On the third floor of the New Haven Hall of Re- cords, I sat down with City Controller Daryl Jones in his office to experience the future of city government’s communication and workflow systems firsthand. “Hey Eric!” Jones waved to the web-cam on the computer monitor. We were joined remotely by his colleague Eric Valle through Microsoft Lync, a Skype-esque program that will soon enable city officials to instant message, as well as audio and video conference with anyone on staff with their computer, smartphone, or tablet, like Jones’s Surface device.
Welcome to iNewHaven.
The change has city officials fired up. Jones remembered the first time he showed an employee in the Department of Parks and Recreation how to make a video call from his cell phone with Lync: “He was like, ‘Wait, wait. Hang up and let me call you this time. Oh my God, I’m never using a regular phone again!’”
The technology overhaul is slated to go into effect throughout the city government as soon as December, but the revamp has been a long time coming. The issue surfaced most recently last Thursday when Ward 28 Alder Claudette Robinson- Thorpe claimed she was not briefed on a special Board of Alders meeting because the email system failed to deliver the relevant newsletters.
To ameliorate a buildup of complaints, the entire system will be rebuilt from the ground up—first, the majority of the city’s physical servers will be replaced with cloud servers, and then, all software will be upgraded from Windows 7 to Microsoft 365. These changes are the key to eliminating a whole host of is- sues that have impeded the daily work of city officials, resulting in lost emails and misunderstandings in meeting times.
Though not all city officials prioritize an overhaul of their operating systems, outdated email, security breaches, and flatlining tech investments, which have cost the city tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity, many have made it clear that the current state of technology in the Elm City is no longer sustainable.
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Jones told me that officials have actually walked between the Hall of Records and City Hall, located in different buildings on the same block near the New Haven Green, to follow up on emails that were never processed through the city’s outdated mail client GroupWise, known to few outside city government. That’s how slow the connections between buildings can be. The city’s networks and fiber cables are often unable to support current traffic, resulting in crashes that can last up to a week. Those crashes take crucial systems for bill payment and monitoring down with the network.
Security breaches have also become “more than just a once in a blue moon event,” according to Jones, with the latest incident occurring just a few weeks ago. On a Friday afternoon, someone in the city’s network opened an email containing a virus that encrypted an individual computer’s hard drive and then moved on to infiltrate the entire network’s hard drives. The casualties: two days of productivity, two drives, and a department’s shared drive.
Just as the city’s hardware is outdated, so, too, is the software.
“Look, we still have Blackberries because they’re the only device GroupWise works on!” Jones said as he pulled the chunky device out of his pocket and set it down next to his slimmer, sleeker iPhone. “That’s a perfect example of how antiquated our email system is.”
According to Jones, officials are often unable to open attachments with GroupWise. People have emailed documents from their Macs at home only to discover that the files are incompatible with the software at work.
The city website is also long due for some enhancements in user experience, including a better search function, more interactive information, among others. Though New Haven was among only 25 other cities to be awarded an A for its city website by the National Policy Research Council, the site has not been majorly revamped in six years. In the 16 years that Andrew Kardana has served as the city’s webmaster, there have only been two or three redesigns.
The outdated technologies don’t just make for a clunky user experience—they interfere in the smooth running of city operations.
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This is where Jones’s 1.6 million-dollar plan to revamp the city’s technology comes in. The approach is twofold: develop the physical network first, then migrate all operating systems over to Microsoft 365. Both steps have already been in progress since April.
The first order of business is upgrading the city’s servers, which run the government’s programs and store all of its data. The proposed new software can’t run on the current underlying network, which is far from “rock solid,” according to Jones. So, the plan is to migrate to virtual servers, which will allow the government to add more servers without buying new physical ones, which currently cost 5,000 dollars to 10,000 dollars each. By Jones’ estimate, one 22,000-dollar virtual server could replace thirty physical servers, saving the city a total of 30,000 dollars.
The new network has already been built, but data from the old servers have not been switched over yet. When the power was tested on the new server, the city found that the network consumed more than 100 percent of the battery’s power, delaying progress by a month. Nevertheless, Jones hopes to see the network fully upgraded by mid-October.
While speeding up the city’s sluggish networks and fiber cables is crucial, it is the switch to new software that city officials are most excited about.
“Everybody’s excited about the new technology, you know, they keep asking me ‘When can we get 365? When can we get 365?’” Jones told me as he waved his hands around, miming the city staff’s enthusiasm. “And I say, ‘It’s coming as soon as we fix our physical networks.’”
Microsoft 365 allows officials to do business everywhere, and it’s compatible for both iPhone and Android, meaning an email or IM conversation can carry over seamlessly from desktop to mobile. Eventually, field operations may be conducted entirely through tablets instead of the current pen-and-paper system. Police, health inspectors, and park rangers alike can instantly sign off on violations, submit inspections, and communicate via Bluetooth with the office. And even though not everyone will receive a Surface, Jones plans to order more tablets and iPhones for officials to use in the near future.
Jones and Eric Valle, the project manager, are two of the 75 desktop users at City Hall who have been testing out Microsoft 365’s proof of concept since May. Eventually, about a thousand users will be switched over to the new software. The process is estimated to cost anywhere from 350,000 dollars to 700,000 dollars, and it will be the most difficult, expensive part of the overall project.
The city has just signed a contract with Microsoft and closed its bidding for the migration; now, it’s in the process of selecting a vendor that has experience transfer- ring data from physical servers to the cloud. One of the most important features of the switchover is precisely the ability to protect the government’s new software with defenses at the cloud level, which Jones hopes will prevent further security breaches that have wiped out entire hard drives in the past.
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While some officials have anecdotes about the hindrance of old technology on their everyday work, Ward 29 Alder Brian Wingate said he has never experienced any problems during his three and a half years working at City Hall. “If there is an issue with [email attachments not opening], the solution is just a phone call away,” he told me in a phone interview.
Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter echoed Wingate’s ambivalence with the system. “Like any system, it may have a glitch for an hour or so, but it’s usually fixed soon enough,” he said. He told the Herald in a phone interview that he has personally never had any issues with the mail client and has not heard any com- plaints about technology from other staff members.
Though some officials like Wingate and Carter may find no fault with the current state of technology in New Haven, Jones remains adamant about making the big leap and seeing the upgrade through. In past years, the primary administration did not recognize the importance of technology, which has contributed to huge losses in productivity and business opportunities.
In response to whether New Haven has the resources to allocate to technology at the moment, Jones explained that the best cost analysis of the upgrade so far has pegged initial savings at 100,000 dollars per year. This money could then become available to address more important city issues like gun violence, lagging public schools, and unemployment. The ultimate goal is to improve the way the city government interacts with the pub- lic and how it serves the people.
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New Haven is also looking to emulate Yale’s embrace of cutting edge technology, and potentially partner with the University for future joint ventures. By Jones’ estimate, there are 360 people working in Yale’s IT department, compared to only 13 in City Hall. Yale’s abundance of resources and its technological experience could be used to improve New Haven’s technology through programs such as training partnerships or WiFi deployment collaborations.
“Yale has already established campus-wide WiFi, but they are still working on improving the WiFi in their courtyards, where students say it gets spotty,” Jones said. “We want to partner with them because they’ve done a good job so far, and we can learn from what worked and what didn’t work for them.”
Within the next few years, the city is striving to deploy public WiFi on the New Haven Green, a hotspot that regularly brings in five to six thousand people at a time for concerts and public events. But this is secondary to the hardware and software upgrades that the city so desperately needs right now.
“We have to get our own house in order first. We’re going straight from the dinosaurs to the Jetsons,” he said.