IT Stories from the Field with City of Beaumont's Chief Technology Officer

Angie Wright, Beaumont's CTO, shares stories from the field

In this episode, Heroes of IT podcast host Ashley Smith interviews Angie Wright, the Chief Technology Officer of the City of Beaumont, Texas. They discuss the challenges faced by IT teams, the importance of accurate reporting and manual work, and the dependence on vendors. They also explore the number of applications and tools used to manage endpoints and the process of evaluating new tools. The conversation highlights the significance of integrations in IT operations.

Read the Heroes of IT transcript

Ashley: Welcome to the Heroes of IT podcast. My name is Ashley. I'm a Customer Marketing Manager here at Automox and I will be your host for today. Today we are joined by Angie Wright from the city of Beaumont, Texas, where she is their Chief Technology Officer. Welcome, Angie. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you here. January, for those of you who don't know, at Automox is our State of IT Operations Month. So every single year we survey IT professionals and we talk to them about what's really going on in their IT environment and then you know we come back with that survey, we analyze the trends and we get down to what's really happening inside of some IT offices across the nation.

So today we're gonna be looking at a couple of those stats and chatting about what they mean for the future of IT. Angie, before we get into it, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and what your team is like at the City of Beaumont?

Angie: I have been with the City of Beaumont since 2011. I started here as a project manager and have grown into my most recent promotion as chief technology officer. The IT department for the city manages all technology for all departments, anywhere from water to the guys in the field with their tablets to police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, you name it. If it's technology, then we manage it here in our IT department. Before I started working for the city, I didn't quite realize just what all that entailed behind the scenes. And so it has been really educational over the last several years learning what all it intricacies it takes to run a city. My role at the city is to make sure that all the technology in the city is used, that it's updated, it's functioning, it's secure, so the employees that directly assist our citizens can do their jobs efficiently and effectively. So no begging, nothing small, just an entire city at your fingertips.

Ashley: Okay so diving into our first point. In our State of ITOps Report for 2024, we found that the top challenges for ITOps teams were doing more tasks than they could handle and accurate reporting and manual work. Is there a single answer to overcoming these challenges for small IT teams?

Angie: There's never going to be a singular answer. That would be too easy. The problem is too multifaceted for that. The root cause is going to be different for every organization. I think that for us and a lot of others in our industry, the biggest influence is how fast technology is growing and how fast it has grown. Early on when technology first became a part of your everyday workspace. You had the older generation that didn't quite embrace it. And so it grew slowly. It was incorporated slowly until it was forced on them. Whereas now you still have the new mindset that technology is good. Technology can be efficient technology can help streamline services and allow for our you know our perspective can allow citizens to um pay their water bill from home. I mean you can do any number of things with technology these days. We implemented a couple of years ago online permitting. All of that technology is a good thing and it benefits everyone. The problem that we see and that I know a lot of especially my counterparts in government see is that there's only there's money for the technology and there's or there's money for staff and there's generally not money for both and what it both are required so there's only so much that people can do. Our software support team manages 250-plus applications with six people. So you're going to, you're going to have, there's, there's a happy medium of yes, this technology is good, but there's still some need for the employee on the other end, the technology employee that is required to handle the back end of it all, to make it more streamlined and efficient for the other people. And for me, and what I've seen, is that it's not just government entities. It's, I mean, even corporations are having the problem now and making sure that they have their core technology staff large enough to handle the technology they want to put out there. If your staff is not large enough, then you run into the risk of overworking staff. You talked about having more tasks than you know what to do with, which leads to people doing work and not documenting their work. So then your reporting is off because you haven't documented the work. I mean I can tell you that we probably have work orders that have been completed a month ago that are still waiting to be open. So if I were to run a report today my reporting would be inaccurate. The problem is you have so many tasks and you're heaping so many of those tasks on your employees that they don't have the time to document and complete out all of the necessary information that you need to be able to do the reporting. Yeah, so I can I can definitely see that as a valid statistic. And there is still some manual work on the back end. Not everything can be automated. Even though we tell a lot of people, if you have the data in the system, then I can pull it out of the system, but that still requires somebody to manually write a report. So there is that. I mean, technology is great, but there is still a lot of work left to it. Yeah, definitely. And I think especially when you're the leader of a team like you are, it's almost like the IT issues almost become like HR issues. Like, are my employees happy? Are they working in okay bandwidth? Are they buried in work? I know.

Ashley: Right now, I think a big trend in the IT industry is who owns the knowledge of something. And if someone goes on short-term leave or someone gets promoted where does all that knowledge go? How does it transfer? How does it work within the team?

Angie: I know a lot of people are trying to tackle that as well. Yeah. And we try to have backups. We even have tertiary backups for when people are on vacation.

But inevitably, you'll run into an instance where the primary is out sick or the primary is out on vacation and the secondary is, you know, gets sick and can't come in today. Well, then, you know, who's going to do that work? And, you know, your users are, you know, they need it done. They need to be able to do their work. So who is going to assist in that? And you can only train so many people with so much before they're so overloaded that it's not it's not worth it for them to work here. So there's really a fine line and a happy medium that you have to walk um where you just have to say I'm sorry we don't have anybody there today um that can handle that for you but we can definitely get it handled tomorrow or um that's when you have to lean more on your vendors where you call them up and say, look, you know, the person you normally talk to, they're not here and I really need to get this resolved. Um, and so you have to have that, that relationship with your vendors as well. Yeah. That sounds like it's almost like a 50/50 split. Uh, yes, there are the people with the skills and the processes, but also there is dependence and reliance on a tool to almost fix itself and to help itself and or to help you and your team. Right.

Ashley: So speaking of tools, I think that's a pretty good segue. 49% of ITOps teams use six or more applications, tools, or services just to manage endpoints. I mean, that's not even counting all the other tasks and all the other departments with their own tools. Do you think that there is a golden number of applications or tools to manage your endpoints and are there inherent risks using more or less?

Angie: I think the golden number is again going to depend on the organization. In my mind, the golden number would be three. Not necessarily the end all be all you have to have three. But I feel like if you have too many, then you're going to run into issues where somebody likes one tool better than the other and like we talked about you have multiple people doing multiple redundancies. And so if I like XYZ tool and then my counterpart likes ABC tool, then you're not going to be getting the same information. And, or you're, you know, you have three tools and they kind of overlap each other. So you get the majority of the information you need out of one tool. And that's the tool you like. You like the dashboard. You like the way it looks. You like the way it, you know, it does the majority of what you need, so you spend all your time on that, but you're ignoring this other tool over here that was put into place for a reason, and you're going to end up missing out on notifications of something that is important. So that's why I would say less is better for the majority of it. I mean, once you start incorporating more tools, you tend to, it just tends to get burdensome. Yeah, definitely. So looking at tools, especially when you have different employees coming to you, asking for things to solve certain pain points.

Ashley: How do you know when you found a good one? How do you and your team go about evaluating new tools and how do you know when it's, you know, really satisfied a problem for you guys?

Angie: A lot of evaluation. You're going to want something that can do the majority of the functionality that you need it to do or that will integrate with other tools that you already have. For example, you know we have our MDR and Automox, We can import our vulnerabilities from our MDR into Automox and then Automox will then see, go out, look at all of our endpoints and it will determine what of those endpoints is vulnerable to that vulnerability and then it will patch it. So you want something that's going to work together, something that's going to be compatible and that's going to make your life easier. I mean if it doesn't make your life easier then the tool isn't for you. And you're going to want to have, again, just because it works good for one person, the team doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody. So there's going to be a lot of testing, a lot of give and take there for the team to determine what tool. And just because you have found one tool that works now doesn't mean there's not going to be a better tool out there tomorrow. But you also have to look at, if I'm going to spend this money on this tool, I need to get my return on investment. I have to be fiscally responsible and make sure that I get the usability, it's gotta be scalable. I've got to look at cost and reputation. It needs to have a reputation for security. It doesn't need to have a reputation of being compromised in any way. And a big one, like I said previously, is the integration capabilities.

Ashley: Yeah, I think that I feel like certain terms like last year, I feel this was the year of like AI and ChatGPT, and you know, using really using automation. But I feel like maybe in 2024 integrations will be the buzzword. I feel like just within my own conversations with customers and other tools and vendors this year. I feel like integrations if it's not there, then you know, is it worth it?

Angie: You can't communicate if you can't trade information across your team, across departments departments. It's enough to make you reconsider buying a tool.

Ashley: Right, it really is. Okay, you heard it here first, 2024 is the year of integrations. I like that. Well, I really enjoyed this conversation today, Angie. For any listeners who are interested in hearing more, about the city of Beaumont. You can always check out their story and case study on automox.com/resources. We have their story up there. We have a bunch of our other cities, local governments, and schools up on there as well. And they tell some pretty terrific stories. But thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Bye.