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Today is Power IT Down Day

Friday, August 27, 2010
Clint Nelms, Network Infrastrucutre Practice Manager
Started last year, Power IT Down Day is a program to drive awareness of energy conservation in the Government IT sector. The premise is simple: at the end of the day, turn of unneeded workstations, monitors, printers and other devices. The energy savings can add up quick, especially if left on over an entire weekend. So if you’re leaving the office to enjoy the weekend, make sure you turn off all of your IT equipment and save your city a bit of money. In fact, if everyone at your city did it, it could end up saving the city a lot of money. Just make sure you leave your servers on!

Creating an IT Security Plan

Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Clint Nelms, Network Infrastrucutre Practice Manager
As a follow up to my last post about Nashville's IT woes, I want to point you to another GovTech article that walks government folks through creating an IT security plan. This is exactly the kind of thing that we work on with our customers – creating a citywide, comprehensive IT security plan that covers all areas of the IT infrastructure from laptop policies to theft prevention. City’s store a lot of sensitive data and do a tremendous amount of business with money, yet often they lack the kind of policies needed to adequately protect these areas. GovTech gives you a great place to start if you’re looking to implement such policies at your city.

Nashville Demonstrates the Need for IT Security Policies

Monday, August 23, 2010
Clint Nelms, Network Infrastrucutre Practice Manager
GovTech is running an interview with Nashville’s Technology Chief Keith Durbin about how the city has learned from the mistakes of its numerous security breaches. Durbin primarily focuses his thoughts around how the lack of robust IT security policies led to most of the breaches. Whether it’s a misplaced thumb drive or a stolen laptop, without encryption and security policies in place, vast amounts of citizen data can be leaked. Unfortunately for Nashville, they had to learn the hard way and suffer the negative media attention. But you don’t have to. Read over the article, learn from it, and begin putting IT security policies in place right now to prevent this sort of thing from happening at your city.

Sophicity to Display at the Florida League of Cities Annual Conference

Friday, August 13, 2010
Kevin Howarth, Director of Business Development
The conventions keep on coming. Join Tim and I at the Florida League of Cities Annual Conference in Hollywood, FL next week! If you are planning to attend, drop by Booth 24 and let us know what’s on your mind. Conventions are fun but staying at an awesome hotel on the beach makes them even better!

Citizens Turn to Twitter for Emergency Communications

Thursday, August 12, 2010
Tim Verras, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience
Social media, especially Twitter, is often a frequent topic of discussion amongst government professionals. We’ve heard it come up a number of times at conventions and there are always a few folks who seem to dismiss it as a fad for children. The problem is, that’s just not true. Many government organizations are finding ways to use Twitter that are dramatically changing the landscape of G2C communication. In fact, as this recent study shows, citizens are using Twitter and expect their government too as well. 18% of those polled said they would turn to social media for any emergency updates. Problem is, if the government’s not listening, they may lose an opportunity to communicate with almost 20% of their citizenship. That’s a significant number during a disaster communication scenario. Cities are no longer in a position to dismiss social media as a fad. If you don’t already have plans in the works, now is a great time to start.

Michigan's Undercover CTO

Friday, August 06, 2010
Tim Verras, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience
GovTech is running a great article on Michigan’s CTO and how he’s followed the TV show to go “Undercover CTO”. The article lays out what he discovered by spending time in the trenches with the folks in his organization. He found that most folks were hard workers, with serious gripes but no way to air them. He found it refreshing that he could hear business issues from real people and how that affected his future police decisions. If you are managing a large organization think about taking some time to hang out with the folks that are doing the hard work out in the field. You’re likely to learn a lot about how to add efficiency and increase morale.

Local Government IT Professionals Focusing on Social Media

Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Tim Verras, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience
Kevin and I just got back from the GMIS International convention held right here in Atlanta. It’s a collection of IT professionals from the City and County governments that meat to discuss how IT is shaping city governance. This year the two hot topics seemed to be city websites and social media. Twitter and Facebook are seeping into the government sector and often the task of administering these initiatives falls to IT. This is a difficult situation because this is not a traditional IT function. In the best case, this is a function hat should be handled by the internal communications and marketing department. Yet at the end of the day, cities with tight budgets are asking the IT team to watch over these sites. If your city is going down his route, you might want to seriously consider hiring in in-house social media expert. While IT has the technical chops to handle social media, they often lack the time to create the kind of compelling content that is necessary to derive value out of social media.

Sophicity to Display at GMIS International Convention

Friday, July 30, 2010
Kevin Howarth, Director of Business Development
If you are planning on going to GMIS International this year, we are pleased to announce that we will be displaying at the event. The conference moves from city to city each year but this year it’s in our hometown of Atlanta. GMIS is one of the most targeted conferences for us in the IT field and is a great way to hear what’s on the minds of government technology professionals from all over the country. Hope to see you there!

Google Shows Off Its Apps for Government Solution

Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Tim Verras, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience
We’ve discussed Google’s efforts to get into the Government sector in the past but the latest news is Google’s strongest commitment yet to the sector. This week the company announced that its now offering Google Apps for Government. This is the same Google apps that many people already use but the key difference is that it is on its own, secure cloud meant only for governments. Google has even had the system federally tested so that it now meets standards to store all non-classified information, which should meet the need of most governmental organizations. This should help to alleviate the fears that many leveled at Google during its roll out of Los Angeles’s Apps implementation, namely that the information would be easily compromised. It will be interesting to see if this actually spurs adoption or proves that cloud-based computing is still too new for government to be truly interested.

South Carolina Cities Look to The Web

Saturday, July 17, 2010
Kevin Howarth, Director of Business Development
Tim and I just returned from the MASC convention and I must say it was one of the best conventions we’ve been to all year. This year South Carolina’s cities seem to be focused on websites and a number of folks stopped by our booth to chat about their plans for upgrading and improving their web presence. It’s further evidence that cities across the country are realizing that a website is more than just an online directory – it is a crucial part of the city’s communications and services strategies. From YouTube’d mayoral addresses to integrated 311 applications we heard a number of really good ideas of where cities wanted to take their websites. As more city services move to the web is your city’s website up to the demand?
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