BIS 437 – Rapid IT Development Management, Town of Windham Projects

Recently the BIS department has teamed up with the Town of Windham to work on multiple municipal IT Projects to help develop the municipality to use more modern techniques and tools regarding their Information Technology, Financial Technology, and Fire Department Technology. This semester so far, we have talked to multiple town officials such as Robert Zarnetske the Town Manager, Ronald Palmer Jr. the Fire Chief, Doug Lary one of the Directors on the Taxing District Board of Directors for Willimantic, and Lisa Madden the Regional Revenue Collector.

During our first discussion with them, we were able to get brief understanding of what they were looking for to help them with their daily activities and to help them be more efficient to make up for the limited number of resources the municipality has to work with. Some ideas that Rob Zarnetske provided us with are the following two projects:

Windham Document Access & Digitization Initiative (WDADI)

The objective of this project will be to digitize, organize, and publish the Town of Windham’s public records, making them searchable, accessible, and easy to navigate. We will be using Toshiba OCR, Microsoft Teams for meeting transcription, RingCentral AI Receptionist for information capture from FAQs and documents, and CivicPlus for public access, while training municipal employees for ongoing sustainability

Windham Online Project Dashboard – With and Without ChatGPT Assistant

This project consists of creating a publicly accessible project dashboard on windhamct.gov using Microsoft Project for the web as the single source of truth, displayed in CivicPlus via a user-friendly interface for publishing or unpublishing content. Having two potential plans gives the Town leadership the option between aa low-cost, solely dashboard deployment, or a higher-cost AI integrated solution that improves community engagement and information retrieval.
Lisa Madden expressed concerns about efficiency in the municipality regarding developing new tools to improve transparency in the Town’s financial reporting, while Fire Chief Palmer discussed the implementation of an AI module within the departments medical call software system.