Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Joplin City Council informal meeting for Monday, July the 7th, 2025.

We're gonna two items on the agenda.

We're gonna start with the IT department update 2025.

Hello, Mark.

Good evening, Mayor, Council.

Um just talked to Director Bloomberg, and he yielded all the rest of his time to me.

Now I'm good luck with that.

Good luck with that.

Um there is quite a bit of information on the slides, and I know you've had a chance to look at them.

I will not bore anyone by reading through them, but um basically give you an overview of the department and the status of where we are with some initiatives in the past and the future.

Um the department was formed actually in 1999, and I didn't get hired till 2001.

So does that make me the first IT director, or how many do you think there have been?

Two before you there were not two before me, but there was one before me.

And I happened to be looking for a car, and my wife said you should apply for that job.

So almost 24 years later, here I am.

Um also to note on here was that, and I'm sorry, the city manager's probably gonna twitch a little bit, but the cyber initiative was actually four years to the day, um, July 7th.

So that was a very, very busy day for us in 2021, and uh lots of time after that, and council stepped up and committed to shoring up and giving us lots of tools for uh keeping the organization safe.

Um then with the um addition of the marketing department, we're now also um heavily entrenched in learning Apple and Macintosh systems that we weren't um up until that time.

So here's a a non-typical org chart for you.

Um I I again I think things should be fun, but um, I know it's baseball season, but since I have five guys, they fit a basketball team better, and so that's them.

Uh me, my network admins been here 16 years.

John Gillian, my head GIS guys have been here almost 30, uh, and then on down from there.

Um we are completely staffed, and I actually can't think of a time that we were not fully staffed, but for about six weeks when we were looking for you know, somebody uh we've had a couple of turnovers and retirements, but um other than that, we're we just keep everybody on the court playing the game.

Um again, not gonna read everything to you here, but active directory basically means how many people are actively using our systems, and you can see in 23 we had 500, 24, we had 550, we're approaching 600.

Um, I'm going to excuse me.

I'm going to actually have another council bill later on at the end of the informal or at the end of the formal.

Um by Microsoft counts, we're still at 550.

Those are the people that are actively using Microsoft, Microsoft Office, email, etc.

But we count service accounts and other things that don't actually have the Microsoft sign in to keep some of the other integrated systems working.

So network sites, uh, that's another one.

I I honestly can't since 2003 when we decided to move over here.

We have brought built remodeled or added some type of facility almost every 12 to 18 months since I got here.

Last year was the ARF building, before that was station seven.

So that was what network sites continually go up, and that's the number of buildings that are connected or interconnected between uh the organization.

Laptops and workstations replaced, that's a little bit of a number to work through.

Um, that is not the total number.

Again, we have 550 users, each one of them has some sort of workstation or laptop available to them.

That's what we are doing each year, trying to stay on top of a replacement cycle that's about five to six years.

And the industry will tell you that I'm taking way too way too long to do that, but we we get as much bang for our buck as we can out of the machines.

And then the ruggedized laptops added was a line I wanted y'all to see basically when we went in 2003 to give every officer their own laptop.

That increased the rugged laptop count went from about 79, 83 up to about 135.

So and then again at the bottom, we're oh our voiceover IP system is continuing to grow as we add.

And a lot of that system has actually helped us to save some significant uh chunks of change with people being able to share those, you know, extensions and long distance uh rates have gone down since we're all sharing that.

So and then the last time, of course, we're we're gonna be talking about iPads.

Um 2025 initiatives, uh we completed the voiceover IP upgrade, which again that was basically um we have two servers, one primary, one secondary, keep that system afloat.

Uh those were put in when uh Mr.

Robine and I worked on building the library, so that'll tell you how old those servers were.

So we got some mileage out of them.

We replaced them um early this year.

We've upgraded in City Hall, we've upgraded all of the CCTV cameras and the primary server to a digital watchdog server, and I think off the top of my head, I think that server has 90 terabytes of storage for video.

There's a significant increase in where we were before.

And then uh again, we're continuing the time in attendance and the asset management system next year.

Um I'm looking toward the implementation of what's called an Esri Advantage program as my key initiative, and that is a collaborative arrangement with the vendor that does our GIS software.

They offer a kind of a professional services project management situation where uh they have a annual meeting with my department with the other departments that use GIS.

What are your initiatives?

Where are you gonna go?

What's that look like?

Do we need other servers to do that?

How do we need to do that?

What kind of user roles and responsibilities, rather than just piecemealing that every uh year, trying to figure out um what is public works, what where's the direction with that?