08-15-16 Personnel and Finance - Laserfiche WebLink

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activities and insourcing high activities which makes the most sense overall financially. We've been able to reduce the number of people demoted to doing some of the lower activities, and we've been able to focus on things that are more important like our infrastructure and security in a world where we are increasingly more exposed to people who are trying to have foul play with social security numbers, credit card information, highly sensitive systems, that we are well protected and in a good position. We are also planning on increasing capacity, we're going to be leveraging more technology in process improvement and maintaining a high standard. This year we have been focused on projects that are important to our reorganization but that have also been listed as priorities by the Council in the past, including Kronos, a time and attendance system. This is going to allow the Police Department to stop using the blue cards and having a paper - based system to track overtime. Automatically when the officers request overtime, it will be validated based on whether they are eligible for that overtime. It is also going to allow them to request their vacation. Council President Tim Scott explained that the overtime and any other thing outside of the normal pay was turned in on a card, and there were administrators that would go through and tally up their overtime, and that was one thing that the Council has been pushing to upgrade. Mr. Garces continued that we've partnered on downtown wireless with other organizations including the Community Foundation, and we've also enabled access to free wireless in community centers, also something that surfaced from the Council priorities. One of the things that we recognize in the digital divide is that it is not only about devices, but also about data. This will allow people to search for jobs, pay their bills, learn new things, and entertain themselves. We are making sure that we have equal access. We have a new and improved open data portal. It is enhanced to be faster and it has the ability to connect CB data, and we'll be publishing more data to be more transparent. Based on the skills of the people we've hired, we are able to do this work at a far less cost than we were paying for our old data portal, we're saving about $40,000 per year. We are connecting people in a more effective way, for example we changed the call order when people call into 311 by presenting the automatic payment option for utilities first, which has reduced forty percent (40 %) of the calls that were being transferred from 311. In the past we received about 8,000 calls per year just making those erroneous transfers, so this enhances people's ability to interactions and we're being good stewards of their time. We've partnered with the community to do summer programs with the Bowman Creek educational ecosystem where we're giving access to students who are in Riley and Washington High School and IVY Tech, IUSB and Notre Dame to look at the City and create technology that improves the quality of life in their neighborhoods including how you automatically detect when drains get clogged. We've been supporting their efforts. We relaunched the Falcam website, which gets one -fourth (1/4) of the City's web traffic. It is of high importance to the community, so we were able to partner with South Bend Code School and kids who tend to be underrepresented in their access to technology, so they can learn about the technology and the falcons, and create a new website that looks better and is faster. 12