Utah tech leader reflects on his dual HR role and modernization
Divya Kulkarni via Getty Images
By
Chris Teale
Brock Arnold manages both human resources and IT for Roosevelt in the northeast of the state, and took “antiquated” systems that reduced payroll from a three-day task to three hours.
In small cities and counties across the United States, often one staff member is tasked with multiple jobs, including managing IT.
That’s the story in Roosevelt, Utah, a city with around 7,000 residents in the northeast of the state. There, Brock Arnold managed the local government’s human resources, having been involved in HR in some capacity since his teenage years. When the role of IT manager opened up, he found himself thrust into it.
“I joke with people sometimes and tell them that the reason that I'm over at IT is because I'm the person who knows the most about it,” Arnold said in a recent interview.
He came into a city government that he described as “antiquated in our systems,” and decided he wanted to help move operations into the cloud, not only to help make those processes more efficient but also more secure against cyberattacks. He quickly moved the city onto Tyler Technologies’ local government software platform and soon saw dramatic results.
For example, running payroll for the city’s 51 full-time and approximately 180 part-time employees would take three days, and require supervisors to come into the office on a Sunday afternoon to approve payments. Other typical processes for employees, like approving invoices and requesting time off, also had to be done in person. Now, that process takes a matter of hours as it is hosted in the cloud, and can be done off-site.
“We started small by just trying to figure out how we can move our access directory into the cloud,” Arnold said. “How can we make this easier for our supervisors to see their account information, to put in invoices, to track their budgets? That's what led us on the road of investigating how to update our software and our systems.”
Beyond those efficiency gains, the city also has used its modernization journey to speed up more public-facing improvements.
People would often come to the city’s animal shelter at night and leave their pets tied to the gas meter outside the building for workers to find in the morning. Arnold said the city decided it needed to put cameras at the shelter, which in the past would have required multiple phone calls,approvals and layers of bureaucracy.
But by using the Tyler platform, Arnold was able to get a quote inside two hours for a camera purchase and installation, then had the city manager log in remotely from a conference to approve that acquisition. A relatively small improvement showed employees that modernization could work, and can be done so safely.
“I know not every situation is like that, but that was a really quick way to get some buy-in for people to say, ‘Look at the efficiency that we're creating here when we need to solve a problem,’” Arnold said. “It's been really great to switch to that from an efficiency side, but then from a security side, I don't have to worry about having to have a [virtual private network] into the system to get somebody access. They just log in with their credentials and their multi-factor authentication into the cloud, and they're on the system, and I know that it's secure.”
That cybersecurity aspect of moving to the cloud is critical, Arnold said, especially in the wake of Iran-linked hackers conducting cyberattacks against various small water systems and transportation agencies in multiple states. Given the threats faced, especially to smaller governments that may be more vulnerable, partnerships have sprung up to help them mitigate those risks. The cloud helps too, Arnold said.
“I think all of us in general have our heads in the sand a little bit when it comes to cyber, because we just don't understand the full scope of the danger,” he said. “A big part of it was just trying to move out of those localized servers so that we could be better protected.”