Welcome to the joint government operations and resilience committee meeting.

I'd like to acknowledge my um chair Toyla Carter of the Resilience Committee and invite her to offer any opening remarks.

Thank you.

Um we're glad to uh host this joint committee today.

We hope it's a really good use of everyone's time because we like to consolidate this and look forward to all the presentations.

Thank you all for being here and all you do.

All right, thank you all so much for being here.

Obviously, this is incredibly timey, bate timely based on where we are in the season.

So we're excited to hear uh the presentations.

I would like to acknowledge our council members that are present.

So we have staff from District A, C, H, I, and then Councilmember Cayman's online.

And she also has someone here on staff, and then at large one, we have a team member.

I'm sorry.

Raveras is here.

Thank you for being here.

And my chair here, um, Councilmember Carter, and then Councilman Alcorn.

Okay, perfect.

All righty.

So today's meeting will feature two presentations, one from Houston's information technology services, and then also the Office of Emergency Management.

At this time, I would like to yield to the for the HIITS presentation.

Presentation one enterprise resource planning system contract, and the presenter will be Stephen David, who is our operations officer from the mayor's office.

And also Summer Zhao.

She's a deputy chief information officer as well.

Thank you so much to both of you, and thank you for being here.

Good afternoon, Council members.

I am uh happy to be here in front of y'all.

Councilmember get this out of here.

It's good to see you, man.

Uh thanks for taking the time.

Thanks for hosting us.

Uh I'm here with uh deputy CIO of the IT department, SummerShow.

Um, and really excited to talk about um what we have coming up.

Um we're gonna bring it to council soon.

This is intended to talk to you a little bit about she's gonna walk you through exactly what the SAP contract is, um, what we are planning to do, what the next few years looks like.

I'm here to have uh here to help answer any questions, but also to give sort of an introductory remarks um about the way that the city of Houston comports itself with regard to IT strategy.

Uh so as some of y'all may or may not know, uh, prior to coming back to the city of Houston, I had a uh seven-year stint in the private sector, uh six-year stint in the private sector, and I worked uh most of that time with a company called Accenture.

It's the uh world's largest IT consulting firm.

Um and what I did was a lot of the work that you're about to see, uh transitioning municipalities, county governments, state governments from one system to another system.

We call it IT implementation.

Uh more importantly, um transitioning from what we would consider tier two, tier three uh systems into a tier one system.

SAP, for example, is a tier one system.

Uh the home brewed systems that the city of Houston has uh or had uh prior to SAP or any of our other systems would be considered tier two and tier three.

With regard to IT strategy, the City of Houston has uh over the course of the the past few decades made a couple of very strategic choices that has set itself up for uh success moving forward in the future.

So, for example, and we sort of take this for granted, we are a Microsoft organization.

Um we have Outlook, we have PowerPoint and Word, we have all of the licensing infrastructure underneath it.

For example, we are what's called an E5 license organization.

That's the biggest and best license that you can get.

You get really cool things like Power BI baked into your license.

But more importantly, what it did was it created a foundation for which we could grow.

Um so a great example uh of that is that our 311 platform, while we call it Chris, the uh customer can't remember.

Uh it's actually built on a product called Dynamics, which is Microsoft, another example of a strategic investment where we bring something full into the Microsoft network.

The City of Houston also made that choice um about 11 years ago with SAP.

We went from a tier two system, which was more of a homebrewed cobbled together pieces of things that did HR over here and finance over there and budgeting over there and all and payments and invoices uh over here.

And so we we came together and made the strategic choice a little over a decade ago that we want to move to a system we chose SAP and summer will walk you through sort of the the big high uh best and highest about SAP as a as a product, but more importantly, we made a strategic investment in ourselves.

Um and what we did, what we have done since then was slowly move and piece ourselves together into creating a more comprehensive view of this product uh that supports almost every single major corporation in the world.

Um and what we are now doing, what this represents for us is going to that next that next step where we get off of what's called on-prem, on-premise uh infrastructure and going fully into the cloud, um, which is a really really good thing for a lot of different reasons.

Um it create creates redundancy, it allows for remote access, it allows for a whole bunch of support that we wouldn't otherwise not have.

Um so I'm pretty excited about this.

Um this is a uh a big big step um for the city of Houston for a lot of different reasons, and you'll see how plugged in to SAP we are.

Um and then additionally, I'm also here to help answer any questions that y'all might have about implementation itself, right?