The press release is titled Kansas Legislature Selects ISYS Search Software to Supply Easy-to-Use Search Technology for its Electronic Committee Project. I’m certain that the Kansas Legislature needs a good system to pull together the many records of the legislation process and ISYS is a well known name that has been around for a long time, although this is, perhaps, but a successor owner to the original company.
But how are software applications chosen by governmental agencies, and how did ISYS get chosen in this case? All the press release tells us is:
” . . . by way of a colleague’s recommendation, the committee selected ISYS:web to supply this functionality.”
I hope it was a colleague well versed in database and full text searching technology, but the Press Release doesn’t say. I’m sure ISYS will do a fine job for Kansas, and if the information is available through the Web, which I suspect it will be, we’ll all get a chance to test it.
UPDATE
One of the folks from ISYS notes:
My understanding is the web team became aware of us courtesy of Val Carter of the Kansas Revisor of Statutes. The KRS has been a customer of ISYS:desktop since November 2002, and Val referred ISYS to the people in charge of evaluating Web-based technologies for the entire legislature.
That certainly seems like a reasonable approach to selecting a database. Not only word of mouth advertising, but presumably the Kansas Revisor of Statutes has developed some ISYS expertise that may prove useful in implementing the Kansas Legislature system. Further, the computers used by the two, but related, state agencies, could even learn to talk with each other, because they speak the same [computer] language.
Now if only the CIA and the FBI could learn the same language.
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