2004 Management Information Systems
Annual Professional Award
Carole McKinney

Carole McKinney
Written by: Sam Ferguson

Statement of why Applicant deserves Award:

            Over the last nine months Carole, as the application supervisor, has been a part of over 80 different application projects.  This equates to approximately a project being completed every other day.  This type of application output and the coordination, cooperation and user relationship interface effort that Carole exhibits is why I believe Carole McKinney is deserving of this award.

Major Project(s)/Accomplishments:

            Carole and her team, as stated above, have done many things over the last nine months.  Carole has been singularly responsible for the following efforts:

Manager's Follow Up Database:

            This effort involved the Village Manager's office and specifically designing a system that allows the Manager and his assistants the ability to log and follow up on agreed to staff assignments.  The system logs the assignment and then based on a target date sends reminders to the assignee that the Manager still needs a result.  While this system is mainly a tool for the Manager's office it is instrumental in retaining assignment history and achieved results.  This system assists the Manager in keeping track of all of his delegated work and he uses this to make sure that credit is due to those who get the work completed as mutually agreed upon.

 
On-Line Fire and Police General Orders and Emergency Operations Manual:

                        This was really three separate applications but the outcome for all of them was similar.  The Police and Fire departments had the need to post all of their general orders and SOP's on line.  Carole was the analyst responsible for putting this together and she took the electronic files and through the use of Lotus Notes programmed it so that the officer and firemen could read their respective documents and be given credit for having read them.  The Fire and Police require all of their personnel to have read these documents and the system made it very easy for the men and women to read these documents with the  system recording who had complied with the directive.  The information on compliance is readily available for Police and Fire command staff.  The on-line systems save each department countless man hours of manual documentation and follow up.

                        The emergency operations manual was a similar project in that it enabled the emergency operations manual document to be better shared and used among emergency operations staff and personnel.  This on-line version is available to select operations personnel and can only be edited by the department chiefs with read only access for others involved.  Again, this effort has saved emergency operations personnel numerous man-hours of work and future enhancements to the emergency plan will be made more easily as a result of the system.

  E-Commerce Phase II:    

            This was a major project and one that has had fantastic results.  The Village of Schaumburg, like many other agencies, has been working on and delivering services via the web for some time.  In the past we had enabled on-line parking ticket payments, garage sale permits and water bill payments.  All of these efforts have proven to be successful in their own right and Carole has played a role with these.

            This last year Carole began work on phase II of this effort with vehicle sticker registration.  The Village of Schaumburg takes in over $1 million dollars in vehicle stickers annually.  This effort involves countless hours of Finance department personnel time as they wait on the many counter customers purchasing their vehicle stickers.  Similarly, the Village pays thousands of dollars to an outsource agency to deal with the hundreds of mailed in vehicle sticker renewals.
The on-line renewal system was implemented just this past March and has been extremely successful.  The system has been taking in approximately $2000 a day electronically which accounts for over 100 renewed stickers a day.  Every electronic renewal that comes in saves the Village personnel time and or outsource costs.   To be specific every web renewal saves 73 cents over the lock box cost or conservatively $2200 per year based on the estimated 3000 renewals that went to the web instead of the lock box.  Additionally, the web renewals have saved the Village a conservative 50 plus man hours of counter work, thus easing Finance's customer service burden. When all is said and done the on-line vehicle sticker renewal option for our residents will collect $110,000 or 11% of the annual vehicle sticker renewal revenues and will have saved the Village hard dollars and precious personnel time.

 Other Work Related Activities:  

            Carole participates in the annual Village  Heart Walk and United Way campaigns and has taken a leadership role by being the heart walk liaison person for our department.
 
Education:  

            Carole has a B.S. in Computational Mathematics from Eastern Illinois University, 1985.  and a M.S. in Information Systems from Roosevelt University, 1992.

 Experience:  

            Carole's experience began as a Programmer/Analyst at Northwestern University Cancer Center 1985 to 1988.  There she developed systems to track data for cancer and AIDS research studies, as well as did computer operations and training.  She was promoted to Senior Programmer/Analyst while she was there.  Later she was a Programmer/Analyst at Unisys Corp., 1988 to 1996.  There she developed systems to manage warehouse operations and spare parts inventory and distribution, including parts planning and procurement.  She  was promoted to Senior Programmer/Analyst and then Business Systems Analyst while there.  She then left Unisys and became Project Manager at Ameritech Cellular Systems, 1996 to 1998.  There she managed projects for systems that supported the Ameritech Cellular stores and for cellular billing.

            Carole came to the Village in 1998 as a Programmer/Analyst and was promoted to Applications Development Supervisor in 2000.

Work Related Honors/Awards/Recognitions:  

            Over this past year Carole has received numerous "atta person"  accolades.  Specifically, she has been awarded 2 Village of Schaumburg Extra Awards.  The Extra Award is given to Village employees who have gone above and beyond their normal duties in service to customers.  These awards are especially gratifying to IT folks because these awards are recommended from the users that are served.

Outside Community Activities:  

            Carole is currently her son's Cub Scout Pack Activities Chairperson and has been a den leader in the past.  She has served on the school PTA board for four years and is currently the PTA newsletter editor.  She is a member of Chicago Women in Technology where she participates with other technology female professionals.  It is here where she became involved with e-mentoring.  This is where she is paired up with a female junior high student at a charter school in Chicago and she writes back and forth with her student and tries to serve as a mentor to her.  She has been doing this community involved effort  for almost two years.