As people continue to move to some of the fastest-growing cities and counties in Texas — several ranking in the top 10 fastest-growing in the nation — IT departments must look forward with an eye to customer service, infrastructure and budget.
“Every city is in some transition or some continuum,” Ernest Pages of Sciens Consulting recently told Industry Insider — Texas.
“You might have a little itty-bitty city, like somewhere near Austin or something,” he said. “Lo and behold, overnight, there’s a 3,000-home development coming, and they’re needing permitting. Suddenly, the financial system can’t handle utility billing. It’s an explosion that happens at this point, and the folks don't have enough resources people-wise or experience-wise … to keep up with it. It has a huge impact on the whole IT shop.”
In essence, growth is a technology driver, and smaller municipalities are looking for assistance with that change.
Several IT leaders spoke about challenges and the strategies they used to address them during April’s Texas Association of Governmental IT Managers conference.
Challenges include:
- Staff shortfalls
- Cyber threats
- Budget constraints
- Working with multiple vendors, products and platforms
Strategies include:
- Using a consultancy to assist with various documentation and planning, then presenting it to the city council
- Moving services to the cloud, including threat detection and cloud backups
- Negotiating upfront pricing for subscription costs, always on the rise
Pages’ consultancy provides strategic planning, succession planning and staff planning to municipalities. Pages said his group generally focuses on cities of 40,000-60,000 population that are growing rapidly. Over time, they’ve assisted municipalities including Allen, now about 112,000 residents, and Waco, at about 144,000.
With a shortage of IT workers and a “coming tsunami of retirements,” leaders must have strategic and staff planning in place to accommodate this growth. IT leadership needs to document budgets, time lines, resources and staff needs.
Municipalities also need IT managers who can translate needs to the city administration, which holds the purse strings. It takes a technologist who can speak to the business side, and there is often a gap between those skills, Pages said.
