Doug Wells, Director of Information Technology at Sanitation District #1 of Northern Kentucky

WHAT WE DO:

"We provide sanitation service for Northern Kentucky, which includes Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties. The tri-county area encompasses three treatment plants and spans the pipe infrastructure and storm water management of multiple municipalities within the region. We perform watershed analysis and maintenance for the area with engineering, planning and maintenance teams working together to ensure that storm water is treated and able to reenter streams and rivers in the least destructive way for the environment.

IT’s function in all of that, aside from the traditional network and client support, is to manage tracking all the assets involved; the pipes, pumping stations, treatment plants and all the inventory, as well as  the data collection coming in from it all. As a public utility, all that information must be stored, analyzed and reported on."

Do you view business as a customer or a partner of IT?

"Here at SD1, the business understands its need for technology, so I feel like a partner. They don’t come to us with products, they come to us with problems. I am regularly called into meetings about business problems and asked how IT can work with them or what type of technology we can use to solve the problem. They are not telling us what technology they want us to implement, or what software they want installed; they want our understanding there to help solve problems. And we’re involved with engineers as partners in projects at all times in developing applications and running simulations. The GIS section of IT is a great example of how we are well integrated in the SD1 business. This advanced mapping team uses data to help analyze where money needs to be spent and that ultimately helps us to better utilize the public funds. There is a limited amount of money, and many things going on at all times, so if we can evaluate aging pipes, for example, using compiled data like flow, area, pipe scores, populations affected and so on, we can promote efficiency. We can be most effective and strategic in planning, we can catch and repair things before they fail and we can avoid raising rates."