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."

To what extent does our recreational use of technology drive innovation in business? Is business taking the lead or lagging behind?

"As technology has become available in smaller devices, like iPhones and iPads, we see people becoming used to a standard of affordable technology that they can bring into their homes for their use and play. This recreational use is actually causing business to change.

We see it on the communications and marketing side as businesses try to adapt to social spaces like Twitter.  At SD1 we are now working on a ticketing system that will allow customers to report an issue online. Our customers are the people who are familiar with using this type of feature and they want to be able to report a problem from their phone without talking to someone. And we can use that feature to gather more information, like the GPS coordinates that will allow us to get to a site more quickly. So we are trying to be more available to our customers in the social spaces they are already operating in.

We are also seeing it on the business side as the people who work here are pushing for more efficiency and convenience. The guys in the field once had to take paper notes and then come back to the office to enter it. Then they carried bulky laptops for a while, but now they can attach a tablet to an arm or a leg and kneel down while they are working and make their notes that go right into the system.

I wouldn’t say that we are lagging behind, though we are always taking suggestions as our customers bring us ideas about how we can reach out to them. In other areas, we are leading the charge. We have done a lot with automating the plants so that equipment now reports in information; and we have added technologies to our vehicles and our pumps – we have all these things communicating more and more here in the same way that we are just now beginning to see the Internet of Things offered in consumer appliances.

I think we’ve actually seen an evolution in the technology user and less division between business and recreational use. Technology used to be scary – it was the big mainframe computer that no one person could afford – so many people used to be fearful about using technology for themselves. Today many more people are using all kinds of technologies all the time, so that there’s less thinking this is a work thing and this is a home thing. Employees now arrive smarter about technology use and need less training. Overall I think it’s a very good thing that is driving efficiencies and making things better."