Leading with Purpose in Tech ft. Chris Seidt

In this episode, we sit down with Chris Seidt, the Executive Director and CIO for the City of Louisville, who has been with the city government for over 22 years. Chris shares his remarkable journey from a police dispatcher to leading the city's IT department, highlighting the importance of leadership that’s rooted in experience, community impact, and adaptability.

Chris delves into the complexities of managing IT for a large municipal government, from handling 216 million annual cyber events to rolling out innovative initiatives like the Connected Parks program. He discusses the challenges of working with outdated government software, the significance of digital inclusion, and how his team is working to bridge the digital divide in Louisville.

This episode is a treasure trove of insights for IT leaders, offering lessons on the importance of flexibility, the power of leading by example, and the value of aligning technology with community needs. Whether you’re interested in public sector IT, leadership, or urban technology initiatives, this conversation with Chris Seidt provides practical takeaways and an inspiring look at how tech leadership can drive real change.

Creators & Guests

Guest

Chris Seidt

Executive Director Metro Technology Services Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government

What is IT Leaders?

The purpose of the IT Leaders Council is to bring together IT Directors and Managers for leadership training, educational content from guest speakers, and peer discussions in a vendor-free, collaborative environment. IT Leaders Councils are currently offered in Indianapolis, IN and Columbus, OH, with more cities coming soon!

00:00:00:06 - 00:00:10:20
Chris Seidt
Well, good morning everybody. I'll catch us up here on on time. So, each of us clickers working currently.

00:00:10:22 - 00:00:24:14
Chris Seidt
Is not behind the wheel. Okay. In the interim, I'll go ahead and get the intro as out of the way. So, for those that don't know me, I know there are several friendly faces in the room here that I've known for a while. My name is Chris Seidt I'm the executive director and CIO for the City of Louisville.

00:00:24:15 - 00:00:43:18
Chris Seidt
It's a job that I've held for almost seven years now, but I've been with the city government going on 22 years. And I'll get to my origin story there in a minute. A little bit about me. I'm from Louisville. Yes. I probably won't tell you where I went to high school, because that's one of my security challenge questions.

00:00:43:20 - 00:01:09:09
Chris Seidt
But it was in the Highlands. If that gives away the location. My wife, Shannon, we've been married for 22 years. I've known her for, 30, 32 years now. We went to high school together. And so, my two kids on the picture here are Mason and Phil. Mason just graduate from Atherton, and, and is a rising eighth grader that just started school.

00:01:09:10 - 00:01:29:05
Chris Seidt
So, looking forward to going through high school again next year. Went to the University of Louisville after I went to the, Sullivan University. I am a nontraditional student in that sense. So I, immediately started working out of high school, tried to do the full time student thing at the same time at U of L.

00:01:29:07 - 00:01:48:11
Chris Seidt
That ended probably how you think it would. And so just kind of, you know, let education go to the side at first. Focused on my work and went to work for the city of Louisville in 2002 as a police dispatcher. So if you call 901 anywhere from 2002 to 2007, it's likely that you talked to me at some point.

00:01:48:16 - 00:02:08:20
Chris Seidt
Not a lot of people call 911. That's not something that people do for fun, or some people do it for fun. But I do. But but not as often as you would think. So, not only did I answer number one calls, but I worked the police radios and set officers all over the community, making sure that, you know, we were responsive to the needs of of the citizens of Louisville.

00:02:08:22 - 00:02:28:08
Chris Seidt
I'm also a very vocal Louisville fan. So if you follow social media, you'll see that my feed is full of technology and interesting information, and you have all sports. So, if you're a UK fan, I've probably engaged with you at some point. But, and my son actually is kind of taken in my, in my image on that.

00:02:28:09 - 00:02:42:12
Chris Seidt
He actually has started a whole social media channel called the Ville HQ that has a pretty big following. If you've seen some of his hype videos out there. So proud of him to kind of see him continue the family legacy, there.

00:02:42:14 - 00:03:02:00
Chris Seidt
Okay. That's right. All right. So back to the work history thing. So I told you I've worked for the city for combined 22 years, starting as a police dispatcher was my first full time job, that, first job that I had out of school, right out of high school. That, kind of got me, familiar with city services and the thing that a lot of people don't come and fight with.

00:03:02:00 - 00:03:22:20
Chris Seidt
The city of Louisville is working at the, zoo. So I was actually a guest services employee there starting in the summer of 1995. Worked there for about a year and a half. Operated the train, as you can see here. And also worked at the front gate. And that so. And then the bottom picture down here, you can see that's me working in the number one center.

00:03:22:22 - 00:03:46:16
Chris Seidt
That's probably circa 2005 or 6 or so. We moved into a fairly new communications center after the city county merger. City county merger kind of played an important part in my origin story and going into it. When we merged with the city in the county, there were five separate dispatch centers. So if you think about Jefferson County and the complexities of all the different things that were here, we had a city police dispatch center.

00:03:46:16 - 00:04:06:11
Chris Seidt
We had a central number one operation that took all the calls and then farmed them to the other systems. We had a city fire department dispatch center that dealt with EMS and fire, and then we had a county fire, police and EMS that was consolidated for the county population. And then there was what they call global public radio, which dealt with a lot of the folks that you maybe don't normally associate with.

00:04:06:11 - 00:04:27:02
Chris Seidt
Number one, that's the folks that go out to put barricades up when the roads are closed, they go out and they deal with obstructions in the roadway when trees fall across them. So that was all different dispatch functions prior to the city county merger that happened in 2003. When we merged, we had different computer systems. We were running different facilities scattered all across the city.

00:04:27:04 - 00:04:44:07
Chris Seidt
And so in 2004, they kicked off a project to consolidate all of those functions. That was one of the beauties of of having a merged government was, hey, we don't have to have five dispatch centers. We can have one. You have one director running that instead of five separate ones, and we kind of get some cost efficiencies from that.

00:04:44:09 - 00:05:04:17
Chris Seidt
So with our dispatch center, you know, we had to build a new computer aided dispatch program that's very complex. You're dealing with, we now have 11 suburban fire districts, Anchorage, middle Town, Okolona. You probably familiar with a lot of them. We have the old City of Louisville Fire Department, and they all have areas that they're responsible for responding to.

00:05:04:19 - 00:05:32:16
Chris Seidt
So building out all those response plans for people to go to the right place at the right time, with the right apparatus for the right type of run, took a lot of effort. I was the young kid at the time, 22 years ago. And so I got pulled into that project as, the quality assurance tester, I'll call it at the time, didn't really have that title back 20 years ago, but to make sure that the system that they were building would meet the needs of the dispatchers coming out of the operation that I had previously been in.

00:05:32:18 - 00:05:54:09
Chris Seidt
So, the city dispatch system that I worked on initially was an IBM mainframe driven system, at the same hundred and 40 character text limit that the Twitter had until just last year. And so, yeah, to kind of be very concise with what you typed into that system, because as soon as you got to 140 characters, it started writing over what you had done a little while back.

00:05:54:10 - 00:06:17:13
Chris Seidt
And if an officer's chasing somebody down the street and you're turning down alleys and streets and giving descriptions of suspects, you've got to be very good at being able to repeat that information back to the dispatcher. So there was no mouse. There was a monochrome screen, had green on it. I'm sorry. That's all I had to look at is probably about, you know, 12 inch monitor to look out for the dispatch system at the time.

00:06:17:15 - 00:06:48:14
Chris Seidt
And we were moving to a windows based solution. I mean, you know, it's 2004. You know, IBM mainframes aren't really the thing that were rolling out at that point. If you have them, you probably still are keeping them alive today. But, we made the decision to kind of go forward with a new solution. So we had to sit there and test every function key and every, well, nuanced thing that would go with making sure that that run as soon as somebody called, made it to the right dispatcher on the right channel so that they would be able to send the police out.

00:06:48:16 - 00:07:10:19
Chris Seidt
My former director over the number one center, Debbie Fox, she's over development today. She always said when seconds count, we count seconds. So one of our big KPIs was, how fast can we get that call into the system and over to the dispatcher so that we got a response on the way to them. And, and that kind of was the first experience I had with leaders that were very clear about their expectations.

00:07:10:19 - 00:07:29:07
Chris Seidt
And so I kind of wanted to touch a little bit on that today in terms of like, we don't always get formal leadership training, but we're always getting leadership training because if you look around you, the people that you work with, the people that you work for, they're always teaching you a lesson. That can be a lesson that can be a bad lesson, right?

00:07:29:09 - 00:07:52:09
Chris Seidt
Everybody here has probably had a really great boss that they would unflinchingly work and do whatever they needed them to. And you probably had that one that you go home at the end of the day and you want to quit. And I've had both, through my career with the city, I've had the honor of having some really great people in my career, like Debbie, Doug Hamilton, who many of you probably have heard the name at some point in time, was a great leader within the city.

00:07:52:10 - 00:08:13:13
Chris Seidt
He had a combined 50 plus years of government service, serving as a police chief director of number one and ultimately as a chief, according to the mayor, overall public safety. So, having those folks in your life, can have a big influence on you. And I just wanted to kind of point that out. The other thing I wanted to touch on is just kind of fun facts.

00:08:13:15 - 00:08:32:15
Chris Seidt
I am a high school basketball official for the six and seven region. So if you don't like this presentation, feel free to do a photo for me. But, I actually kind of enjoy it. It's kind of fun when people do, because usually they don't know what I've seen. Right? And nobody ever asks. They don't ask what I saw or what I didn't see.

00:08:32:17 - 00:08:45:10
Chris Seidt
And then the other cool thing is that I just wanted to point out as a leader is, and it's kind of a tip that I was going to give later on, but I'll touch on it now. I'm certified to operate that. I could try. And I did that because I asked my staff to be able to do that too.

00:08:45:12 - 00:09:06:08
Chris Seidt
Within our IT department, we take care of 128 miles of fiber optic cable that connects a lot of our city facilities. We also have 2000 police cameras scattered across the community. They all sit 18 to 23ft in the air on utility poles. And so when we first got our bucket truck, we used to outsource this work, but it got to be a little too much once we crossed the threshold.

00:09:06:10 - 00:09:22:10
Chris Seidt
So with, you know, that many cameras out there and that much fiber optic cable, we bought a bucket truck and, and my staff was a little nervous about it at first, as you might expect. Or, I mean, you're you're putting your life in the hands of a hydraulic lifting going up, you know, 25ft in the air traffic.

00:09:22:12 - 00:09:37:14
Chris Seidt
And I didn't want them to go into that thinking that I was asking them to do something that I wouldn't do. So when we first did the training class to get certified on the truck and public works has a lot of trucks out there, so they were more than happy to throw us up in the bucket truck and scare us a little bit.

00:09:37:16 - 00:09:57:02
Chris Seidt
But, you know, I wanted to be able to be able to lead from out front, right? I wanted to be able to say, hey, I'll go first. So this picture was the day that we got trained on the truck was the first one. It and I went out in the field with the guys after we got cleared on it and did some work on the cameras, and I think that kind of sets the tone as a leader for what people expect you to do, right?

00:09:57:02 - 00:10:13:11
Chris Seidt
It's like, hey, I'm not afraid to roll my sleeves up and get dirty. When we had the pandemic hit in 2020. One of the things that we did is we ordered a ton of laptops, city government, and prior to the pandemic, we didn't have remote work. If we did, it was, you know, a handful of people that could do it.

00:10:13:11 - 00:10:33:12
Chris Seidt
One day a week at best. And in March of 2020, that all that all changed. And so we ordered 2400 laptops, for our workforce, for people that could go home. And there's a lot of people that can't. We still have to have people in the jail. They still have to have people on the fire apparatus. We still have to have police officers in their cars.

00:10:33:14 - 00:10:53:09
Chris Seidt
But for those office employees, we didn't really have a great plan in place. So, guys, I unloaded 2400 laptops with my team off of semis, because that's a lot of that's a lot of computers. And again, I say that as a leader, one of the things that I think has gotten to to our success in terms of retention, we're a government, right?

00:10:53:10 - 00:11:09:03
Chris Seidt
We don't pay what the private sector does. We often are poached for, you know, higher paying opportunities. But I think one of the things that we do is we have a job with some purpose. Right? So you look around the community here and our work is everywhere.

00:11:09:05 - 00:11:29:04
Chris Seidt
And this is going to kind of touch on that. There are 41 separate city departments. Many of them you're probably familiar with, you know, just talked about police and fire and EMS number one. Public works is a big one. The parking authority, code enforcement, things that you might not think of. The bill. Louisville. That's a city agency.

00:11:29:06 - 00:11:47:15
Chris Seidt
So we have, two floating offices that we go with as the city IT department. They are on the river, and they float up and down. And when the river floods, we have to be able to keep them connected. The Louisville Zoo, I touched on that. That was kind of my origin story, public art. So we're doing a lot of work with public art right now.

00:11:47:17 - 00:12:05:14
Chris Seidt
We're building them a new website. I think that announcement is coming next week. So don't get mad that I'm announcing that a little early. You'll be able to look around at all the different public art, the statues, the murals and all that and see kind of where those came from and their backstory and really kind of, you know, dive into that.

00:12:05:14 - 00:12:29:21
Chris Seidt
Well, that's a big technology project for us. We're trying to get them onto a system that allows the public to be able to engage with that. We have 6000 people in our organization. There are 700,000 people that reside within Jefferson County that we consider our customers. Right. So everybody here pays either occupational taxes or property taxes or, or some other form of tax that funds the city's operations.

00:12:29:23 - 00:12:55:16
Chris Seidt
We have 200 buildings. That's anything from golf course pro shops. If you've been to Seneca Golf Course, that's one of our connected facilities. All the way to, 6 or 8 storey office buildings full of employees. A lot of our buildings are old. We deal with historic buildings like Metro Hall. They're approaching 200 years old. Running, tabling in those and providing Wi-Fi can be a real challenge for that.

00:12:55:18 - 00:13:19:15
Chris Seidt
So there's a strong mayor council form of government, originally formed in 1778. And I say that because, changing the trajectory of an organization that has existed for almost 250 years can be incredibly difficult. You know, we have a lot of things that are ingrained in the way that Louisville's always done it. And so I'll focus on, the things that we can change here in a few minutes.

00:13:19:16 - 00:13:38:08
Chris Seidt
We have 26 council members. So imagine your board of directors or, your elected board at your organization and how many people are on it. It's usually not that many. So we have, not only a mayor that we, have to keep up with, but we have 26 council members that represent each about 14 to 18,000 residents of Louisville.

00:13:38:08 - 00:14:08:11
Chris Seidt
And they're different geographic areas. There are currently five deputy mayors across our organization. I report up to one of the five that deals with central operations. Our budgets $1.2 billion a year. That would put us in the fortune, or. Sorry, the 5000. About midway off the list. So we're a pretty large organization. Our city budget is 30.5 million, and it's not quite as much as it probably needs to be, but we're working on that.

00:14:08:13 - 00:14:30:20
Chris Seidt
We have, you know, roughly 75 to 1 in terms of end users that we provide support for, for IT staff. So we're incredibly outmanned. We launched $90 million in new software over the last two years. So we spent five on an ERP and then HCM and the new police records management system and a new dispatch system, all sorts of things.

00:14:30:20 - 00:14:53:23
Chris Seidt
So, doing a lot of big project work there. I put this, slide up here to kind of show, where the money goes. This is all public safety. So half of what you will pay in taxes goes directly to those public safety agencies. It sits over in this little slide over here, along with finance and HR, a few other departments, fleet and facilities.

00:14:54:01 - 00:15:21:14
Chris Seidt
So, you know, quite a bit there if you're complaining about, trash pick up people, not mowing the grass. This is the piece of the pie that goes towards that. So if you ever want to talk to your elected officials, about, you know, concerns that you have around where the city's investing its money. This is a great chart to refer back to, because this defines our priorities, as a city.

00:15:21:16 - 00:15:42:02
Chris Seidt
So what do we do in metro technology or the full service IT provider? All those agencies I just talked about, we provide their services. What don't we do? The county clerk is a separate office. So if you do vehicle registrations, you do things like that, that's all. Run through a state system. And the county is a separate elected official.

00:15:42:04 - 00:16:00:23
Chris Seidt
We don't do the library. That is the one outlier is a city agency. We provide them with some other, air services and some back end support. But they, being a public facing agency, get a lot of E-Rate funding, and they do their things a little bit differently than we do, and then we do 24/7 support. So our help, this never closes.

00:16:00:23 - 00:16:20:23
Chris Seidt
We have police officers, we have firefighters, we have corrections officers. Number one, so we're not able to close our operations. So we provide continuous service for that. We have 82 employees full time in the IT department. We do rely on 20 contractors to help us pick up the load, from where we stand. We have 21,000 devices on our network.

00:16:21:03 - 00:16:49:21
Chris Seidt
I mentioned the 128 miles of fiber, and, we have 216 million cyber events annually that we track and respond to. I was talking to Eric earlier from Gcp's about our security team and why we have the number of people turned 16 million. Still outnumbers the 18 people that I have. My security team. As we've seen in recent time, cybersecurity challenges for city governments are are, scary.

00:16:49:23 - 00:17:06:06
Chris Seidt
I think it's it's really a tough time to be in city government. We have people trying to get it into our network continuous city. And cities don't receive the level of funding that they probably need to in order to keep the bad guys out. Now, I feel like we've done a good job of kind of keeping pace, but I think we need to close the gap.

00:17:06:06 - 00:17:28:15
Chris Seidt
Even still, from where we're at. The peak. Eric I'll go back here. So I you know, I talked a little bit about, our agency. I talked a little bit about city government. I wanted to tie together with this slide to kind of talk about how does it impact the community. Right. Normally you think all you're about back office function, right?

00:17:28:17 - 00:17:53:16
Chris Seidt
So we provide all the technology and support for the Real-Time Crime Center. I mentioned those 2000 cameras. There's a room full of people that watch those cameras continuously and try to get the police out of those areas as fast as they can, hopefully to try to prevent something from happening, but oftentimes to to solve the crime as quickly as we can, we deal with, you know, 1300 police, officers, they all have tech in their cars now, like you wouldn't believe.

00:17:53:18 - 00:18:19:06
Chris Seidt
Body worn cameras, dash cameras. They've got a computer in there that can provide them with that information. There's printer in there so they can hand out citations. Lots of different moving pieces. So we've got a team dedicated just to that support aspect. Talk again about the zoo. That's our orangutan, using an iPad to play music. So I always like to touch on, like, kind of the cool, fun stuff that we get to do as a city IT department.

00:18:19:06 - 00:18:36:20
Chris Seidt
So we do work in all the backs of the exhibit spaces to provide these types of encounters. There's a lot of times connectivity and Wi-Fi in every exhibit in the zoo. A touch on the dispatch center. These last two, this is really where it's kind of step forward in the last few years since the pandemic.

00:18:36:22 - 00:18:56:14
Chris Seidt
And this is all related to digital inclusion. So, there's a digital divide in our city. There's a percentage of our population, and it's higher than it needs to be that don't have any home broadband activity. It's running, I think, around 25% of our population. So if you look around the room, 1 in 4 people might not have a home internet connection today.

00:18:56:16 - 00:19:12:22
Chris Seidt
So we're doing two things. One, we've, rolled out new computers, and our community centers to have computer labs available for kids when they get out of school so that they have a resource to be able to get on, you know, on the internet, homework, do some research, whatever they want to do, they can game on them, too.

00:19:12:22 - 00:19:37:18
Chris Seidt
That's fine. I mean, sometimes you just got to blow off some steam. And then the other piece is we're doing what's called our connected Parks program. So our connected parks is a initiative that Mayor Greenberg ran on a couple of years ago when he was running for mayor, that he wanted to provide Wi-Fi in every metro park. I'm proud to say just starting this year, that we've already got 20 of those parks online, and we expect by June of next year that we'll have all 109 metro parks online.

00:19:37:19 - 00:19:59:07
Chris Seidt
So that's a big initiative for us. It's taking a lot of work and infrastructure to put that in place. Many parks don't have any improvements that we can put Wi-Fi equipment on. So we're having to install poles and power and those types of things. This picture down here in the center is that Alberta Jones Park. It's one of our new parks that the Parks Alliance, worked with Metro Parks to build out.

00:19:59:09 - 00:20:25:23
Chris Seidt
And we worked with them to make that our very first connected park. It is the heaviest utilization of any public Wi-Fi park out of the 20 that we've done so far in terms of daily use and data consumption. We know that there's a gap in that neighborhood for people that have lack of home connectivity. We've prioritized building in those areas intentionally to make sure that we can kind of close that divide.

00:20:26:01 - 00:20:45:11
Chris Seidt
And then, this is one other example of tech. I think I'll I'll play it here real quickly, just briefly. For those who haven't seen it, this is our Motrin, Tiger. She just had a baby about two weeks ago. And we have a cub cam in the exhibit. And so let me see if I can get this to play just for one second.

00:20:45:11 - 00:21:04:07
Chris Seidt
I'm not going to play the whole video, but I think it does a good job of it back here. So this is our Cub cam. So you can see the cub laying down here with mom. We put cameras in exhibits like this. The giraffe, just had a baby that they announced, I think, yesterday morning. It actually happened a couple days ago.

00:21:04:08 - 00:21:25:15
Chris Seidt
We got the watch, and they'll. They'll put a calf cam out there for the the, the giraffe here soon. But, we're really excited to be able to do work like this, to be able to, you know, have educational experiences for the public and to have these cameras in place so that people can see, kind of what's going on in the, in the back, background of their zoo.

00:21:25:17 - 00:21:46:15
Chris Seidt
Let me transition here. So talk a little bit about, you know, they've talked about the city, have talked about me, talked about some of the things that we do. I want to talk a little bit about highly my team. So I took over in January of 2018. And when I took over, I looked at our existing strategic plan for the department.

00:21:46:17 - 00:22:08:16
Chris Seidt
Taking care of people was number five on our list. At least it was in the top five. I will give credit for that. Personnel turnover rates were running pretty high at that point. There was a leadership change. Partly attributed to this, but 18% turnover in the agency. It's it's pretty high for for what we've seen.

00:22:08:18 - 00:22:29:14
Chris Seidt
So we've moved taking care of people up to number one on our list. And you have to be intentional about it's not just a buzzword, right? Like, you can't just say it and then not do anything. So how did we do that? Investing in training. So making sure that people have opportunities to learn and grow. And that can even mean that they might grow out of our organization.

00:22:29:16 - 00:22:50:12
Chris Seidt
A lot of organizations tend to get really possessive of, well, if I train you, I want you to sign this agreement that says you'll pay me back if you leave within a year. We don't do that. I want people that want to be there, and. And I want them to want to be there. Right. So if you provide those training opportunities, giving them that chance to grow is step one, step two took a little longer.

00:22:50:17 - 00:23:18:01
Chris Seidt
And that was really emphasizing internal promotion. So working on giving people the opportunity to take that next step. I think that, that was probably the most painful piece of the changes that we had to implement. Because I think a lot of people, when they saw one person move, immediately thought, well, I'm the next right. And sometimes people are at different points in their career and their trajectory and their experiences that you can't do everybody at the same time.

00:23:18:03 - 00:23:36:05
Chris Seidt
The other thing about city government that's a little bit painful is that we're very, very transparent with salary information. So everybody in the city government knows what everybody else makes. So when you give somebody a promotion or if somebody an increase, everybody knows it. Within a couple of weeks it shows up on a public dashboard you can go out to.

00:23:36:05 - 00:24:01:15
Chris Seidt
And I'll share links to all of our open data here at the end. That can present challenges because people get upset when they see somebody that they maybe perceive, wasn't as deserving as they think they are themselves. So it's definitely an area that we've had to work, having an open door policy. I know it's kind of cheesy and and maybe, isn't the right way to phrase it.

00:24:01:17 - 00:24:20:13
Chris Seidt
My door is open 95% of the day. I close it very briefly for calls when I have to, and then it's right back open. And it's not just sitting at my desk waiting for somebody to come in to me. It's getting out into the office space and walking around and talking to the employees. Right. It's making sure that they feel seen and heard, continuously.

00:24:20:13 - 00:24:39:09
Chris Seidt
Because I think one of the things that we struggle with as a city government is, you know, making sure that people's voices are raised. So taking taking the time, spending it with them and then taking that information and making sure it gets to the appropriate level of city government to take care of an issue. Alex kind of talked about meetings earlier in the, in the Y.

00:24:39:09 - 00:24:58:19
Chris Seidt
Right. I frankly would just like to see an overall reduction in the. So people spend a ton of time in meetings, and if they're in the meeting, they're probably not doing the work that actually needs to be done. They're just talking about it. So, I definitely like the ly there. And I'm going to try to use that in our meetings to do some further reduction there.

00:24:58:21 - 00:25:16:10
Chris Seidt
I talked a little earlier about, you know, the city government's been around since 1778 focusing on the things that we can change. If if something comes up and somebody is upset about it and they want to see a change. I'm pretty quick to acknowledge whether or not I think there's a realistic chance of that happening. Right? I've been around the city for 22 years.

00:25:16:12 - 00:25:37:22
Chris Seidt
I've been. This is my fourth mayor. The entire Metro Council, minus three people has turned over in the time that I've worked there. Right. So, there's a lot of people coming and going, and it's not to say that'll never happen, but if it hasn't changed through four administrations and, you know, dozens of council, officials through the years, probably not going to happen.

00:25:38:00 - 00:25:57:05
Chris Seidt
You know, meet with people where you need to meet them. This is another kind of key point that I wanted to touch on. So, talk a little bit about communication this morning. I think different people have different expectations of where they want to be met and their communication. I have people that report directly to me in my leadership team that prefer that we communicate over text.

00:25:57:10 - 00:26:18:01
Chris Seidt
I have people that prefer that we only chat over a phone call. I have people that want to just send me an email, and I have people that want to have one on one every other week, and I do all of those things to help meet them where they need to be met out. And and because of that, we've had incredible stability, I think, on our leadership team compared to some of our other, peers.

00:26:18:03 - 00:26:43:03
Chris Seidt
I'll talk about this one briefly. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I love a good strategy. We continuously work on our strategic plans as an organization. But if the culture is not there and the people aren't bought in, just. You might as well put it up and throw it away. Be flexible. I've always found that, people, often times when they have difficult situations come up either in their professional life or in their personal life.

00:26:43:03 - 00:26:58:06
Chris Seidt
They need you to provide that flexibility. That's one of the things that we really try to focus on is making sure that we meet people, with that flexibility so that they have the opportunity. Maybe they need to travel out of town for a funeral for a few days, and they want to tell it work because they don't expect that they're going to be off on the entire time.

00:26:58:09 - 00:27:14:04
Chris Seidt
Cool. You can take three days. Go for that, too. And then the last piece that I want to talk about, kind of from a leadership standpoint, is, the mini taste great. After you get some women's. Right. So somebody hinges some lemons, maybe you got some bad news. Try to squeeze them and put some sugar in there.

00:27:14:04 - 00:27:30:09
Chris Seidt
Right? I mean, like, it's it's, we're all handed difficult situations as IT leaders, right? And we always have something that we wish we could take back. And lemons aren't always the best thing if you just bite into them. But if you take those and try to add them to something else and maybe, make the best of it.

00:27:30:09 - 00:27:55:10
Chris Seidt
So those are kind of the the core tenets of how I lead my team at that local metro. And then I will go about how I got to you got to understand. Oh, cool. All right. Sweet. I got time that I'm on time. I thought I was behind schedule here. So, Mayor Grimmer stuff. Right? Priorities. We talked a little about strategic planning and how, you know, people have to be brought in on that, right?

00:27:55:12 - 00:28:18:17
Chris Seidt
So this is his plan for improving walkable. And, you know, you can kind of see his number one priorities aligned with where the budget allocation was at. So 50% of the budget is being spent on public safety. And I can tell you it's higher than that because some of the spend in my agency also goes towards that. The team that we support for cameras and that like a truck and all the repair budget, that's all in the IT budget.

00:28:18:17 - 00:28:42:05
Chris Seidt
So it's actually more than 50%. He wants to improve affordable housing in Louisville. So you're seeing a lot of investment in that space cleaning up the mess. I hope that you all have seen the improvements that have happened here. And I know it's difficult to see if you don't drive all over the community all the time. If you go back, you know, a few years, the amount of trash that was blowing around in different parts of the community, it was it was pretty intense.

00:28:42:11 - 00:29:02:01
Chris Seidt
We've got teams dedicated to doing that, clean up pretty regularly now, and, and we do take, tweets. So if you want to tweet us where you see, a problem out there, you can tweet, Metro 311 and we'll take take out information and send somebody out. The mayor announced his universal pre-K program this year.

00:29:02:01 - 00:29:22:04
Chris Seidt
So he thinks that one of the things that will help to disrupt violence in our community is getting kids into school early. And so there's not a lot of pre-K options out there for kids right now. Wanted to make sure that pre-K was available to any four year old in the community. And so we've started down that, process with a $5 million investment this year, protecting the rights of women.

00:29:22:04 - 00:29:43:05
Chris Seidt
So we've established an office for women in our in our organization, and they regularly are doing, women's ambassador programs and women's leadership programing, within the city government and for the community at large, and then making it easier to invest in Louisville. Y'all may have seen the news announcement recently about Leda, which is the new local Economic development Alliance.

00:29:43:07 - 00:30:04:02
Chris Seidt
That is, modeled after several cities that have built similar organizations that are a public private partnership and then healthier parks and healthier cities. We're playing into that space, and it, through our connected Parks program, making sure that there's accessibility out there. One cool thing about the connected parks, we've started partnering with Air Pollution Control District.

00:30:04:03 - 00:30:24:11
Chris Seidt
And they are now putting neighborhood level sensors in the park since we've got the connectivity already there so that we can provide real time, neighborhood level air quality monitoring and look for smells and other types of things so that people have awareness for that. If you go on our website, you can see all of the, air quality monitors that we've got across the community.

00:30:24:13 - 00:30:46:06
Chris Seidt
So we have a lot of challenges. I touched a little bit about, salaries. We had a compensation study completed last year. It showed that a lot of our staff are underpaid by up to 30% versus the market. Despite that, we had 7% turnover last year. So we've been able to stem the tide. And I think part of that is because we have some work that provides some purpose.

00:30:46:06 - 00:31:10:06
Chris Seidt
So the end of the day, you're giving back to the community that you that you live in that, that you work in. And I think a lot of people resonate with that. Kind of mission in our organization. Yes. All compensation or is that just simply looking at a study so that the salary. So it was a salary specific study because I think you guys do a very good job.

00:31:10:08 - 00:31:32:16
Chris Seidt
You know, as far as benefits and retirements, you know. So yeah, that's a that's a good point. So benefits have changed through the years. I'll I'll give a couple examples. So I've got an 18 year old and a now 13 year old. When my 18 year old was born, which was oh six. We paid $250 for my baby to come home with us.

00:31:32:16 - 00:31:59:11
Chris Seidt
Right? That was how good our insurance was. It was great. You know, at 10 or $15. We walked out the door, we got a baby. We got a car seat. We're good. Fast forward five years later to, 2011, when when Finn was born. And, now we were up to 1250. Right. So just in five years that, you know, out of pocket costs for the employee went up, you know what, 500%?

00:31:59:13 - 00:32:25:12
Chris Seidt
Yeah, it was a it was a pretty big increase pretty quickly. And the other thing that changed in 2014 with the state legislature is that the pension program changed for city and county employees. So, I'm what they call a tier one employee. So, I predate that time frame, which means if I do 27 years of service with the organization, I get a full pension benefit starting the day that I get 27 years.

00:32:25:14 - 00:32:44:18
Chris Seidt
Our newest employees are bringing what they call tier three. And tier three is kind of a hybrid 401 K type model. So there is no defined end to your your service. So it's not it's not as robust as it used to be. So those have been challenges. And I think a lot of our employees and it's mandatory.

00:32:44:18 - 00:33:09:06
Chris Seidt
That's the 11 years. So like you're forced to contribute you know 5% of your salary at 6%. Now all of your salary to that. And then the city puts in an appropriate amount, but it can be a challenge for people to, to retain them long term like we used to with that tier one pension benefit we've benchmarked against other cities and counties of our size Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, Nashville.

00:33:09:06 - 00:33:25:15
Chris Seidt
They're a little bit bigger than us, but it's, you know, proportionately close, in terms of population. And what we found is that we're about half the size for IT organization that we should be, that's a recurring theme. You'll see a lot of that. I think one of the things that I worry about most with my team is burnout.

00:33:25:17 - 00:33:51:08
Chris Seidt
And just number of projects, the the volume of work, it's things that we're trying to to get better. And we do try to supplement where we can. Other challenges. Vendors that sell government software are terrible. And and I don't say that lightly. I don't so like you. And I'll just like, we use workday for our HCM and our Europe, right?

00:33:51:08 - 00:34:14:07
Chris Seidt
We use real tools that a lot of other organizations in this room are probably using, but there's not a lot of businesses that sell permitting software. Right. There's not a lot of businesses that sell licensing software that, you know, you you get a license to open a liquor store, right? Those are very government focused, and there's just not a lot of players in the space.

00:34:14:07 - 00:34:32:23
Chris Seidt
And so we've really kind of struggled finding the right partners in those spaces. So if you've ever had a bad experience with with city government, and I'll attribute a lot of that to the fact that we don't have a lot of choices unless we just want to develop our own. We don't have a development team today that could take on that work.

00:34:33:01 - 00:34:51:21
Chris Seidt
You know, having 41 departments and 41 different lines of business, you've seen the variety of stuff that we do here, competing interests, who goes first, who goes 41st. Somebody is going to be last on the priority list. So that's a that's a thing that we continuously struggle with. And I talked about the bad guys in their interest in our data.

00:34:52:02 - 00:35:11:03
Chris Seidt
If you've kept up with the City of Columbus hack that just happened a couple of weeks ago, that's 6.5TB of really sensitive data exported out of their network. And they've already released three of it online. And police officers in Columbus are already having people over the bank accounts and their training and everything else. Class action lawsuit against the city government.

00:35:11:05 - 00:35:33:02
Chris Seidt
If you want to know, this stuff keeps me up at night. There you go. But, you know, flipping funding the towns are a little more positive. Note here's the things that I think are going to kind of revolutionize, you know, city services and the way that we do things in Louisville. I think generative AI is going to help us deal with constituent complaints and questions more frequently than what we're able to do today.

00:35:33:02 - 00:35:55:02
Chris Seidt
Metro three more runs a great program. They celebrated their 35th anniversary yesterday. It's been around since 1989. And, you know, it's a great, great product, but sometimes you got to sit on hold for 30 minutes. I'd like to see us get better at that by having online chat bots that I. They can answer your question off of our very robust knowledge database.

00:35:55:04 - 00:36:15:15
Chris Seidt
You know, we're doubling down on customer relationship management. We've talked a little bit about the software that the government vendors provide. We think that maybe our path forward is putting more commercial solutions out there, such as a Salesforce to front end a lot of those systems, and then basically let those systems do what they're good at, which is issuing out the permit or the license.

00:36:15:17 - 00:36:38:01
Chris Seidt
We're working really hard to recruit more internet service providers to the area. So about half the city of Louisville right now is served by, fiber ISP. Usually it's AT&T or igloo. Results. Their service about half of it has maybe spectrum, as as their best option. There will be more news coming on this later this month, so I'll just leave it at that.

00:36:38:02 - 00:36:56:21
Chris Seidt
And then, focusing on cybersecurity, we've talked about our challenges. We're adding two new positions, later this year. I didn't announce them this morning, but we will be looking to recruit a red team, member for our team. And we'll also be looking for a threat intelligence person to work across the community to talk with organizations.

00:36:56:21 - 00:37:15:17
Chris Seidt
Like. You're also to understand the threats that we're seeing and share that information across a broader audience. And with that, I've got two QR codes up here in the left. One takes you to our city website. It's your city website. Tons of information out there. The second one over here, it's a fairly new thing for us.

00:37:15:17 - 00:37:31:13
Chris Seidt
We just did it a couple of years ago. It's our open data portal, so I mentioned you could look up city salaries. I also want you to know that you can look up every transaction that the city has ever done in terms of spent. So you can go out there and look by department, by vendor, there's all sorts of things you can see out there.

00:37:31:13 - 00:37:42:08
Chris Seidt
So if you want to look at that information, it's all publicly available to you. I'd encourage you to check it out. Now I'm definitely going to try to get my data team in with that data that I heard earlier this morning. And with that, thank you for your time.