IT director agrees to changes

FROM B1 the City Council better evaluate the city’s spending on technology and help them understand why the technology budget has risen so rapidly in recent years.

The audit made seven formal recommendations. Jonathan Behnke, the city’s director of Information Technology, agreed to implement each of them by July 1.

He said new contracts with outside technology vendors will help the city implement the needed changes.

“The new contracts provided an opportunity to modernize, automate and centralize various aspects of information technology service delivery,” he said in response to the audit.

Centralizing employee requests for technology help will make it easier for the city to track how many requests it receives, how quickly those requests are resolved and emerging trends in the types of requests submitted. Multiple systems have previously handled requests, so it has not been possible for the city to track and analyze them all in one place.

The new contracts replace previous deals from 2012. The new contracts are with Zensar Technologies for “enterprise compute and workplace services” and with CGI for support services and “application development and maintenance.”

City technology services are handled by more than 70 information technology workers and 45 public safety radio engineers and support staff.

The city’s technology system spans 31 departments, more than 300 locations and more than 11,500 city employees.

A survey of city workers last April found that 67 percent consider city information technology services above average or excellent, while 21 percent deemed them average. Just over 8 percent of workers rated them below average or poor.

The survey showed that 90 percent of workers requested technology help in the previous 12 months, and that 74 percent had made multiple requests.

The audit noted that city efforts should become more efficient at solving problems. More than 22 percent of requests were “generally not fully resolved” on the first try, and sometimes it took “unreasonably long” to resolve issues.