Regarding one of dozens of topics discussed in a city commission work session Thursday afternoon, Ashland Police Department’s Ryan Conley and Adam Daniels pulled back the curtain on how the city is handling IT issues to make for more efficient operations.
“Kudos to these two guys; absolutely stellar job,” Grubb said.
Michelle Veach, the city’s finance director, said the city previously paid $1.1 million to VC3, an outside IT company, “with only negligible improvements.”
With Conley and Daniels steering the IT ship, Veach estimated nearly $900,000 in savings already, “and some gifts keep on giving.”
“This took us out of the dark ages,” Veach said. “Improved technology with these savings … and helped on operational cost reduction.”
Conley said Grubb tasked the duo with elevating the performance of IT infrastructure and enhancing efficiency.
“We’ve consolidated a lot of things,” Conley said. “We’ve learned ways to basically take all the different departments and IT structures and merge them into one. It brought us a lot of value because we could consolidate all those licenses into one and we’re operating on one system.”
Conley said they’re on pace for between $300,000 and $400,000 worth of savings in annual recurring costs that accompany security systems, cloud systems and software.
Daniels has taken the lead on hardware.
“When we started last year, we started off as basically getting Internet to all city sites,” Daniel said. The plan was to start with 18 sites. They’ve completed 15 of the current goal of 20, with “major ones out of the way” such as the city building, police department and fire department.
“We looked at infrastructure, the network, the backbone of everything,” he said.
Conley said three parks department staff members “saved the day” in terms of running wire. Tackling that task alone resulted in about $185,000 of savings, he said.
“Instead of paying 15 people, we’re paying one at a much reduced rate because we’re doing the most work once it’s set up,” Conley said.
The city has experienced significant cost reductions in cellular billing. He said the phone system is working well, too. Once a call comes in to the city, the goal is for residents to wait less than 60 seconds.
“They can see the metrics, and they’re knocking it out of the park on that,” Conley said.
The IT team is avoiding signing contracts when possible, “and so far that’s dramatically benefited the city.”
One major challenge is “tackling ISPs (Internet service providers),” he said.
The city continues to rely on Kinetic and Spectrum, which are “still going strong,” Conley said.
Conley said one example of improvement is with keys. Instead of department heads having multiple keys, for instance, “you now have one key,” he said, specifically referring to Police Chief Todd Kelley.
“It’s the little things,” Conley said. “You don’t have to change locks because somebody lost a key.”
He said they’re trying to mitigate risks as they move forward.
“We’ve moved a lot of hardware,” he said. “Adam has been moving fast.”
The team is aiming for “the best and latest technology all the time,” Conley said.
He said the next big investment is the Internet, as the city is using more cloud storage than ever before.
Commissioner DJ Rymer asked about cybersecurity.
While Conley couldn’t divulge too many details, he said, “there’s some expense there. … Michelle (Veach) keeps us in check. We’ve had a green light all the way.”
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