Utah County IT director seeks training funds and three programmers to address growing demand

Patrick Moore, information systems director for Utah County, told commissioners in a budget work session that the county’s IT team has delivered several recent technology upgrades but is now stretched thin and needs additional staff and training to sustain and scale services.

Moore said the department has adopted DocuSign integrated with the county’s BMI document system to enable secure digital approvals and introduced online credit-card payments for the treasurer’s office. He described a county-built election-results dashboard that turned around results within minutes on primary night and a new QR-based ballot-pickup tracking dashboard that logs who picked up a ballot box and when, improving chain-of-custody visibility for elections.

“The mission is to be a trusted partner in providing technological innovation that enables departments as they efficiently and effectively serve the county and citizens,” Moore said, framing his budget requests around continuity and measurable productivity gains.

Moore provided staffing and workload numbers: the programming group has 12 full-time programmers supporting roughly 106 applications, with about 25,000 programming hours available annually. He said outstanding requests across departments amount to roughly an additional 27,000 hours, which he described as a gap that cannot be met at current staffing levels.

As a targeted, near-term ask, Moore requested $17,000 for a Pluralsight enterprise account to give every IT staff member access to the platform’s training catalog (he cited an approximate retail of $540 per person). He also proposed requiring each IT staffer to complete 40 supervisor-approved hours of training annually so the county can track skills growth rather than rely on informal, anecdotal measures.

“By making it a mandate from me, it also binds the supervisor to make sure [staff] are allowed to take the time,” Moore said. He argued the training purchase is more cost-effective than sending a few people to occasional classes and would provide ongoing retraining and credentialing capability.

On staffing, Moore asked for three additional programmers — two at the higher ‘programmer three’ classification and one at the ‘programmer one’ level — plus conversion of an existing programmer-three to a new lead programmer role to organize small cross-functional teams. He said that team structure had produced projects “at least 50% faster” during recent internal efforts and would reduce single-person knowledge silos.

Moore also flagged the lack of a formal database administrator (DBA) job description as his top operational risk. He said Jay Sundberg, assistant IT director, currently performs DBA duties and that Sundberg’s retirement would leave a gap in institutional knowledge unless the county creates and staffs the DBA role.

Commissioners pressed Moore on how the department would measure productivity gains and whether technology investments would reduce or merely shift workload. An unidentified commissioner asked whether automation would free staff time; Moore said some gains are measurable while others depend on departments’ ability to quantify outcomes and commit to baseline tracking before new tools are introduced.

Commissioners discussed the county’s internal-service funding model: departments pay per-device monthly support fees that have so far been held steady, and Moore said those rates may need to rise as network and infrastructure costs grow. Moore said the staffing plan would still come before the commission for approval and emphasized the need to balance in-house hires with contractor use for specialized, time-sensitive work; he cited past contractor-assisted integrations (instant payments, BMI) as examples.

Moore described an in-house inventory and procurement interface (no separate budget request) that will let employees see assigned equipment, replacement dates, accrued recapitalization funding and procurement milestones to reduce uncertainty about orders and approvals.

The presentation closed with Moore reiterating the department’s reliance on small teams and cross-training to reduce single-point failures and asking the commission for support of the training and staffing requests. Commissioners thanked Moore and signaled further review of budget implications would follow.

Next steps: Moore said staffing changes and any rate adjustments would be brought forward to the commission for approval as part of the budget process.