Features

As Abe Alirez was growing up, he dreamt of driving a truck—hauling loads of freight that help keep the economy going while seeing the U.S. along its highways and byways. Alirez also loved technology. He wasn’t old enough to drive a truck, but he was old—and skilled enough—to repair his friends’ video game systems. For […]

Jeff Scheetz likes to joke that he moved from his native Colorado to Avondale, Arizona, to escape the snow. He’s done that, although it also means he left some of his favorite fishing streams behind when he became chief information officer for the city of 89,334 that’s on the western boundary of Phoenix. However, Scheetz […]

Six months after joining the City of New Braunfels, Texas, in 2018 as its director of information technology, Tony Gonzalez was brought into a meeting where an idea was presented to replace the city’s enterprise resource planning system. Understanding this project was going to have a price tag of $1.5 million to $2 million, Gonzalez […]

Craig McBeath earned a promotion to director of information technology for the City of Bloomington, Illinois, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. And his first task was keeping the city’s services up and running as the whole country was shutting down. Located in central Illinois, roughly two hours southwest of Chicago, Bloomington is home to […]

Several years ago, Stephen Hunt fielded a complaint from someone who needed to access a building with some engineering labs at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He told them to call someone on his IT staff. That’s because getting such passcodes is part of the services Hunt and his team provide as he leads IT […]

For months, tacked above Jalen Byford’s desk at the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services was a huge map of Oklahoma that he got from the state tourism department. Byford had plastered it with pushpins and Post-it notes denoting places where he had already installed technicians as well as places where he still needed […]

Onward it goes, the migration of on-premise case management systems to the more secure yet still accessible cloud. Time was when it might have been met with dissent by the people who administer Michigan’s Macomb County, but as Chief Information Officer Jako van Blerk assures, the process proceeds according to plan and with the support […]

Ashtabula County, Ohio, sits on the shores of Lake Erie, all 720 square miles of it dotted with quaint towns and picturesque greenery. It’s known for its wine country, covered bridges and—if you ask Rockford Benson—the down-to-earth friendliness of its 97,000 people. Benson is a native son who came home to serve his neighbors. He’s […]

As quarantines swept the nation at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, students of Charles County, Maryland, were sent home—and Lora Bennett had to act quickly. As the executive director of information technology strategy for Charles County Public Schools, she had a find a way to enable students to learn from the comfort and safety […]

As executive director of Concurrent Technologies Corp.’s Information Technology Division, Kevin Pudliner isn’t always at liberty to talk about his team’s work. He can, however, say they’ve played crucial roles in assisting the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence agencies analyze data by developing algorithms that can also detect malware attacks. Pudliner and his team […]