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County IT director says ERP project is on schedule; IBM agreement in final legal review
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Summary
Vigo Ford, Snohomish County IT director, told the committee the county has selected Oracle as its ERP platform and reached a final agreement with IBM as systems integrator; phase 0 work is expected to begin in April with multi‑year implementation to follow.
Vigo Ford, director of the Snohomish County Department of Information Technology, told the Public Infrastructure & Conservation Committee on March 17 that the county’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) project is "on track, we're on schedule and on budget." Ford said the county selected Oracle as the ERP platform in 2024 and has reached a final agreement with IBM to serve as systems integrator; the contract is in final legal review.
The project follows a cloud‑first, single‑platform strategy designed to consolidate separate HR and finance systems. Ford said the county plans to kick off a phase‑0 set of preparatory tasks in April, begin heavier design and implementation work over the summer and expects core finance and HCM modules to take roughly 12 months for finance with staggered human capital management work thereafter. "The actual implementation work itself... will start over the summer, and continue on for frankly 2 to 3 years after that," Ford said.
Ford described a broad engagement and training plan: a steering committee, an ERP project office, communities of practice, regular leadership forums, town halls with Oracle and IBM, office hours for county employees and roughly 40 Oracle University licenses already in use to familiarize staff with the system. He emphasized change management and data foundation work, and warned that the county must integrate many existing applications rather than expecting wholesale replacement.
On procurement and risk, Ford said the contract with IBM is in final legal review and that the county has put an emphasis on selecting a systems integrator and writing a statement of work that reflects the project's complexity. "This is the most complex IT project any organization can ever do," he told the committee. He also flagged information‑security and interoperability as key priorities tied to the platform choice.
Council members asked for measurable tracking of expected operational savings. Vice Chair Dunn asked whether the project team will capture before‑and‑after metrics for redundancy reduction and staff time savings; Ford said the county’s operational excellence team will document current baselines and future savings, noting that the level of precision will vary by department. Ford said outside agencies that work with the county have been invited to community forums, and some have attended leadership sessions.
Ford said the project team will bring the IBM contract package to the council "hopefully by the end of this month" and that continued updates to the committee would follow as the legal review and funding approvals proceed.
