Most IT writing assumes a company. There's a budget owner who can say yes, a security team down the hall, and a quarter that ends when the board says it does. Running IT for a city works differently, and the differences are where most of the hard lessons are.
A few of them, to set the scene:
- Everything is a record. Email, Teams chats, ticket notes and the screenshot you sent a vendor can all be requested by the public. That changes how you write, what you keep and how long you keep it.
- Purchases go through a process. Quotes, bids, contract review, sometimes a council vote. A tool you could buy with a card in the private sector might take a fiscal year here.
- The users are everyone. Clerks, police, public works crews on tablets, a planning department living in GIS, elected officials on personal phones, and residents using the services you keep running.
- Some systems can't go down. When dispatch, water treatment and the utility billing portal share a network, a maintenance window isn't a casual decision.
- The team is small. Often a handful of people covering what a company would split across six departments.
What you'll find here
Writeups of real projects and real problems from that world: what we were trying to do, what broke, what worked, and what I'd do differently. Expect posts on identity and MFA rollouts, Microsoft 365 in government clouds, GIS and the departments that depend on it, retention and records requests, budgeting and procurement, and the day-to-day of keeping a municipal network healthy.
When something is a checklist, it'll be a checklist you can copy. When something is a judgment call, I'll say so.
Why it's anonymous
The lessons are more useful than the name of the city they came from. Keeping the site anonymous lets me be honest about what went wrong without putting coworkers, vendors or residents on the spot, and it keeps details about a real network off the internet.
That means every story is sanitized before it's posted: names, locations, dates, hostnames and anything that could help someone target a real system are changed or removed. I wrote up how I do that in its own post, in case it's useful for your own writing.
Say hello
If you work in local government IT, or support people who do, I'd like to hear what you're dealing with. Write to the address on the About page, or subscribe to the RSS feed to get new posts.