County Switches Email to Google to Speed Up Workflow

Over the weekend, nearly 6,000 Anne Arundel County employees had their email inboxes upgraded from a service dating back to the 1980s up to the modern day.

Anne Arundel County Executive Laura Neuman said the shift to Google's Mail service is a tremendous upgrade, and will ultimately increase efficiency and decrease overall costs.

"This is one of the very first steps in making Anne Arundel County Government more efficient, and bringing it into the 21st century," Neuman said.

Neuman said she gets hundreds of emails a day, and using the county's previous mail servers, experienced lag when doing basic operations such as opening or deleting emails. Multiply that lag across the 5,700 employees that use the county's email servers, and it's a frightening amount of time wasted, she said.

"If you can imagine, 5,700 people all struggling with the same issue, day after day," she said.

The county had previously contracted computer programmers trained in a technologically ancient language to ensure the aging servers could still operate. 

"We were employing COBOL programmers, paying them for maintenance of an outdated system built in a language that hasn't been taught since the 1980s," she said.

Now that the county has offloaded that work to Google's servers, they stand to save "hundreds of thousands" of dollars a year, Neuman said, noting that the numbers haven't been tallied yet.

The technology sea change is one of many that Neuman is targeting during her term in office. She said some county department computers are still running on DOS-based operating systems, which haven't been mainstream since the late 1980s.

"Every department will get a complete overhaul," she said. "Increased efficiency can come from a very small investment in technology."

When Neuman was appointed as executive in February, she said her office had no computer. Among other improvements to the Arundel Center, Neuman has been focusing on upgrading and replacing the existing technology, much of which she said was from the 1980s.