GMIS in My Own Words: Rauf Bolden, IT Director, City of Orange Beach, Alabama

The GMIS family comes from many backgrounds. Personally, I am a web developer and coder who

inherited the IT role in a small town of 5,000 people. I can manage both Web and IT because the city has

a very capable IT consultant and other vendors who take care of HDD failures and so on. Technology

does not have to be the face of the city like Fire, Police or Public Works. I argue, the city should not be

the job, but government should create jobs in the private sector, thus lowering cost of insurance, benefits

and so on for our taxpayers.

The web really became important to us during Hurricane Ivan in 2004 when people needed information

quickly that was reliable about their families, condos and businesses in Orange Beach. As we waded

through the process, it became painfully evident that our DSL infrastructure was woefully inadequate to

support the gargantuan requests we had for e-mail, PDFs, forms and other correspondence.

We responded with the formation of our Telecommunications Committee that was spearheaded by our

local financial expert Al Bradley. He led us until his passing in July 2014.

Part of Al’s legacy was to insist on a fiber-optic backbone for our city, so we went out to bid and Harbor

Communications won our business. The City Attorney added a rider that they provide four strands of

dark fiber to every city building for us to use as part of their franchise agreement.

As funds were short both before and after the oil spill in 2010, we slowly connected all the city

facilities and simultaneously added public Wi-Fi access at every building and park, except the sewer

plant. It is just too far out in the woods.

Today, we enjoy a 100 Mbps pipe that sustains all of our communications, allows us to broadcast on the

SEC Network, provides Osprey Cameras on a 24/7 basis and feeds our primary application: Google apps

for government.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share!