Los Angeles County Assessor modernizes with Oracle Cloud
The US’s largest local assessment agency turns to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to extend a modernization project and move off on-premises technology.
“One of my top goals coming into this office was to make sure that we provide public service that is both effective and cost-efficient. This milestone of the project with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is our biggest success to date. I hope this lays the groundwork for future modernization projects in other counties and departments.”
Business challenges
The Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor reviews more than 400,000 property documents and completes 500,000 real property appraisals each year. Until five years ago, this was handled in a paper-based environment using 40-year-old “green screen” technology on a mainframe computer that required manuals to look up archaic coding language.
The county performed an exhaustive search to find readily available software to meet California’s complex assessment requirements, but came up empty. So the assessor’s office embarked on a five-phase modernization project to develop an in-house custom application, with Oracle Consulting as its technology partner. They were looking for an agile approach from the start—iterating, fixing defects, improving functionality, tackling technical debt, and adding enhancements every three months.
The decision to move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure midway through the project had huge benefits, including cost savings, better performance, flexibility, and resource efficiencies. We could focus our attention on application development rather than infrastructure requirements and maintenance.
Why Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor Chose Oracle
By moving its custom Assessor Modernization Project app to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the Los Angeles assessor was able to benefit from cost savings, better performance, and flexibility. OCI also allowed the county to keep its focus on app development, and let Oracle take over infrastructure requirements and maintenance.
Results
Working virtually in a COVID-19 environment, the assessor’s team and Oracle Consulting moved the app, along with 80 servers, from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Exadata Cloud Service seamlessly. Data processing jobs that once took up to 8 hours are now processed in half the time. Risk has been mitigated with disaster recovery. The app’s users are seeing faster page loads than ever before for a better user experience.
This shift to cloud is also dramatically improving usability for the public. The assessor has been a leading technology innovator in California, not only opening access to its app for other departments in Los Angeles, but also looking to share the platform with other counties in the state. The team plans to move off its antiquated mainframe by using the app to generate all of their annual property assessments.
Partners
Oracle Consulting partnered with Los Angeles to migrate its custom Assessor Modernization Project application.