Information Technology Report

Following a series of departmental reports I'm sharing with you all, our IT director, Al Quinn, shared his report regarding what is the city's smallest department. IT consists of Al and an on-call employee Chad, who also works in the engineering department. Together, they keep the city running by fixing any and all technical issues. Ask any department head and they can tell you how important these two guys are to keeping everything working.

I work closely with Al in the technology committee that I asked the city to form. We've worked with and updated the software at the electric department, which by the way will start allowing people to pay their electric bill online in about a month through the website http://www.starkvilleelectric.com (the website isn't up just yet, should be within a month)

We also made a major update to the software used by the police and courts. This is important because the old software would sometimes crash every other day, stopping court entirely and resulting in people having to wait and time lost. The new software also works with the computer units we're retrofitting our police cars with. They allow them to pull up information on vehicles and also records the events during the officer's time in his car. Video recordings are valuable because there have been incidents where a person may claim an officer treated them bad, but with the video evidence that can be proved or laid to rest conclusively and without the time, trouble, and potential legal proceeds that previously plagued the department.

Click here for a copy of Al's presentation if you're interested and please feel free to email me if you'd like to learn more about our committee or have any suggestions.