Water Resources Division
CPAC Home Page
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Water Resources Division |
TO: |
CPAC |
THROUGH: |
Bob Pierce, Acting Chief, GIPO |
FROM: |
Chuck O'Hara |
SUBJECT: |
Submission of a cost recovery proposal for concurrencee |
This is a revised proposal (01/15/00) for a method of cost recovering dollars for support of internally authored software. The proposal was re-written using the comments garnered from the first CPAC review. The CPAC review ended with three "yes" votes and three "no" votes. The "yes" votes were all conditional on changes being made to the proposal. The no votes were essentially unconditional. This proposal is again submitted for consideration by CPAC. We will have discussion and comment at the next CPAC meeting. It is important to our Field offices we determine a good and logical method to enable sufficient support of our internally authored, highly transferable software.
Thank you for considering this innovative cost recovery method. Please send your email-based vote (approval or disapproval and comments) on whether to support the proposed cost-recovery experiment to the CPAC chairperson.
The purpose of this email is to propose a method for cost recovering maintenance costs for the software application BasinSoft. BasinSoft is a GIS-based suite of programs developed to utilize digital cartographic data to quantify 27 selected morphometric characteristics and optional area-weighted characteristics for a drainage basin. BasinSoft was developed by Craig Harvey through a Technology Transfer project and the application is currently in use at 28 WRD offices. A cost recovery is proposed such that sites will be asked to provide $300 per site for annual maintenance of the BasinSoft application. Sites participating in the cost-recovery will be entitled to the following products and services:
A list of sites requesting licensed use of the application will be compiled and maintained by the developer. The list would be included for cost recovery as part of the normal annual DIS cost recovery, and BasinSoft would be made available to the field as a self-supporting application.
This proposal cost recovery will provide valuable insight about how our user community views the value of in-house developed software. The software that we develop in-house is sometimes highly transferable to our other offices and the support is all-too-frequently only provided on an ad hoc basis. By supporting this proposal, it will be possible to evaluate a progressive, new method for supporting our internal applications by allowing the software's use to determine its own level of support. The economic principle of the "availability of a substitution product" should be a contributing factor in accessing whether a particular software application should be used or not -- if a better, cheaper commercially available software product meets our needs, we should use it. If COTS software solutions are not available that meet our needs, we should have a mechanism for supporting necessary non-corporate internal applications. This proposal addresses that need.
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