Nationally, Dallas is viewed as a key high-tech centre. The high-tech industry is, in fact, growing faster in Silicon Prairie than in Silicon Valley. Dallas's high-tech sector - made up of the data processing, semiconductor and telecommunications industries - is roughly three times as big as that of its high-tech neighbour, Austin. The region accounts for nearly half of the state's technology revenue and more than 40 per cent of Texas's high-tech jobs. The "Telecom Corridor", in the suburb of Richardson, boasts over 600 companies and the largest concentration of telecom companies in the country. Dallas is now the nation's fifth-largest cybercity in high-tech employment and the largest cybercity in Texas, according to a study by the American Electronics Association.

When it comes to the public sector, however, Big D isn't so big. Help! The city's 911 system has never been upgraded.

In Governing's report-card rating of 35 cities, Dallas was one of only four to score a D, joining much smaller cities, such as Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbus, Ohio, at the bottom of the list. And not only do independent observers give the city's IT the thumbs down, so do city hall insiders. "Essentially the city of Dallas is behind the times with its technology largely because of its lack of investment in new technology and a lack of leadership to provide the technology necessary to the city," says Robert Melton, the city's former auditor who resigned last summer. McFarland replaced former IS director David Morgan, who had been with the city for 16 years, and filled a spot that had been run by interim directors during the Y2K critical months of December 1998 through April 1999.

Just how outdated is the city's technology? The key applications run on the LINC operating system and mainframe computers. The police, city attorney, fire and water departments, and financial management system each have their own local area networks, all 5 to 8 years old, and another, equally old LAN serves all other department systems. Installed in 1985, the city's 911 system has never been upgraded, and it and the 311 system, installed in 1995, must be replaced. Telephones run on an ancient analogue Centrex system, and there are more than 5000 manufacturer-discontinued phone sets for which parts are no longer available. "The probability for failure increases as the systems get older and older," McFarland says.

Forget integration and standardisation. The city has eight database programs, five e-mail systems, six separate large data networks and dozens of smaller networks. Five word-processing systems are used. PCs are mixed with Macintosh computers as are operating systems that range from Windows 3.0 to 98. Maintaining nonstandardised equipment and software configurations for the 6000 data users and 8500 voice users in the city's 36 departments is "literally impossible", McFarland says, and costs the city millions of dollars annually. Dallas offers no e-government services whatsoever, and the city's Web site, with its slogan, "Dallas, the city that works: diverse, vibrant and progressive", is little more than a city hall vanity page.

But McFarland insists he can turn all this around - and in record time - putting Dallas's public-sector IT on par with that of Austin, San Francisco and Boston, which won with a solid B ranking from Governing magazine (see "The Boston IT Party"). "We'll be ahead of all of them by the time we're through," he boasts.