And

I'd like to call to order the technology committee.

Right now.

Could we have a roll call, please?

Is it Casmin here?

Robert here.

Jennifer Clark

here.

Linda Peterson.

Our Altimber.

Michael Danforth.

Yep.

Excellent.

We have a quorum.

All right.

There's no public comment.

Let's go on to our regular agenda, which is the item 8.F1, a presentation and consideration of the proposed fiscal year 2027.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Nope.

I if it's okay with everyone, we're going to skip that item.

Yes.

And then we're going to go to 8.1, which is a joint committee action approving the recommended fiscal year 2027 budget for enterprise information technology.

Can I get a motion?

Motion by Robert, second by Dan Forth.

Finance motion by Clark, second by Village.

Good morning, CIO Blake.

Good

afternoon.

I mean, oh my gosh, it is afternoon.

Oh,

no, it's

good

afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Chris Blanding, CIO.

Um, first of all, I am on the downside of a cold, so it sounds worse than it is.

I swear I'm not contagious.

If I cough, it's worse than it is, but I'm trying to maintain throughout this.

Thank you.

I will try.

Um, I'd like to start by thanking everybody involved in preparing the budget, finance, Mike Wheeler, um the IT managers, and specifically Heidi Hernandez, our management analysts.

I'd also like to thank County Administrator Sutton, Technology Chair Clark, and of all of you for supporting technology and the role it plays in Lake County.

So at its at its core, IT supports people and the technology they use.

We already our mission to the county strategic priorities of adaptive infrastructure and superior county operations and services.

Enterprise IT provides innovative, modern, secure solutions and the technology infrastructure to help the county achieve its vision of being a national leader.

This budget helps us maintain a modern infrastructure security platform and adapt to evolving security threats.

We support end users through the help desk and applications teams, and we utilize project managers and business analysts to implement solutions and support departments countywide.

Finally, we support our legally legacy Oracle ERP platform boss and our soon-to-be new modern ERP platform.

We've done many things through the year.

Uh redesigned our network, refreshed our entire network infrastructure, consolidated our security tools into one modern platform, upgraded our telecommunications platform, new authentication methods for users to prevent phishing, uh, monitoring support tools, network segmentation, data classification, and modernized our backup solutions to keep the county running.

And not to forget the annual refresh of computers, the help desk does every year.

So this year we'll look at adding some security protections to help keep pace with and respond to evolving AI threats specifically.

We'll refresh end-of-life network hardware, uh, continue the annual computer refresh and consolidate some applications.

Finally, we're modernizing our 20-plus-year-old legacy ERP solution by moving a work day with the go live scheduled for December this year.

This undertaking, while it has been has its technical components, is really a change management effort.

We're working hard to standardize, simplify and streamline business processes so we can fully utilize the power of the software moving forward.

I recently attended Workday's annual conference, and the message was what I heard from others is that Go Live is the beginning of the journey.

The state of Georgia went live with 70,000 plus employees in July.

Message from them and others is pay your people and your suppliers.

Understand that things won't be perfect at go live.