WHO WE ARE

Our History

Prior to 2002, every department in the City of Beckley was responsible for running their own individual IT initiatives. Thus, there was no unified city-wide IT policy, and the city’s IT resources were fragmented. In 2002, Mayor Emmit Pugh created the IT department in order to combine these resources into one central point of management.

In January 2004, BITS absorbed the IT staff from the Beckley Police Department in order to expand our service capabilities. In May 2008, we added an additional IT Technician to undertake maintenance and service tasks for the city’s expanding network of IT assets. In April 2010, BITS added a full-time Administrative Assistant to handle miscellaneous office duties, allowing the IT technicians and administrators to focus full-time on maintaining the city’s IT infrastructure.

Our Objectives

BITS has many objectives, both external and internal. Some of these include:

• Providing high-tech business solutions for the City of Beckley
• Bringing to fruition the full capability of current applications and systems
• Improving processes to increase efficiency, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction
• Increasing the capabilities of the IT staff, through continuing education

Our Responsibilities

The main overall responsibility of the Beckley Information Technology Services department is to manage the technology infrastructure of the City of Beckley. In order to do this, we constantly analyze the technology needs of the individual departments and recommend solutions. We must remain current on technology issues and trends to evaluate how changes in the industry will impact City operations.

BITS is responsible for managing a citywide network consisting of 17 locations and hundreds of servers, workstations, laptops, and mobile units. Agreements with several outside agencies allow us to provide them with remote access to various law enforcement services. We support a large mix of applications and databases, ensure licensing compliance for all software citywide, establish and verify hardware and software standards and compatibility, and establish, manage, and verify user and systems security.