Information Technology Advisory Committee - Aug 17th, 2017
Schools. Thompson construction is running behind schedule, and may not finish until (up to) one month after the start of the school year starts. Construction on the Gibbs is just beginning.
Capital Budget Requests. The school's PC replacement request is currently a placeholder. More discussion is needed on the school side, to iron out details. Most of the uncertainty involves the high school. The school needs to make a number of software decisions before we'll be able to make hardware decisions.
Copiers. Ricoh has a system called "follow me", which allows one to send jobs to any printer, and the job doesn't print until the submitter swipes a card on the printer. This system is very useful for preventing PII from being left in the printer's output tray.
HHS Veterans Scanning Project. There are two components to this project: (1) scanning paper records and redacting personal information, and (2) setting up a Kiosk in Veteran's plaza. HHS has a $15k appropriation for scanning but needs to get a quote for the kiosk. This project will have storage implications (for storage of scanned data).
Library Tech Refresh. The library's technology refresh request appears consistent with prior year's request.
We have a discussion about digitally signing documents. What tools are available? In terms of state law, what constitutes a legal digital signature. Is a managed document signing workflow sufficient, or does one need a cryptographic signature? There are several places in the town's IT systems where digital signatures would be useful. We should look at this issue after capital budget season.
Town Conference Rooms. It would be nice to improve presentation facilities in the town's conference rooms. Each conference room should have wireless network connectivity, and either a projector or a TV screen. Many committees have A/V presentation needs. There are approximately seven meeting rooms to outfit. This might turn into a capital request for next year.
New Capital Budgeting Software. We currently use three systems to process capital budget requests: an intake form, Microsoft access (to store data collected from the intake form), and Excel (for creating charts). There's manual effort involved in moving between each of these systems. An integrated system would be better, and make the process more streamlined. We don't have a preferred vendor in this area; it would be good to determine what system offerings are out there. It would also be nice if such a system could be used for managing operational budgets. Munis has some budging facilities, but not much for doing budget reports.