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Observations. Issues. and Concerns The Department of Natural Resources continues to make significant progress in the management of its information services. The most important accomplishment this year is the submission of a single project that encompasses several IS pro- jects. This project has been assigned the Department's highest priority which in- dicates the Department's recognition of the significance of IS to the Department. Other important accomplishments include the hiring of a very experienced and capable Geographic Information Systems (GIS) coordinator for the Department and the removal of the last Wang. ' The ISpersonne1 resources in Natural Resources are decentralized and this con- tinues to result in some lack of unified planning across the divisions. Filling the GIS coordinator position is an especially strong strategic move for the Department that will help increase cooperation and coordination between all the divisions as they increase and accelerate their use of GIS. The Department is en- couraged to continue to explore more efforts to centralize other IS functions such as a data base administrator. A departmental DBA would bring more unity to the Department by standardizing on common database products, departmental and divisional data models, and standard definitions of common data elements. The Department has for many years depended on Wang computers for many of its important IS functions. The IMC staff felt that this has presented a serious risk to the Department in recent years. The Department has moved all applica- tions off the Wang to a more stable platform. These applications will now be enhanced to be more closely aligned with the Department's business require- ments. While this project was slow in getting started, the Department has com- pleted a significant milestone with the physical removal of the Wang. The divisions of the Department of Natural Resources have historically not worked closely together in a coordinated fashion. This lack of coordination may have been encouraged to some extent by moving the IS personnel out to the divi- sions several years ago. The current IS director has made substantial progress in bringing the divisions together by organizing cross-divisional planning commit- tees that meet to understand and act on issues that are important to the whole Department. This has helped the divisions understand how their common mission to manage the State's natural resources is a greater strength than are the differ- ences between the divisions. The Department would significantly benefit from stronger control and coordination at the central IS level. Much of the Department's technical direction is based on sound technology that covers a wide range of areas: ESRI ARC/Info for GIS, TCP/IP for data commu- nication protocol, Informix and Informix 4GL for DBMS and new development, Department of Natural Resources 9/6/96 5