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Utah County information systems director outlines 2021 budget needs, cites pandemic-driven upgrades and new projects
Summary
Information Systems Director Patrick Guarow told the Utah County Board of County Commissioners that recent investments in backups, connectivity and applications improved pandemic response and county services; he requested limited staff reclassifications and one new integration-engineer position while proposing operating-cost increases for equipment and maintenance.
Patrick Guarow, director of the Utah County information systems department, told county commissioners during a budget work session that recent investments in infrastructure and software have strengthened county operations and supported pandemic response, but the department is seeking targeted operating increases and one new integration-engineer position.
Guarow said accurate, dependable and accessible information "is absolutely essential for government transparency and accountability to its citizens," and outlined three divisions in the department: IT support, programming and geographic information systems (GIS). He stressed that most budget growth requested for 2021 is for equipment support, maintenance and software licensing rather than new full-time hires.
Among the upgrades Guarow described, the county implemented an off-site disaster-recovery solution using Oracle Data Guard and an ExaGrid backup system that he said totals "over 600 terabytes" and keeps county data replicated across sites. He said the data center also will receive a new fire-suppression system to replace an older Halon unit that does not meet federal compliance standards.
The county expanded help-desk coverage and is deploying a 24/7 online ticketing system that will log calls, capture response metrics and include a single-question closing survey to improve customer-feedback rates. Guarow said four technicians processed more than 8,000 help-desk requests last year and that the department expanded help-desk hours to roughly 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to match employee schedules.
Connectivity improvements installed amid the pandemic have also increased remote-access capacity. "This new connection increased our VPN connection capacity more than 300%," Guarow said, describing a higher-capacity primary connection with redundant fallbacks to reduce outage impact for county services.
On the programming side, Guarow said the team has dozens of projects in flight and reported productivity gains: "we increased productivity more than 30% for new lines of code" over a six-month comparison with 2019 and "more than 55%" when including temporary COVID-funded programmers. He highlighted an online marriage-license application that had issued more than 7,500 licenses and generated roughly $300,000 in gross revenue, and said election results ingestion is automated so the county web page updates within seconds after polls close.
Guarow also described an automated "cure letter" process for ballots that require voter confirmation and said a county staff member estimated savings of about $5,000 per election from automating that workflow.
Budget requests include a modest operating increase for the IT support division (Guarow cited an adjusted 2020 support budget of about $2,147,000) and a programming budget that includes adding one integration-engineer position to improve integration between Workday, the general ledger and the countybudgeting system Questica. Guarow said two programmers had spent roughly 400 hours processing payroll because integration rules were missing in Workday, and he said hiring could reduce reliance on a consultant currently costing about $100,000 a year.
He also sought a classification upgrade on the GIS side and described a year in which GIS completed 42 new applications and dashboards used across departments, including mobile field apps for mosquito abatement, parcel-search tools for the public and mapping layers that feed the county's 911 dispatch. Guarow presented the GIS adjusted 2020 budget at about $1,160,000 and asked to upgrade one GIS analyst position to a GIS programmer.
Guarow emphasized that many pandemic-era changes accelerated work the county had already planned: remote-work adoption left about 72% of administrative positions working partly or mostly from home, he said, and that required prioritizing projects and preserving security and uptime. He closed by urging departments to partner on outcomes-based projects rather than making ad-hoc requests.
No formal votes or motions were recorded during the presentation; commissioners asked clarifying questions and thanked Guarow for the work. The session transitioned to the next agenda item.
