Government Technology and the Center for Digital Government* recently shared the annual list of Digital Counties winners, which included seven Florida counties. Stay tuned to Industry Insider — Florida for the remaining counties coming in the next week.
Continuing this year’s list is Polk County, which took eighth place in the 500,000-999,999 population category.
In Polk County, the IT division is using technology to bridge the gap between innovation and solution delivery. For example, in the last 12 months, the county has completed a project to migrate its public-facing website to a cloud provider, allowing IT staff to focus on application development and building an accessible, modern website. Other notable efforts include creating a more transparent, public-facing budget dashboard to improve its overall budget process and piloting a project to replace legacy PBX phone systems with a new call-center-as-a-service platform. The latter project was a migration of all on-premises call centers to a cloud-hosted solution, resulting in a collaboration between the Board of County Commissioners, Tax Collector’s Office, Sheriff’s Office, State Attorney Office, Public Defender’s Office and the Clerk of Courts.
Among its challenges, Polk County cites implementing state-mandated cybersecurity policies and training along with understanding how to govern cloud-based software agreements effectively. To address the former, the county recently met with its current cyber insurance provider, risk management division, attorney’s office and IT leads for other constitutional offices to better understand what roles these groups would play during a potential event and how cyber insurance protects the county altogether. Notable efforts in cloud computing governance include creating a framework to provide a secure, supported operational environment for the county and adding governance to the county’s strategic plan to better execute software agreements.
*Government Technology and the Center for Digital Government are both part of e.Republic, Industry Insider — Florida's parent company.
