Throughout it all, ITD employees stayed on target with dayto- day system development and enhancement requests.
ISDBIS was a reliable workhorse. But with changes in technology escalating at about the speed of Hurricane Katrina, ISDBIS was no longer state of the art. Information options for Postal Inspectors, analysts, and everyone else in the agency with “a need to know” were expanding, and the now-archaic database system with the nearly unpronounceable name had lost its relevance. Chief Postal Inspector Lee Heath knew he had to bring his agency into the 21st Century. The only way the Inspection Service could successfully accomplish its goals—without a big investment in “people power” and other resources—would be to build new technology that could boost productivity. ISDBIS was cumbersome and expensive to maintain, and a replacement was overdue. Yet obstacles loomed for Information Technology Division (ITD) staff. Year 2000 issues demanded major overhauls to bring Inspection Service systems in compliance. Then came 9-11, followed by several bouts of anthrax, and ricin trailed close behind. Throughout it all, ITD employees stayed on target with dayto- day system development and enhancement requests. Enter the U.S. Postal Service’s IT office with bad news: IT vendor charges were surging, cost cuts were the order of the day, and job loads for postal data centers needed to be better distributed. Much of the Postal Service’s operating system and scheduling software that ran ISDBIS was on the chopping block. When the agency announced that ISDBIS would be moved to another data center, ITD knew it was time for a change.