On Friday, March 30th, we had the distinct pleasure of hosting the CIO/Comissioner and Director of MIS, respectively, of Suffolk County. The indefatigueable Sharon Cates-Williams, and the engaging Doug Miller. Doug spoke about the work the county has done in the GIS field, creating a very rich database of geolocated information and making it available to all the municipalities and first responders in the field. The applications are manifold, from helping tax assessors make accurate assessments, ( groans from the audience... ) to helping first responders possess critical knowledge on residents with special needs. Fire departments can now have maps of their districts with an overlay of the houses that contain folks with disabilities, an extremely helpful feature. Doug also detailed some of the automated tools that the police are using, such as OCR cameras that scan license plates as a cruiser drives, checking those plates against the State's databases for outstanding warrants and other issues, and then notifying the officer that there's something to be attended to around him.
Ms. Cates-Williams came to speak about the Long Island Wi-Fi project, which has been a focus of my attention since the county executive mentioned it in his state of the county speech in 2006. Her vision for the project, is an outdoor focused network with three tiers of service, a free tier and two paid, higher speed grades, one that enables mobile county workers to be more efficient, and timelier in their responses to changing conditions, with the ability to stay connected to data on the road. Department of Social Services workers and Probation officers were just two of the areas where she illustrated the benefits of mobility.
