Goodyear IT presents FY26 strategic plan update, highlights cybersecurity, workforce and AI governance

Lisa Faizan, Goodyear's chief information officer, presented the city's fiscal year 2026 information technology strategic plan at the Goodyear City Council work session on Sept. 15, 2025, describing goals for cybersecurity, workforce development, process automation and data governance.

The plan, Faizan said, was developed from department director feedback, business partner relations and an annual CIO business-value survey. "Our mission is to provide a reliable and secure technology foundation for delivery of municipal services through collaboration with stakeholders, and our vision is to become a trusted partner enabling business transformation driven by process efficiency, innovation, and data," she told the council.

Why it matters: IT supports the city's core operations across departments; the plan identifies projects that staff say will reduce manual work, improve security and enable data-driven decision-making. Faizan said work under the plan will include consolidating duplicate software, automating onboarding and offboarding and building recovery capabilities for mission-critical systems.

Key points: - Workforce and training: Faizan said IT promoted eight staff into internal positions over the past year and has trained all staff in the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) standard. The department is conducting maturity and skills assessments and aims to expand cross-training and career-lattice opportunities. - Cybersecurity and business continuity: Faizan said the city maintains a "healthy cybersecurity posture" but must keep improving; staff identified gaps in recovering mission-critical systems and will request one-time funds in the FY27 budget to address redundant off-site recovery capability and other recovery measures. - Automation and efficiency: The plan prioritizes automation and integration. Faizan said IT identified more than $30,000 in savings for FY26 by consolidating duplicate tools and will continue to evaluate vendor integration tools to reduce manual tasks. - AI and data governance: Faizan noted the city published its first AI and data governance guidelines the prior week and that IT will work with departmental data stewards on data classification, dashboard building and safe evaluation of AI tools. She gave examples of current staff uses of AI for drafting job descriptions, standard operating procedures and training material.

Council questions focused on governance and prioritization. One council member asked how resource allocation decisions are made across departments. Faizan replied that governance follows ITIL and that priorities are set through "prioritization, due dates, and communication with our department staff to see what our resource capabilities are and what we could deliver in what time frames." She added that final prioritization involves collaboration with the city manager's office.

Faizan also described plans for biannual tabletop exercises and ongoing testing of recovery processes, and said IT will begin capitalizing on automation tools to broaden monitoring and alerting.

Ending: Faizan said IT will continue to use the CIO business-value survey to measure progress and align IT workload with department needs. She invited further council questions at the close of the presentation.