Michigan’s largest county, Wayne County is home to more than 1.75 million people and includes the city of Detroit. Since Winfield became CIO, the Department of Technology has taken steps to replace legacy infrastructure with more efficient cloud-based solutions and is looking at other opportunities to move systems to the cloud. A land records management cloud is already being used in the Register of Deeds, and a cloud-based ERP system also is being considered.
“We really look at the cloud to not only provide the core functionality we need to provide the services we have as a county, but also to give us the benefits of reduced IT support and a lower cost of implementing the systems,” Winfield said last September.
Cutting costs is a key consideration for Wayne County, whose finances secured an emergency declaration from Gov. Rick Snyder last year to allow the county executive to impose a recovery plan to bring things back into balance. With these plans now underway, Winfield said the county is on the upswing and the future looks promising.
For example, the county is moving toward better data analysis of vital services to make them more efficient. Winfield sees the effort to measure services like public health and roads as a way to improve government for constituents.
“We’re starting a dialog on how we measure outcomes of what we’re doing as a government,” he said. “How do we provide services? What data do we need to derive from those services to understand [whether] we are making an impact?”
Under Winfield’s leadership, the county has also extended outreach efforts to its 43 communities as part of a regional government collaboration forum.
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