Page 44 - FCW, November/December 2020

Public Sector Innovations
Services (DPSS).
Carlos Sanchez, a section
manager in the IT Division’s Office of Automation and System Support, said the telework tracking app is still in the pilot stage, but discussions are in the works to expand it to the HR department.
Although the application is especially timely given the seismic shifts in the workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic, work on it began in 2018. The Welfare Fraud Prevention and Investigation Section in DPSS is currently using the application, Sanchez said, adding that although employees’ activities may differ, the application’s flexibility makes it useful across DPSS.
Employees use the app to insert their tasks for the upcoming week into a digital planner for approval by their supervisors. Each day, employees can add deliverables or documents to completed tasks or add new tasks.
“It gives management the visibility of the type of work that their agents are doing,” Sanchez said.
The app can generate reports that help managers assess efficiencies in remote working and look for growth opportunities. In the future, developers might add the capability to measure productivity, Sanchez said.
The app also alerts workers and supervisors when their annual telework certifications are due for renewal.
Leveraging IoT for Increased Flood Protection
44 November/December 2020 FCW.COM
Town of Cary, N.C.
Cary, N.C., is using the internet of things (IoT) to monitor flood potential and go from being a reactive to a proactive and ultimately a predictive town.
Situated atop three river basins, Cary installed seven water-level sensors and nearly 40 rain gauges at town-owned facilities. Together, the devices provide minute-by-minute information that officials can use to predict which areas might flood.
Some of the devices transmit data wirelessly while others are tied into the city’s robust fiber network, said Terry Yates, Cary’s smart cities and IT project manager. “We use Microsoft as the ingestion point to bring all that data into the ecosystem, specifically Microsoft Azure.”
Using SAS Analytics, employees
can glean insights from real-time
and historical data via an interactive dashboard, reports and business intelligence. The system integrates
with Esri’s ArcGIS for visualization and Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform, which alerts town
employees and residents about flooding. “It’s all about being able to access that
data in real time and then taking action on it,” Cary CIO Nicole Raimundo said.
Town officials can also generate
and deploy predictive models that help identify potential flooding events within Cary’s borders and in surrounding areas. The information enables the stormwater management team to make informed decisions about what steps to take in the event of a flood.
The stormwater monitoring project is foundational, Yates said. Once the kinks are worked out, officials will look into applying IoT in other ways.
Before the IoT initiative, residents would call in to report flooding, and the town would react. “Many agencies rely on their citizens and people in the field calling in with information,” Yates said. “Our goal and what we strive for is that every agency should know what’s going on [in] real time. We shouldn’t have to rely on citizens to call and say, ‘You’ve got this issue.’ We should already know it. We should already be responding.”