Time for a deep dive into what our $426,000 Information Technology Department does all month.
When IT Director Monica Wright submits her monthly reports, we are treated to a ticket count. Every time something happens over there, a ticket is generated and that task is then completed by either Monica Wright (Department head with no network credentials) or Kristy Acevedo, the network administrator.
[Yes, TSM Consulting does a LOT of the “network administrator” job, but we’ll get to that later].
The ticket count looks large and impressive. Like Ron Jeremy in ultra HD on a 70-inch TV, perhaps. But are they REALLY doing that much work? I was curious.
I recently requested a list of all tickets generated in September of 2021. Boy, was it an eye-opener. Especially since City council just agreed to give the IT Department ANOTHER $90,000 over last year’s budget to hire ANOTHER IT person! They must be super busy over there, right? They generated FOUR HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX tickets in September!
Wow. That’s a lot! That’s like 14 tickets every single day, including weekends! Such busy little bees they are!
Or is something else going on here? Each ticket shows a category (email, backups, hardware problem, etc) and a time stamp. With this, I was able to draw some conclusions.
Here is my breakdown of categories so far (I will break this down further as I have time):
Unspecified or left blank: 68 tickets (16%) had either no information on the category or said “unspecified”. So we literally have no record or idea of what they were doing on 16% of these tickets.
Backups: 157 tickets (37%). One thing I noticed immediately is there were quite a few tickets generated in the wee hours of the morning, when there is no way in hell anybody was working. These are almost exclusively “backups” and they are clearly generated automatically. Maybe they call that “working” in the government sector, but not in the real world.
Can you imagine telling your boss you worked all night when you were REALLY asleep and then pointing to your ice maker which made cubes all night automatically and saying “see! Look what I did!”
So a whopping 1/3 of all their “work” is backups and a goodly portion of that takes place in the middle of the night. Another big chunk of those happen at the end of the day. Many times, I saw 10 or 12 tickets generated between 4:30pm and 4:45pm. In other words, sitting there at the end of the day and watching the machines backup data. Ain’t government work grand?
So we can already see that 53% of the tickets (255 out of 426) we either have no idea what they were doing OR the ticket was just noting an automated backup of data – many times in the middle of the night.
Ouch. We’re now down to 171 tickets for the month – between TWO people. Not so impressive anymore. Less than 3 tickets per worker per day, if you include weekends (we’ll get to that too).
A/V System: 16 tickets (3.7%). This mainly happened on days where a City council meeting was going to take place that night (twice a month). Monica managed to milk 12 tickets in 13 minutes for “A/V System”. Then as you can see, everyone took a nice, long siesta until the automated backups started at 4:30pm:
Facebook/Twitter/Website: 13 tickets (3%). I assume this is going to the City website and updating something – like a job opening or announcement. Super hard work.
Printer toner: 4 tickets (<1%): I made jokes over the last three years about Monica going around changing printer cartridges. It appears to be partially true. Hard to believe that a grown adult as head of another department (City Hall, Library) can’t change printer ink themselves, but apparently that’s the case.
We are now up to 288 tickets in the “pretty much a joke and anyone with a pulse can do it” category. That’s 67% so far – or 2/3 of their “work” for the month.
Continuing on….
Antivirus, cybersecurity, firewall, malware: 19 tickets (4.5%). OK, now we’re talking! Good to see they spend 4.5% of their time on the combo of antivirus (10 tickets), cybersecurity (7 tickets), firewall (1 ticket) and malware/worm (1 ticket). Of course, this is AFTER they allowed ransomware onto the system a couple years ago resulting in the destruction of roughly $40,000 in City computer equipment.
Did I mention that some of the “antivirus” work took place in the middle of the night? It did. More automation masquerading as “work” (making the ice cubes!):
The kicker? The IT Department ALSO paid our old friends TSM Consulting $7,631 last month for “Panda antivirus”! Like I have said a million times before, we ALREADY HAVE three people in the IT department: Wright, Acevedo and TSM Consulting, who makes tens of thousands of dollars per year to do the work our IT Department is incapable of doing.
Police Department: 61 tickets (14%). Not a surprise. The police department has a lot of equipment, body cams, mobile laptops, printers, etc. Of these 61 tickets, however, 20 of the tickets were “backup” events – and thus automated and already counted above in the “backups” category. The other 41 tickets (9.6% of total for the month) were things like software problems, software install, printer install, etc.
HOWEVER, don’t forget: two years ago (immediately after the ransomware fuckup by the IT Department) the police department took a LOT of responsibility OUT of the hands of the IT Department! They have spent over $28,000 with WatchGuard to store all body cam footage since then – and will continue to spend $10,620 per year for this service going forward [page 10, column 4, paragraph 2 onwards]
So, everything to do with bodycam recording, storage, backups and data manipulation SHOULD be taken care of by this $10,620 per year contract. Ergo, the IT Department presence over there should be limited to very basic events like printer installation and other small problems – NOT the job of backing up or dealing with bodycam data.
Now we get to the meat and potatoes. The following is the stuff you probably think of when you think of what the IT Department spends all day doing. It amounts to 44 tickets total – or only 10% of their recorded tasks.
Software install (4), software config (7), software problem (14), software update (9): 34 tickets total (8%). Of these 34 tickets, Acevedo handled 29 of them – or 85%. This reinforces my view that Acevedo is the only one with rudimentary computer knowledge in the “department”.
Of course, it could ALSO be due to the fact that Monica didn’t appear on ANY tickets between the 17th and the 22nd. No doubt on one of her MANY vacations. She DOES get 4 weeks vacation AND 2.5 weeks of sick/personal days every year.
Hardware install (2), hardware config (1), hardware problem (7): 10 tickets total (2.3%). Of these 10 tickets, Acevedo handled 9 of them. This also reinforces my suspicions that Monica doesn’t really get her hands dirty. She costs the taxpayers six figures because (1) she has been there forever (2) holds a title, no matter how undeserved (3) good at looking busy and generating tickets that actually don’t accomplish much.
The final kicker?? Despite it appearing (from the tickets) that Wright and Acevedo take care of “antivirus”, they actually paid our old friends TSM Consulting $7,631 last month for “Panda antivirus”.