Houghton County and its internet security provider VC3 will work to more effectively address issue tickets for departments. Yesterday the Houghton County Commission called a special meeting to discuss recent service outages in communications between departments, the need for updated technology, and a request for an in-house information technology expert.
Some of the key concerns that we currently have are delayed responses, and I can go into these more deeply. Lack of communication between VC3 techs means when one of our employees calls, they get an email to call back, and they have to replay everything over to a new technician. And then just wondering where we’re at with the transition process, what the key issues are, and what we can do about the ticket response. – Theresa Hill, Operations Administration, Houghton County
The meeting brought VC3 together with the county’s department leaders.
What we found was with Houghton County’s current configuration, I’ll just call it that. FCR is not able to resolve many of your issues. And almost everything has to be escalated to my team. Which is overwhelming the queue and causing a lot of service delays. We have made plans for changes that will affect our plans. We have one new hire that starts in a month. And then we have two, level two engineers. Which is really what is required for your county. – Denise Douglas, IT Service Delivery Manager, VC3
Prosecutor Dan Helmer expressed frustration with how the provider has not onboarded several staff across the county.
I get some server problems, credential problems, and things like that based on not having the right information. But I’ve had a computer now for two weeks for a new employee that still isn’t working correctly. We were invoiced $600 to have it set up. And I spent two hours getting it installed this morning. My office manager has probably spent 40 hours working on it. It’s still not working right. And we were able to get hold of one of our providers who does IT. And they said that it hasn’t been installed correctly and it’s maddening because I can’t even have her work. – Dan Helmer, Prosecutor, Houghton County
County operations administration Theresa Hill also shared Helmer’s frustration with the lack of access to important tools her department uses to keep track of department requests.
They’re working on me getting access to the ticket portal to be able to manage that, but just from what I’ve been tracking a lot. – Theresa Hill, Operations Administrator, Houghton County
County clerk Jennifer Kelly says the county needs issues resolved soon, as a gap in network security could negatively impact future elections and voting precincts’ ability to track ballots. She also shared her office’s other operations require secure networks to properly keep records for property sales, tax rolls, voter rolls, marriage licenses, and other functions.
I contacted VC3 by phone and spoke with an Anthony, super great help, and he was going to contact Fiddler and get them connected to the server. He doesn’t know why the change happened. Since we went with VC3 and I set it up, Fiddler has been doing well with getting onto our server as quickly as they can because they are on it sometimes many, many times a day. What changed between yesterday and today or whenever this happened? Anthony couldn’t tell me, but he was going to get Fiddler on there right away. – Jennifer Kelly, Cler, Houghton County
VC3 representatives told county officials the company had a recent staff shortage while a handful of employees were away on medical leave. The provider took responsibility for not providing effective communication between the county departments, and onboarding new employees and technology. The provider will have a technician travel to Houghton County as soon as possible to begin working on a log of IT ticket requests.
Thank you, folks, from VC3. I appreciate your taking the time and listening to all this. Communication obviously is the big thing, and I think we hit it. I think the two groups get together and it will help things out. – Roy Britz, Co-Chair, Houghton County Commission
VC3 provides internet security services for several counties in Michigan. Gratiot County, for example, has an onsite IT employee to address issues. Houghton County pays VC3 20,000 dollars per month to provide essential IT services and internet network security across departments. Internet and network security has been a growing focus of municipal governments as more records are digitized. Houghton County signed a contract with VC3 earlier this year following the departure of the county’s previous IT supervisor.
Houghton County will work to have network passwords and key codes available for vc3’s service team and the IT staff when they arrive shortly.
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