The Department of Management Information Systems provides a crucial link that ties together PEF’s membership and staff in this new information age. MIS provides this link through our extremely efficient support and delivery of Internet services, data services, PC services, telecommunications, and video conferencing.

Through the continuous development and support of our help desk tracking system, MIS was able to complete and document a 42 percent increase in productivity over the past year. This has allowed us to do more for less. We have been able to continue to support the current PEF organization, add additional supported software (such as Xerox Paperport and CentreWare, Microsoft Front Page, VPN access, and Outlook Web Access), add and administer four additional servers (Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server, Xerox Flowport, Check Point Firewall-1, Veritas Backup Exec), and add enterprise-wide anti-virus scanning without an increase in personnel. We supported over 160 workstations across the state in terms of hardware and software.

This year also saw us successfully prepare for and overcome Y2K issues and thereby continue to provide our services without any disruption to the organization. We also survived through a couple of malicious virus programs that plagued many American organizations and in the process increased our security from such future attacks. The aforementioned enterprise-wide anti-virus package scans all e-mails and is updated daily with the latest anti-virus definitions.

MIS supervised the introduction of new, networked digital copiers that serve as copiers, printers, and scanners. These units are faster, of better quality, and cheaper to run than previous equipment. In addition, this obviously reduces the need for individual scanners, printers, and all those support costs these hardware appliances require.

MIS continues to provide membership information via paper reports, labels, and look-up formats. This is the backbone for division elections, mailings, and member mobilizing. We are also in the midst of our huge undertaking of a complete membership database redesign and implementation. When complete, the new database application will be able to provide on-the-fly forms and reports customized to the user to better meet the needs of the membership and PEF staff by making data more accessible and thus shortening turn-around times on data requests. The new database system will be available to our field offices and will also be able to aid in member mobilizing functions out in the field. We also project a great savings in paper and processing costs due to the greater accessibility the end-user has to the data. We are designing the system so that we may easily upgrade access in the future by adding web enabled services and enhanced member mobilizing features.

We are proud of the growth of PEF’s web site, www.pef.org. Over the past year the site has grown from just under 100 pages to over 1000 pages including the new on-line Communicator (a collaboration between PEF’s MIS and PR departments). It was astounding to see our web hits per month go from 300,000 to over 1,100,000 as the contract negotiations proceeded. The web truly became a mainstream vehicle for PEF to communicate with its membership and the outside world. Add to this our massive e-mailing and mobilizing campaigns and PEF was able to communicate to its membership as never before. Watch for future improvements in member mobilizing, news dispersion, data collection, and interactivity from our web site in the coming year.

PEF continues to enjoy very low per minute phone costs of 6.8 cents per minute for 800 and long distance calls through the prior year’s contract with AT&T. We’ve recently expanded our T1 services to meet the bandwidth requirements of our data services and to provide more lines for our phone system. Videoconferencing continues to be available at all field offices as well as PEF headquarters. Usage continues to grow as staff become more accustomed to using the system.

MIS has accomplished all this despite a change in half our staff, where our previous Director and Computer Programmer left PEF to pursue other opportunities. MIS remains a four-person department comprised of the MIS Director, an Information Systems Technician, a Systems Analyst and a Coordinator. Our goals are to continue and improve on MIS’ past leadership and service. Our core objective is to facilitate the transmission of information in all its various forms to meet the needs of the organization and its membership as efficiently and effectively as possible. We now have the technology and know-how to accomplish this. We welcome the opportunity to continually meet and exceed the needs, demands, and challenges that will surely arise to best serve our membership.