At the city
of Las Vegas, that foundation is Oracle.
Today Oracle solutions are pervasive throughout the city’s
operations, notes Kathleen M. Fauerbach, enterprise project
manager. “Over the last 10 years we’ve built over 30 differ-
ent applications sitting on top of our Oracle database,”
Fauerbach says.
Like a lot of progressive municipalities, Las Vegas has tried tation. In just eight weeks she and her team had the new
to adopt some of the business practices commonly found in performance management system up and running.
the private sector. One such area was performance-based “Suddenly what used to take weeks for managers to pull up
personnel management utilizing key performance indicators. was now available to
So when a senior management team turned to Fauerbach them in real time,”
for input on this project, she turned to Oracle and its Daily Fauerbach recalls.
Business Intelligence (DBI) solution. These Oracle DBI
users now include the leaders of the city’s finance, account-
OV E R E A S Y ing, operations, procurement, and HR departments.
As Fauerbach recalls, the senior team wanted a performance In addition to the tremendous productivity gains Oracle
management solution for which ease of use was paramount. DBI has enabled, the key performance indicators and man-
They wanted a system that would allow department direc- agement dashboards built into the system give managers the
tors to see all relevant information at-a-glance so they could instant accountability they never had before.
make decisions on the spot. And they wanted a solution that Another significant benefit of Oracle DBI is the ability
allowed data to be input simply and efficiently. for managers to easily drill down to transactional data.This
This solution would replace a highly manual system that allows a manager to quickly respond to someone who may
involved extracting data from a mainframe or from paper question some of the data, as the manager can drill instantly
spreadsheets, taking weeks to gather even rudimentary into the transaction that created the data point in the first
information on staff performance.Thus a key aspect of the place.
new system would be its ability to gather information from But where Oracle DBI really shines is in its ease of use,
a wide variety of other systems and then unify reporting on which was an important criterion for the city. In order to
that data with as little human intervention and tweaking as keep training costs at a minimum while maximizing usage
possible. of the system, Fauerbach rolled out the solution and just let
Fauerbach personally took charge of the DBI implemen- the managers explore it on their own. ■