Morrisroe describes software update approvals and failover planning

Obviously, you know, given what happened at 911, we have a few more questions about updates performed on the regular.

Are, you know, software updates of that nature happening on a regular basis?

Are they predetermined?

And then who determines when an update should occur and who within OTR or 301 must approve before it is deployed?

Great.

Thank you for that question.

I get to expand a little bit on the work that we do.

So there are a number of levels of approval.

Software updates are very much our focus, as you can imagine, even without the reference to the earlier August event.

But this one, I would say, goes back 23 years as well.

It's grounded in 301's approach that we must always be available.

And there's always times where you're going to have scheduled updates and scheduled outages.

Then you've got to have a backup, and you've got to have a backup to the backup.

So that's something that we take, whether it's the telecom side, whether it's the application side, take very serious.

And therefore, we have a number of processes in place.

I'll just speak at a high level, and I have the privilege of also supporting the cities.

internal customer service desk, the citywide service desk.

Within that team, there's a number of folks who focus solely on change management, as we call it.

So I can kind of speak to that in both ways.

But there's always a need for software updates, software changes, software upgrades.

It's a very controlled process.

The teams that need to do it.

Put forth what they need to do.

There's a body that understands what's happening.

So your change, you have to think about your change, but also will, in fact, somebody else's change.

They all go through an approval process.

It's pretty standard.

It can be on a daily basis.

It can be on a cycle basis.

But there's a pretty standard protocol of being able to go back and look at

Here's the changes we need to make.

Here's why we need to make them.

And has everybody signed off on making those changes?

Since the 911 outage, has that prompted you all to review or change procedures governing software updates to 311?

Thank you for that.

I will say yes, because any event that occurs forces us to do just that.

So this winter when we had extreme winter weather, this summer when we had heat waves,

you know, dating back, again, you mentioned the history of 311, but dating back to their earliest days when there was a transit strike in 2003.

That causes us to think about things, whether it's a natural disaster, whether it's a city, sorry, what's a technical change, but anything that occurs, we have a process through our emergency management resources on our team.

We also partner with

New York City Emergency Management, but within our own team, we'll evaluate.

anything that is out of the norm and say, how would we handle this?

Are we covered?

Are we set?

Are we able to do that?