Bryan Weis

Chief Architect and Development Manager, Lehigh County

Biography

Bryan Weis

Bryan C. Weis is the Chief Architect and Development Manager for the County of Lehigh in northeastern Pennsylvania. Bryan serves as a division head for the Information Technology Applications Group, part of the management team that includes CIO Troy Stone and Computing and Networking Infrastructure Director Bob Kennedy. The trio serves the County under contract from Computer Aid, Inc., a global IT services firm that is currently managing active engagements with over 100 Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies around the world.

Prior to his work at the County, Bryan provided business analysis consulting and custom database application development for more than 200 firms in the legal, entertainment, and non-profit sectors. During this tenure, Bryan deployed several open source and proprietary content management systems to increase productivity and to lower the cost of operations for his clients. Bryan served on the Microsoft Visual Studio Alpha Development team, and in various corporate roles such as VP of Product Development, President and CEO for several companies. Bryan majored in Operations and Information Systems Management at Penn State University and has been delivering software solutions to customers for nearly fifteen years.

Lehigh County

Lehigh County is a county located in the Lehigh Valley region of the eastern part of the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. As of the 2000 U.S. Census, the county's population was 312,090. Its county seat is Allentown, the state's third largest city behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In addition to Allentown, the county includes the western section of the city of Bethlehem, six boroughs  and 14 townships.

The county, which was first settled around 1730, was formed in 1812 with the division of Northampton County into two counties. It is named after the Lehigh River, whose name is derived from the Delaware Indian term Lechauweki or Lechauwekink, meaning "where there are forks".

Presentation

CaseStudy = Lehigh County

Case: Lehigh County

Web project management, Conference Day #2, Thursday May 6th, 1.00 pm - 2.00 pm

Lehigh County, Penn., which serves nearly 350,000 residents in the Allentown region, needed a new public web site that would be more attractive and contain dynamic, user-maintained content to free IT staff from the business of page updates. In this session, Chief Architect and Development Manager Bryan Weis will share how he managed the implementation of open source technology to develop Lehigh County’s new web site at a fraction of the cost of proprietary alternatives, allowing staff to transition into true development rather than maintenance.

The functional requirements demanded by an extensive enterprise community are often at odds with available resources and funding, especially in government situations. After debating his options, Weis chose to implement the largest and most successful open source project in the Microsoft Community - DotNetNuke, a Web Content Management Platform that has an ecosystem of more than 8,000 free and affordable add-on modules and skins. Weis chose this low-cost solution as the county’s foundation for application development, balancing an internal development staff on this new initiative while maintaining day to day operations.

Using a case study format, Weis will share insights on what it took to manage this project and what benefits the county is reaping from choosing the open source Content Management System (CMS) route.

See slides online