InfoSENTRY Requirements Analysis
and Procurement Management for a Statewide Voter Registration System
InfoSENTRY
worked with an independent consulting firm in 1995 to conduct a needs assessment
and requirements analysis for a statewide voter registration system in North
Carolina. The project involved detailed survey research efforts, focus groups,
documentation analysis, site visits, and process walkthroughs in State agencies
and over a dozen counties. The research built upon an InfoSENTRY principal’s
experience almost a decade earlier preparing a study for the North Carolina
General Assembly on the costs and benefits of a statewide voter registry. The
resulting report contained item-by-item listings of functional needs for a new
statewide voter registration system linking various State agency systems with
county offices. It contained four alternative network architectures, developed
to meet the functional needs (ranging from a highly centralized mainframe/SNA
model to an Internet-based model).
The
report, prepared seven years before passage of the Help America Vote Act
(HAVA), recommended creation of a system that was HAVA-compliant well before
the Act’s mandated creation of a single, uniform, and centralized statewide
voter registration system. The system requirements analysis contained
“order-of-magnitude,” life-cycle cost estimates, detailed advantages and
disadvantages, and project implementation schedules for each alternative.
Subsequently,
the State Board of Elections contracted with InfoSENTRY from 1995 through 1998
to move the report through State Information Resource Management Commission (I
R M C) and state legislative technical reviews. InfoSENTRY assisted State
information technology (I T) staff in drafting the State’s Request for
Proposals (RFP) for integration services. We assisted in evaluating the
vendors’ responses to the RFP’s functional and technical requirements.
Following selection of a vendor by the State Board of Elections, InfoSENTRY
worked with the State IT agency to prepare the full procurement and selection
documentation package. The procurement easily withstood a routine procurement
protest by a losing vendor. The winning vendor moved forward with the system development
and implementation project.
