Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 42)

writers for police officers, and a supervisory control and data acquisition system for city-owned water towers. All of those projects were great additions, but there was still much work to be done to provide staff with the resources and information necessary to keep pace with the growth. We used several factors to help choose our solutions and the route we would take to get there, but the “big three” were accessibility, scalability and centralization. Another important factor in the equation was cost, or in our case, future cost avoidance. With the amount of growth the city was experiencing and the demands on IT, the operations had to change to effectively manage everything. This led to our first initiative, the Citywide Thin-Client Project. Hutto Trims Down When this project was implemented in 2006, thin clients were relatively nonexistent in municipal governments, especially at the level we’d hoped to use them. Thin clients are trimmed-down computers that run a limited operating system and lack moving parts. The benefits were nearly endless — low cost, longer life expectancy, fewer failures, significantly less power consumption and centralized administration, to name a few. Another part of the thin-client project was the implementation of Microsoft Terminal Services, which moves all applications off the workstation to the servers in the data room and provides anywhere/anytime access to the PHOTO COURTESY OF TIM HOWELL As we move forward, I see many great things ahead: open government; greater use of Web 2.0; and more collaboration among the city, county, state and feds. city’s computer system and applications, while reducing the technology staff’s workload. This gave mobile workers — such as police officers — full capabilities in the field, eliminating the need to return to the office to fill out reports and check e-mail. The project added four new servers, but hardware support on workstations has all but gone away. System maintenance has been significantly reduced. Also, since thin clients use less power, they can be classified as green technology, which leaves the door open for future remote work force initiatives. The thin-client project was a drastic transformation from the way things had been done before. The project received a Technology Excellence Award from the Texas Association of Governmental Information Technology Managers in April 2007. During the project, all data was centralized and Hutto entered into an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. This agreement was a six-year contract that was prenegotiated by the state Department of Information Resources. This laid the groundwork for future projects. Before I came onboard, Hutto had mostly worked with outside consultants and lacked a clearly defined technology vision. After the thin-client project, I spent the next 18 months fine-tuning the network. We formed a Technology Committee with representation from every city department and created a list of projects that needed to be done. When fiscal 2008 rolled around, we had developed a long list of items, including a phone system, networking equipment, additional terminal servers, a city Web site redesign, firewall and data connection between city facilities. All these projects have been completed, but the new phone system and the Web site redesign are particularly noteworthy. New Phone System Hutto’s rapid growth had stretched the city’s previous digital phone system to the limit, and support was an issue because the staff lacked the expertise to maintain the system. Tim Howell accepts an award from Dale Harwell, former president of the Texas Association of Governmental Information Technology Managers. [42]

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009

Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009 Contents Contributors Introduction Tense Times Insider Threat Twenty and Counting Labor of Love Putting Process Into Play Crossover Appeal FastGov CIO Central Security Adviser CIOs Pluck BlackBerry Phones From the Field Straight Talk

Public CIO - December 2008/January 2009

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