 Welcome to Sheboygan County government working for you. My name is Adam Payne, Sheboygan County administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Tom Wagner. Tom and I have been bringing this show to you for a number of months now under his reign as chair and actually we've been doing this dating back to 2000. We've done a lot of programs and every month what we strive to do is focus on a different department, a different department head and talk about the roles and responsibilities of county government and good work being done. And today, Chris Lewinsky is with us, one of 19 department heads. Chris is our IT director. He's been in the position going almost on two years. I think you said you have a two year anniversary in June. That's correct. Yeah. So it's great to have you with us, Chris. Thanks, Adam. Good to be here. So let's get right into it. Please start with sharing with our viewers a little bit about yourself and your role as our information technology director. Sure. So I was born and raised in Wisconsin. I've lived here my entire life with the exception of four years that I did a stint in the Coast Guard but otherwise spent my entire life here. And as he stated, I've been with the county now for about two years and prior to that I was the IT director at Lakeshore Technical College. I was out there for about eight years. And I understand you're an avid bullhunter and fisherman. Yes, I do like to get outdoors as often as I can. Do you prefer to talk about bullhunting and fishing or would you rather talk about IT services? That's quite a toss up there but today I think it's IT. I think that's a good idea. The big guy over there might not be real happy with it. So let's get into it then. So IT director for nearly two years, a lot of important roles and responsibilities. How many staff do you have? What is approximately the size of your annual budget? So our IT team is a team of 10 and that includes myself. Three of those are contract employees. They provide our help desk. As far as our annual budget, it's just over $2 million on any given year. And of course that's a $2 million budget out of about $145 million annual budget for all of Sheboygan counties providing service to about 835 employees. What's the primary role and responsibilities of your department of your staff? So the mission really of our department is to safeguard all of the county's technological resources as well as provide services to all 19 of those counties. So what that means in terms of responsibilities is like I said providing a 24 by 7 help desk and maintaining all of the county's network infrastructure and software systems to keep everybody up and working. And when you say keep everyone's software systems up, I imagine a lot of our viewers have a computer at home or a laptop, but try to put that in perspective. Just how many computers and software systems are you responsible for maintaining? Sure. Yeah, sometimes it's hard to keep track of them all. The county has about 600 computers, but you know, a mixture of laptops, desktops and tablets, iPads, as well as some smart phones. As far as the number of software applications, major enterprise applications, we have roughly a dozen, but then there's upwards of 200 other smaller applications that are department specific. And very important systems, for example, emergency response, dispatch, you know, give our viewers a bit of a flavor for the importance or some examples of some of the systems you're supporting. So the one that you mentioned, public safety, that's a great example of obviously the sheriff's department and then their interaction with all the various public safety agencies within the county. It's absolutely mission critical, 24 by 7, 365 days a year. And the way that our law enforcement people use technology today is really pretty amazing. I mean, when you look at a sheriff's deputy and they're out and about in the county, patrolling the county and anywhere they are, they've got a constant feed of information. And likewise in dispatch, our dispatchers can see exactly where those officers are within the county. So there's everything from GIS mapping applications to integrations with other departments and even with the state information. So when you think about a deputy officer pulling over a motorist using that license plate information, they can get all kinds of information at their fingertips. And that's all real time. And this day and age, that's very important for officer safety. I could just add to that because a couple years ago I did ride along with a sheriff's deputy and the amount of technology that they had just within their vehicle. It was mind boggling. Yes, it was. But I have to tell you, I was with him and he needed to access it for a situation he was involved in. And it was really important that he get that information. These sheriff's deputy vehicles are starting to look like the cockpit of an airplane. They really are. Amazing what's all around them and they squeeze in into that seat with all of this IT stuff around them. And I got to believe if something's not working, you and your staff probably are pretty quick to be contacted and it's urgent. Yeah, it really is. And it is challenging because, you know, most of that information is coming over a cellular connection. And so, you know, if you're familiar with, you know, I mean cell phone connections sometimes aren't necessarily the strongest depending upon where you are. And yeah, you're absolutely correct. If something's not working and it's mission critical, we are certainly very quick to hear about it and respond to it. So let's transition into that a little bit. What are some of the key challenges that you and your staff face day in and day out? Well, the big one that you hear about in the news all the time and is not unique to Sheboygan County is IT security. And that's a full-time job in itself, just staying ahead or trying to stay ahead of all of those cyber threats and preventing the malicious attacks and data breaches that again we read far too often about in the news. And you do the best you can, but unfortunately the bad actors that are out there perpetrating these attacks, they're working just as hard, so it's an ongoing battle and you do the best you can. The other big challenge and it kind of speaks to what we were talking about with the public safety software is the degree to which these systems are integrated and depend upon each other for various data feeds. It really, it contributes to a lot of complexity and it can cause, you know, there's a lot of unforeseen circumstances that come up and when those things happen and you've got a data conflict and now you've got a system that's not operating the way it should be, that can affect operations. So I think a big challenge is trying to anticipate those complexities and those unforeseen incidents before they happen and hopefully remediate them before they become a problem. And I know you and your team have done a terrific job evaluating our system from top to bottom and identifying weaknesses and opportunities for improvement and with all question it's gotten better. You've shared with our department head team before Chris that I think it was a, within a year or two where a neighboring county had a breach in their system where it was an impact I think with how a bill may have been paid or dollars were moved and maybe just touch on that briefly. Give our viewers a flavor for what you're trying to protect the county from. Sure, so much of it has to do with, it's the simple things, you know, I mean everybody's familiar with the user name and a password and I know IT sometimes gets a bad rap because we're constantly harping on changing your password more frequently and not sharing it with others but research shows that the vast majority of data breaches are something as simple as just a compromise password. The password fell into the wrong hands, the bad actor was able to get access to a system and then like you said it could be anything from moving dollars around to maybe obtaining even a more sensitive password that gets into more sensitive information. So a lot of times it's just disclosing information that the county doesn't want shared out there whether it's a bank account or other more sensitive employee information. And last question before I turn it over to Tom, the help desk you mentioned. I know personally and I imagine most employees feel this way when you come in at the beginning of the day and you fire up that computer and you want to respond to emails or check information or perhaps write some correspondence or whatever it may be and that system is down or your computer is not working or the outlook isn't. You're not able to access your emails or whatever it is. I know personally that's not a good moment and of course we reach out to the help desk and where you have really made some nice progress is the help desk questions in the past at least years ago it could be hours if not days before you got a response. And now it seems as though your team is just right on these types of initiatives and helping get people up and going. What's happened there? How have you been so effective in improving that service? Well and I thank you for saying that. I mean we certainly understand like you said how dependent all of us are on our computers and those systems. So I don't know that we've done anything a lot different other than just utilizing better tools making sure that as those requests come in and those incidents are identified we're prioritizing them properly. We're getting them assigned to the appropriate staff members that can resolve that particular incident and just making that a top priority. We know that without those systems up and running the county can't work so we just make it a priority that you know even if we've got projects going on or other things that we're working on we understand we all have a job to do and we have to kind of sometimes drop what we're doing to take care of those issues. Thank you Chris. Thank you Adam. Chris I know you've been pretty busy the last 18 months in the IT department. There's been some big projects going on. I'm going to say a couple of them and then ask you just to respond and tell us about it because I know they have a big impact on the county. Sure. And the people we're serving. The first one would be the Ring of Fiber. That's a huge project. That was a big project. So for those of our reviewers who are not familiar with that project that was a $2.5 million project that the county engaged in with in conjunction with the city of Sheboygan and Sheboygan area school district and that was about an 18 month project that the construction was completed last fall and the end result was we've got 23 miles of underground fiber optic cable that we share with the city and the school district and what that has allowed us as the county to do is we've connected most of our facilities with that fiber optic network. It's given us a lot more bandwidth to and from the internet and because of that we've been able to share information faster as well as now start to leverage some of the opportunities that are available with cloud resources. Thank you. Next one would be the data center remodel project which is another big project. That's that is a big project and that's been going on now for a couple of years and the big push there is it's all about efficiency and and saving energy costs so we are in the process of shrinking our existing data center virtualizing a lot of our servers so we're using less energy and then because of the smaller and more efficient use of the space we're able to save a significant amount on cooling costs each year too. And when I walked through there that time you could tell all the heat that some of those machines were putting out and they obviously had to be cooled so you know when you're putting out heat and then having to cool it that's got to be expensive. It is and you know that is critical to the operation of a data center. A lot of that equipment is fairly temperature sensitive so we like to keep it at a pretty pretty consistent 70 to 72 degrees and it does take a lot of air conditioning to make that happen. Another one the IT disaster recovery project. That's another project that is has been kind of driven by our fiber optic network. In other words that was a dependency that we needed to finish first but now building the disaster recovery site we're really putting the county in a good position that if there ever were a situation where our primary data center was damaged or otherwise rendered inoperable we would be able to pretty quickly fail over to that disaster recovery site and of course keep the county working as Adam stated before. There's nothing more challenging than coming into work and finding out your computer is not working and this allows us to prevent that from happening on a larger scale. A number of these are quite costly. They are. And how do you go about when you make recommendations to different committees? How do you go about when you look to justify how much you're spending for your return relatives? That's a key point for all of our projects. Obviously it's got to make sense financially because technology is expensive and if you can't realize those efficiencies that will cause those projects to kind of pay themselves back over time it's really questionable whether or not you should undertake those but what we do is we look at what the success factors for the outcomes are and if we can show like I said a positive return on our investment and payback in a few years it's generally something that I will take to our committee and our board and recommend that we move forward with. Thanks Chris. You know another project that Chris tackled in collaboration with our finance director the past year was looking at our allocation process and of course with 19 departments 18 of them are relying on you to share well what's it going to cost for these IT services and the upgrades in IT technology and supporting these computer systems what have you and I was really pleased with the leadership you provided and drilling down into our annual budget development process and that piece that you take the lead on what will each department be charged for their IT services what's that allocation going to be and Tom as you know that's probably an area over the years we've heard some grumbling about because no one wants to be charged for maintaining their computers what have you yet it's a real cost needs to be paid Chris what did you do to improve upon that process? Sure and that was my understanding as well as that I think there was a fair amount of contention over the years and obviously there's no perfect way to address those costs that are unfortunately they're very real they're very necessary but as you stated nobody necessarily likes to pay the bill for those but I took a look at how we were calculating and it was much more it was just kind of across the board there wasn't really any weight provided to actual utilization so what I did is I took the information that we had and I started looking at basically three things you know the number of computers that any given department has the number of help desk tickets that they enter every year I mean that's a big indicator of utilization I mean some departments use our help desk extensively others not so much they're pretty much self functioning and then the last component the third component was really taking a look at some of what I would call the direct costs so there are indirect costs that are borne by everybody in our county government just because that's what it takes to keep the lights on but other departments and I think the one we talked about earlier the Sheriff's Department in particular they have some very very specialized software systems and equipment that aren't really used by anybody else in the county and so we took that into consideration when calculating their IT allocation of course there are other departments that have specialized systems and software like that too but it's much more indicative of how any given department is actually using our IT resources you know and I would just add on that too there's no scenario there that's perfect as far as allocating but I think it increases the amount of ownership that people have in that part of the IT I don't know if you want it well and that was I think that's going to be one of those maybe unintended consequences but I had the same thought that when I revised the IT allocation from what it was my hope is that it will also cause department heads and department managers to start to think about it because when you see that bill this is what we're paying for IT services every year and some of these are expenses that we can control my hope is that they'll look at that and say you know potentially there's some opportunities here for some savings well I know it's a lot more transparent now and not only do policymakers county board supervisors appreciate that but in particular the department heads appreciate it so my compliments Chris thank you as you look forward what are some of the key projects or initiatives that you're looking to tackle in 2017-2018 we've got a couple big ones coming up this year first and foremost is going to be replacing our 20 year old phone system with a new VoIP system VoIP standing for voice over internet protocol it's a fancy way of saying our phone calls are going to be going out over the internet instead of traditional phone lines it's going to make the county's phone system a lot more scalable and we're also looking at it's probably going to cut our monthly phone bill by about 50% if everything goes well the other one is we're going to be moving our email system into the cloud and that too I'm excited it's going to allow our county employees to access their email more easily from outside their workplace and on virtually just about any device that they might be carrying Greg Wegeman our finance committee chairman who really does a nice job leading that committee and is a strong leader on the county board he recently shared during the finance committee meeting that in his private business they went VoIP and he said you know there are a couple of pitfalls or obstacles that they needed to overcome as you go forward with this project what do we need to be cautious about I think with any project of that scale when you think about you know there's roughly six to seven hundred phones within the county and again a very very mission critical system I think just planning and what we're going to tackle or how we're going to tackle that project is doing more of a phased rollout where we're not going to do it it's not just going to happen on one day everybody comes in they've got a brand new phone we're going to roll this out by department or in some cases by building and we will even have a parallel deployment where for a week or two you'll potentially have two phones on your desk you'll have your own old phone and your new phone so as we work through some of those hiccups that invariably will come with a project of that nature you'll still have the old phone available for usage Any other significant IT projects on the horizon? Yeah the big one for 2018 that I'm kind of kicking around right now would be a complete and total redesign of our website And I know that you've been working with Chairman Wagner on the county board chambers as well and just raising the bar and improving that system what's in play there Yeah so there as you know with the county board meetings once a month a lot of their business is done with voting and our voting system that we currently have in the county board chambers it's getting rather aged it's about 15 years old and we're starting to see some reliability issues so we're looking at going to a new voting system that will be based on iPads or tablets and so it'll all be digital very easy to use and much more reliable and scalable than our current system is and all of our board members are using iPads now and I can recall what's it been five years or so that some came kicking and screaming a little bit to that adjustment but I think they kick and scream now if you try to take that iPad away from them it's been very successful Without question the information that can be given to a county board supervisor before a meeting can be so much more updated and quicker it's just a big improvement finance committee meetings is nothing to have a hundred pages of documents and there it's all before them to scroll through versus before our county clerk or somebody would have been making copies of all that it's a great improvement and speaking of timing you know you mentioned the county board chamber system is about 15 years or old now and some people might be thinking well that's not that old but I think most people are aware that technology is changing now so rapidly I mean sometimes I think it's got to be almost challenging to plan more than three or four years because it changes so much things that will be developed or improved upon that haven't even been contemplated how do you you're closer to this than any of us how do you see things changing in county government in the next five years or what challenges do you see in the horizon in the next five years as you look at IT technology well Adam you're absolutely right where it really is difficult to think more than five years out so we generally we don't even try we try to look at you know bigger trends and the one that I see that's going to be affecting everybody not just county government but county government as well is mobility so as more and more people are tied into smartphones and other smart devices like that I think that's really going to change the way the county operates and how we deliver services so when you think of anything from a boat launch permit to issuing sanitary permits to paying our property taxes I think more and more of that will be offered on mobile devices and that flexibility and reach will allow us to serve more county citizens better and more efficiently a lot of people used to come to the admin building and wait in line for things and you don't see that to the degree used to five ten years ago but as you said I think we're going to see even more advances to make it more efficient and convenient for people well we're just about out of time but one question I wanted to ask you that wasn't on our summary sheet of questions I'm just going to take a risk and throw it out for you you're going to be celebrating your two year anniversary in June so you're still relatively new as a department head and a leader in Sheboygan County what's been your impression of working for Sheboygan County what's your team like at IT what's the culture like as a county just overall what's been your impression that's a great question my team is fantastic and it's interesting because of the ten of us roughly 50% of us or half of us have been with the county two years or less so it's a and that has, there's two sides to that coin of course there's, we don't have a lot of the historical knowledge but at the same time we have a lot of fresh insights and new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things and I see that throughout the county I see a lot of fresh perspective I see a lot of collaboration going on and creative problem solving so my two years with the county has really been wonderful in that regard and getting to work with other departments and other department heads good to hear, well we're certainly glad to have you aboard you've been, you quickly earn the respect of your peers and coworkers and we're just glad to have you as part of this team Chris, so thank you thank you, and thank you Tom and speaking of problem solving and collaboration in addition to many of the good projects Chris has been a part of one we didn't mention that's in play is the building of a new transportation complex and Chris and his team will have some involvement with the IT development there as well but April of this year you'll see, if you go out on highway J and 67, 67 toward Rockingall a corner of 67 and J you'll see a new county transportation complex being built the grounds already been raised and the field brought in by our highway department employees they've done a tremendous job and bolt construction and quash's construction will be out there starting in April to actually do the build out so that's going to be in play for the next year that's going to consolidate three facilities into one and next month our building services director Jim Tobias is going to be here to talk about the immense planning and orchestration of a project like that and not only has Jim been very involved with the plans for the new transportation complex but there's so many other building projects that he's involved in in fact some might say he's stretched a little thin so we look forward to having Jim with us next month and until then thank you so much for joining us have a good April and we'll see you soon thank you