Technology committee refines Southborough strategic plan; urges metrics, school outreach and security roadmap

The Town of Southborough Municipal Technology Committee on May 1 reviewed its technology strategic plan, updating guiding principles, technology trends, top pain points and proposed metrics while asking committee members to return recommended metric priorities.

Angela, a committee member who led the presentation, read the document’s guiding principles aloud: “evaluate all technology from a customer first vantage point,” “adopt a cloud first approach for all services and applications,” “create a shared service model of core functionality across departments,” and to “evaluate all technology options for data privacy and security.” Angela told the group the strategy — roughly three years old — needs modest updates and clearer implementation priorities.

Members recommended adding explicit references to data integration and artificial intelligence to the principles. Yascha and other members argued AI deserves separate treatment because of its varied models, security and privacy concerns, and possible uses such as chatbots on the town website to answer routine resident questions. The committee agreed a separate session on AI applications and training for departments would be useful before broad adoption.

The presentation summarized the top five citizen and employee pain points from three recent surveys (2021, 2022, 2024): transaction fees for online payments (notably a roughly 3% fee for tax payments), remote meeting voting access and hybrid participation, website navigation and document findability, centralized communications/subscription capabilities, and inconsistent online payment user experience. Committee members flagged the town’s payment processor and bank relationships as a multi‑party decision requiring finance department engagement.

On metrics, members proposed narrowing the strategic plan to a smaller set of high‑level metrics and moving highly operational measures into an implementation or operational dashboard maintained by IT. The chair and select board member Sam urged the committee to recommend a long‑term direction (for example, preferred GIS or payment platform approaches) so budgeting and vendor choices align. Sam spoke as “one select board member” and asked for guidance on where to invest limited funds.

Committee members also raised school and library inclusion: participants said the schools’ IT representation has been intermittent and asked to re‑engage the school IT administrator and library staff so their systems are included in the town’s inventory. Members agreed to collect departmental inventories of applications, websites and services and pass that catalogue to IT for reconciliation; sensitive technical detail could be reviewed in executive session if necessary.

Security and operational priorities were clear themes. Jay, the town IT staff member, asked committee members to distinguish strategic metrics the committee will track versus operational tasks his office executes (patching, MFA, backups). Jay reported that roughly 80% of core town services already use multi‑factor authentication for staff logins, and that the town manages about 250 email accounts (around 85 internal staff accounts). He recommended the committee commission a security roadmap presentation to help prioritize Windows server upgrades, email filtering and cloud versus on‑premises hosting decisions.

The committee closed by asking members to submit their top two metric priorities per category for consolidation; Angela said she would distribute the presentation slides and the group planned a follow‑up meeting to review a revised draft of the strategy.