Information Technology Advisory Committee - Feb 16th, 2017
Article 26 work has been done. Significant town boards have been provided with town email addresses. A second wave of email provisioning is coming, for secondary boards and committees.
I give an update regarding the CCTV warrant article. The selectmen voted to form the study committee themselves, rather than move the article to town meeting.
Public safety. Town IT is working with the police department to identify systems that should be put on UPS power. The UPS would handle the brief period of time between loss of street power, and the backup generators kicking in.
Munis. All Munis modules have been upgraded to the latest version. The system's first test was the production of 1099 forms, and those forms have all been generated. Tyler Tech cashiering is a module for taking in payments. This job was formerly done by ICS. We're evaluating Munis's self-service module for payments. Eventually, we'll give residents the ability to pay town bills via credit card.
Water and Sewer. We've had our second set of demonstrations from water and sewer billing vendors. There are two components to this project. The first component is the pipeline of meter readings to usage information to bills and payments; the second component is moving utility payments into the town's general ledger. Both vendors include some level of monitoring in their basic products, but more advanced monitoring requires a separate product. It will be several months before the new system goes live.
IT budgets. The IT department has requested funds for an assistant IT director. The department will get a project manager, who's currently working in health and human services. There will also be a GIS person, who works for IT 2/3's of the time, and the DPW 1/3 of the time. We're requesting some money for Munis training and conferences. We'd also like to get involved with local Munis user groups.
School Renovations. Work on the Thompson and Ottoson renovations is ongoing.
VOIP. Our project manager is reviewing bills and building an inventory of equipment needed for a VOIP rollout. (Things like how many phones, and what features the phones need to have.)
Energy management. Energy management projects have been bubbling up. The town has hired a new person to look at efficiencies we might get, by adding more energy management facilities to town buildings.
Cable contracts. The cable advisory committee has been negotiating a contract with Comcast. We'll give them some money to remove old (unused) infrastructure, and Comcast will provide more funding to ACMI. Verizon negotiations are expected to be difficult.
State Standardized Tests. We're referring to standardized education tests like MCAS and PISA. In the past, we've given these exams on paper and pencil, but we plan to move to electronic testing. We've provisioned a set of caching servers to reduce bandwidth requirements. This project has involved extensive collaboration between the IT and school departments.
High school security assessment. There's been a lot of tagging and graffiti in the high school. We're trying to figure out how to combat this. The school is open during non-school hours, which presents a challenge.