County IT Department to request additional personnel in next budget request

Thurston County’s IT Department wants to request additional personnel in its next budget request, IT Director Sherrie Ilg informed the Board of County Commissioners on Thursday, August 31.

Ilg said they would request an additional full-time employee for its network team and hope to make permanent a temporary position in its applications team.

The network team works on the daily administration and securing of the county’s core infrastructure and operational technologies. Ilg said that the team has not seen an increase in personnel for at least the past five years despite the increase in equipment they manage and the staff they support.

Meanwhile, the applications team works on developing, implementing, and supporting applications that county offices and departments use. They also evaluate software requests, manage cloud services, and maintain public-facing county websites.

Applications Team Supervisor Lonnie Richards said that the temporary employee they seek to give permanent employment handled 40% of all service requests during 2022 as other members of the team worked on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) project.

Ilg added that they are seeking to improve its project management office by filling a leadership role that has been vacant for nine months. The project management office focuses on tracking all of the county’s projects and identifying repeatable processes that can be used in varied situations.