CARY – In March 2020, when the Town of Cary decided to move operations virtually, most of the Town’s employees grabbed their laptops and not much else, preparing to head home to work remotely.
“We were very fortunate in that we had already set up, before COVID, and who knew that the past five years would culminate in our ability to transition to remote very successfully,” explains Nicole Raimundo Coughlin, the CIO for the Town of Cary. “We’re there, but we still also have a long way to go.”
With wintry weather ready to strike, adding to the misery of COVID, the Town is already positioned to keep communications open and workers connected.
Coughlin notes that the Town began preparing for a shifting digital ecosystem well before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when she started in her role five years ago began to update the infrastructure and implement new strategies that could cultivate a more connected workforce and a more connected and integrated community.
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“It’s a challenge for a municipality, because of the type of work and the breadth of work that we do, but it’s also an opportunity for us to innovate,” said Coughlin.
After the transition to virtual work for Town employees, Coughlin and her team started to field requests from staff members. Many who’d only taken their laptops were finding that their work would be greatly improved by having a second monitor at their home-based workstation or by wearing the headphones or headset that they’d left behind at their Town office.
“We quickly learned that if you’re looking at big plans, development plans, you’d likely need two monitors, and especially with kids learning from home, they’d benefit from headphones,” Coughlin explained at Wednesday’s NC Technology Association’s Outlook for Tech virtual conference.
A connected workforce and community strategy
So she and her team designed and implemented a way for the Town staff to coordinate contactless pickup of their needed technology infrastructure so that Town staff could operate more effectively, ultimately benefiting the town’s residents.
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In addition, said Coughlin, the Town of Cary has now implemented a queuing system for building arrivals and implemented an online-check-in that also sends automated text messages to people when their arrival time is coming, based on other data in the system.
Beyond these enhancements, she added, the Town is working to address the current gaps that the pandemic has created, including in programming through Parks and Recreation.
“We know there is a big gap for our citizens when we close down our facilities that offer child care, camps, classes, and to transition those to virtual, and that really speaks to how we are thinking about how people can do programming from anywhere.”
Under Coughlin’s leadership, the Town moved away from multiple written strategies all relating to technology and innovation, and now think about and act on one specific strategy: a connected workforce and community strategy.
Or “Anywhere Operations.”
Here’s how research firm Gartner describes the concept: “Anywhere Operations refers to an IT operating model designed to support customers everywhere, enable employees everywhere and manage the deployment of business services across distributed infrastructures.”
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“This takes the strategies that we’ve had before, but wraps them into one because we know that they’re all connected,” said Coughlin. “They really needed to be integrated, so we stopped talking about them as individual strategies and began to think about them as one central strategy.”
Though it was available prior to the pandemic, one example of the Town of Cary’s investment into “Anywhere Operations” includes the ability for residents to easily use their preferred devices to report issues, whether that’s using Alexa to report when their trash can is not picked up and emptied on the scheduled day or reporting a locked gate at a park during hours when it is supposed to be open to the public.
And the pandemic has accelerated the Town’s ability to think, plan, design, and implement technology to enhance service delivery, Coughlin added.
“There have been some great things that have come out of this pandemic,” she said. “It has been really, actually, great for me to see the type of innovation that has come out of not just my team but our entire organization to start to think differently, and let’s face it, it’s also caused us to speed it up, right, like putting wifi in parks, and thinking about how we get more digital services online and how we think about that.”
