The Lower Hudson Regional Information Center (LHRIC) is a non -profit, consortium providing educational and administrative technology services to 62 school districts in Westchester, Putnam, and Rockland counties. The LHRIC is one of twelve Regional Information Centers in New York State and is part of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) system.

The LHRIC has an annual budget of more than $25 million dollars and employs more than 170 Information Technology professionals. It provides a comprehensive menu of cost effective and high quality services including: Technical services and support; Internet access; regional Internet filtering; test scoring; data warehousing; financial and student information systems; staff development; planning; project management; and systems integration.

The LHRIC, while offering numerous quality products and services, has established an exemplary reputation for commitment and caring.

The Lower Hudson Regional Information Center recognizes its mission to assist school districts in meeting and exceeding the New York State Standards and Assessments and to enable school districts to administer and manage their schools efficiently and effectively. To this end, the LHRIC is maintaining its recently developed strategic direction to focus on "people systems", as well as adopting a new strategy, the transferring and developing services which take advantage of the potential of the Internet. These two strategic directions will enable us to accelerate the development of local school district capacity to handle the challenges of a rapidly evolving educational and technological environment and transform our business models to allow schools to work with us anytime and anywhere. Newly developed local capacity and web services will be targeted at curriculum and assessment, staff development, and the technologies necessary for schools to meet the NYS Standards.

The LHRIC recognizes that as school technology needs continue to grow; its capacity to meet the heightened demand will be stretched beyond anything we see today. To meet these increased technology demands by only increasing our staff, is short sighted and expensive.

We believe in a long term strategy of building local technology capacity in our schools. Second, the LHRIC, with assistance from Synthesis, needs to invest in the internal re-design of service delivery processes and accompany the re-design with new technology tools that enable each employee at the LHRIC to be more efficient and productive. Finally, we need to leverage the potential of the Internet by transferring as many of our existing and new services to this medium as possible. This strategy will insure that both the schools and the LHRIC will be in a position to handle the heightened demand and, beyond that, allow us to drive down costs, increase customer satisfaction, and produce an educational environment where students meet and exceed the NYS Standards.

The LHRIC does not intend to institutionalize BOCES' services at their present levels. As an organization we need to be leading and changing to meet the needs of an evolving market. As competencies become exportable to local districts we will export those competencies and redesign our services.

The LHRIC will maintain its strategic role in recognizing emerging technologies that have educational applications. Our Research and Development commitments have spawned a number of new initiatives that have been beneficial for schools in our region. Maintaining this strategic position on behalf of schools in our region will insure technology investments in emerging technologies by local school districts is funding well spent.

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