SIDNEY — The city of Sidney Information Technology department had a very successful year in 2022. Some of the highlights include core network infrastructure upgrades, server and storage solution upgrades, Financial Management Reporting migration, Electronic Citation implementation within both County and Municipal Courts, enhanced cybersecurity end user awareness training and the addition of staff to assist the highly efficient and dedicated team.

Manager Joel Glass has submitted the following report:

With the network infrastructure upgrades, the Information Technology department is able to provide more secure communications and more reliable service to the public including Electronic Court solutions with online payment options, online bill pay services for Revenue Collections, and enhanced Geographic Information System (GIS) services.

The Information Technology team also completed the implementation of a highly advanced server and storage solution to support some of the most advanced technological solutions in the industry. The new design provide redundancy as well as performance to generate the highly efficient workflow for the City of Sidney operations.

In the later months of 2022, the Information Technology team started the migration of the City’s financial management solution to one of the latest and most advanced solutions in the industry. This implementation will provide a more efficient workflow with enhanced operations for Human Resources and Payroll processing.

Additionally, the Information Technology department started the migration to a new Court software solution. The current Court configuration is a highly impressive and cost effective solution. Shelby County and the City of Sidney have a combined system that consists of Sidney Municipal Court, Shelby County Common Pleas Court, Shelby County Juvenile Court and Shelby County Clerk of Courts. Its creation marked a first-of-its-kind solution dated back to 2016. This design and implementation has saved well over $1,000,000 in tax dollars spread throughout all agencies. Its highly effective configuration still serves as a benchmark for the State.

In 2023, the Information Technology department is looking to have a very busy year. With the completion of the Financial management migration as well as the Court software migration, the department is looking to complete a virtual desktop platform as a core function of the server migration strategy in the first quarter of 2023.

Additional projects for the Information Technology department’s 2023 budget cycle include the integration of an industry-leading Enterprise Permitting and Licensing software solution, upgrading the City’s automatic water meter collection system, and implementation of a next generation in car and body camera solution to name a few.

To round out the 2023 year the Information Technology department is looking to upgrade the enterprise GIS solution with integral integration into the new industry-leading Enterprise Permitting and Licensing application, streamlining workflow, management, inspection, and electronic plan review. The GIS implementation is also a highly impressive shared services solution, which is very unique. The city of Sidney and Shelby County has partnered together to provide a central GIS solution with a Regional Small Government License Agreement (SGLA), which is one of very few in the Country. Together with these partnerships between the City of Sidney and Shelby County, the advanced Information Technology team is able to provide efficient, cost effective, enterprise class solutions to the public.