A new report finds New Jersey’s local government operations are fraught with technological risk.

medfr06751, ThinkSTock
medfr06751, ThinkSTock
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The study, “Managing Technology Risks Through Technological Proficiency,” recommends that local leaders focus on technological proficiency to minimize risk and maximize productivity, before problems arise.

“Over the past decade and a half technology has been slowly creeping into more and more things that local government agencies do, and we’re finding now that governments are so deep with technology that they’ve never had to think about before,” said Marc Pfeiffer, the author of the study and assistant director and senior policy fellow at Rutgers’ Bloustein Local Government Research Center.

Pfeiffer said “if governments aren’t technologically proficient in how they manage their technology, they can find that their services that their citizens rely on every day won’t get delivered, and they won’t meet citizen expectations.”

According to Pfeiffer, everyone is aware that cyber security is an issue, however there are several other areas of risk that government agencies need to think about.

“Those other risks include for example, operational risks, financial risks, legal risks, risks to their reputation and a category that we’ve called overall societal risks,” he said. “They all have a different impact on the ability of the government to do its job and meet increasing citizen expectations for how governments use and deliver technology services.

He said if a municipal computer system gets corrupted, health inspectors may not be able to get the information to do their inspections, because the components they rely on may stop working.

In addition, glitches that slow or stop the flow information on the local level can disrupt essential services and cause problems, “and they’re going to happen at a greater and greater frequency as time goes on, because we’re becoming so much more reliant on technology.”

He added if you don’t manage your technology competently “you may not be able to handle your financial transactions, you may not be able to pay your bills on a timely basis, you may not be able to get tax bills out on a timely basis.”

So what needs to be done to improve things?

Pfeiffer believes governments need to take a hard look at their technology setups and figure out “what happens when things go wrong, and what we are doing to make sure we’re not going to have those mistakes?”

This is important, he said, because if a town runs into a problem and can’t provide services that citizens expect, “that has a reputational risk, it can affect the reputation that a government has with its citizens, and affect the future of people who are in charge, the elected officials.”

According to Pfeiffer, government generally runs about five years behind the private sector when it comes to adopting new technologies, but citizens are expecting new technologies to be adopted because they’re using it in their day to day life.

“Problems are arising because local leaders are not aware of it, they haven’t really thought about what the problems are," he said.

He said the goal of the report is to try and help municipalities catch up, and to make them aware of the risks they face, while giving them suggestions on how they can "get their arms around it.”

He suggested local leaders should establish policies to safeguard their technology.

“They need to establish governance policy, who makes the decisions on technology, what’s the role of the governing body in making those decisions and making policies, and develop a technology plan and tie it to the annual budget," he said. "The third thing they need to do is improve the cyber-hygiene of their employees, which is training and refreshing the training of their employees, so when they get an email that looks suspicious, they don’t click on it, and they also have to make sure they’re delivering their technology competently.”

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