Mi-GMIS - 2019 Awards

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2019 Awards

Celebrating the people and projects transforming Michigan's public sector

IT Professional of the Year

Jeff Small, CIO Great Lakes Water Authority - Awarded IT Professional of the Year

Jeff Small has been the CIO at Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) for the past three years. In his time leading the Information Technology group, Jeff has instituted a robust cyber security program, an enterprise technology project management office, and has moved GLWA to a cloud-first, mobile enabled, anytime/anywhere strategy for technology service delivery. Jeff has also reorganized IT application groups to create better alignment with GLWA's asset-centric operational strategy, while expanding IT's ability to fully support productivity and back office functions. At the same time, Jeff has led GLWA's effort to separate Detroit Water and Sewerage Department information technology functions from those of GLWA, all while maintaining or improving IT service delivery for both organizations. In addition to his organizational transformation leadership, Jeff has sponsored several important projects that expand GLWA's ability to deliver on its core mission of providing "water of unquestionable quality." Those projects include a complete re-implementation of GLWA's HRIS system, expansion of GLWA's learning management system to its 127 member communities, and near real-time water system GIS maps that improve GLWA's ability to respond more rapidly to heavy precipitation events that could overflow the sewerage system and negatively impact its constituent communities. Jeff's leadership is not limited to GLWA; Jeff also contributes his talents and thought leadership to a variety of IT industry organizations in Michigan and the Midwest by serving as a board member for Mi-GMIS, State of Michigan CIO Kitchen Cabinet, Government Technology Special Districts, and the governing body for the Detroit CIO Executive Summit.

IT Security Project of the Year

Ingham County Awarded IT Security Project of the Year Award - LEIN Logging on a Shoestring

Congratulations Ingham County on your inventive, fiscally responsible solution!

The Mi-GMIS Best IT Security Project Award is given to a government agency that develops creative solutions for Information Technology Security, recognizing the ever present threat to our infrastructure while demonstrating technology’s role as a vital player in improving organizational security.

Setting up software that collects all of the logging data required by LEIN on a shoestring budget. Goal was to use open source software to avoid high implementation costs.

During our last LEIN audit, we found that we were not compliant with keeping track of user account sign-on and file audit logs. An inexpensive solution was required due to budget constraints, leaving many commercial options out of reach. We chose a trio of applications that integrate together: Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Beats. Why we chose this route is simple: It's open-source and free software that's capable of meeting the requirements that LEIN expects, that once installed and operational has roughly the same capability as Splunk.

IT Project of the Year

Ingham County Awarded IT Project of the Year - Lost Pet Project

Congratulations Ingham County! Pet owners and found pets are grateful for your efforts!

The Mi-GMIS Best IT Project Award is presented to a government agency that shows resourceful initiatives, cost savings measures, an innovative IT solution to a problem, a new way of working or a new business process.

At Ingham County we have been designing a map for our Animal Control department for their website. We evaluated other options and were not happy with the ones we found so we decided to create a system for ourselves. Many of our inquiries that come in relate to lost or found pets as it has not been possible to see them on our website before.

The system allows citizens to report their own animals missing on a map and will reduce the number of calls we receive to report such pets. The animals are shown on the website for 10 days and then the user has the ability to renew an animal's listing. This puts the management of our lost and found system on the animal owner rather than on our animal control team freeing up time and resources. The goal is for lost animals to be away from their families for a shorter amount of time and for found animals to be discovered more quickly as well.