2016 Awards

City of Novi - Awarded IT Project of the Year

This year’s winner is the City of Novi who, in partnership with the Novi Community School District, Northville Public Schools and Walled Lake Consolidated Schools, launched an online community attraction tool called Hello Novi (hellonovi.org).  The site provides an engaging, technologically driven platform for anyone to become acquainted with the Novi community.  Users can explore with an interactive map and learn about the exemplary educational opportunities, high quality public services and robust private employment locations with the City of Novi.  Using traditional informational content, location based presentation and share based social media, users can travel down a Novi street in an augmented reality experiencing the traits and amenities that make Novi a unique and desirable place to live in or visit.  The site also proves useful to families who are moving to Novi from other countries for overseas work assignments.  Hello Novi features a google translate option to facilitate understanding in dozens of languages and provides information that can be useful in making necessary arrangements prior to arrival including school district information.  As part of its development, a series of interviews were conducted with families, businesses, city leaders and school administrators to determine the Novi brand as it is really lived and experienced.   Hello Novi serves as the beginning of a conversation about the City and enhances and expands the ability to portray Novi in an increasingly mobile world. 

Kent County Awarded IT Security Project of the Year Award

This year’s winner is the Kent County Information Technology Department for its multi piece approach in fighting their recent challenges with ransomware infections.  As ransomware attacks moved beyond individual user hard drives to numerous attacks on its network drives, the IT department needed effective, cost effective ways to mitigate or avoid the attacks.  Their solution began first with a Powershell script written by one of the department’s security desk technicians.  The script monitors individual file writes to file servers from each PC.  If a set threshold is exceeded, the staff is alerted and the application doing the writes is terminated thus reducing recovery times for when infections do occur.  The second piece consisted of implementing deep packet filtering, a capability from their WebSense appliance,  as an extension of Kent County’s web filtering.  Instead of just reacting to the categorization of the website, the appliance examines the actual content of what is being downloaded.  Parameters are set up to reject malware downloads which has made a significant dent in the number of ransomware attacks experienced earlier this year.  Current attacks usually only occur on PCs where the capability hasn’t yet been rolled out to or when a PC is connected to some other network than Kent County’s and their anti-virus software doesn’t recognize the variant.   

The final piece is on-going user education.  The IT department began working with the county’s Communications Director and periodically send out security newsletters to county employees .  The newsletters focus on current security issues and the number of newsletters increased as the number of ransomware attacks increased.   All three pieces plus a substantial amount of staff time to coordinate the effort and perform individual tasks have worked together to significantly reduce disruption to Kent County’s  customer base and increase available staff time which would otherwise have been spent fighting infections one by one.