NALIT News | Summer 2024

2024 NALIT Professional Development Seminar

The 2024 NALIT Professional Development Seminar will be in Richmond, Va., Sept. 16-19. Topics will include: "Deliberate Creativity: Three Elements of Innovation;" "AI in Legislatures: Policies and Strategies;" "AI Tools for Developers;" "Cybersecurity in Legislative Systems;" "Building Your IT Teams: Cross Training and Succession;" "Client Communication;" "Improving Help Desk Performance;" and "DevOps: Identifying and Embracing the Changing Landscape" "The Practical Side of Cybersecurity."

As always, the seminar will feature the following signature NALIT events:

• Five Minutes of Fame: One person from each participating chamber or legislative IT has five minutes (strictly enforced) to share anything they choose about IT. You can talk about hardware, software, infrastructure, application development, staffing, budgeting … You name it. Advance sign-up is required.

• Application Showcases: Each legislative IT office that submits a showcase will have a table in the ballroom. They will do several demonstrations of their application as our attendees move around the room to visit each showcase. Advance sign-up is required.

• Birds of a Feather Roundtables: Meet in small groups with your colleagues to discuss questions directly relevant to your position-whether management, support/help desk, infrastructure and systems administration, or applications development and programming.

Register for the 2024 NALIT Professional Development Seminar

Career Development for Legislative IT Teams

By Shay Wilson

The last couple of years have proved that recruitment and retention can be real challenges. I don't have any innovative solutions for finding new people, but I hope that my colleagues in other legislatures are willing to share ideas. What I would like to explore today is how to keep the people we already have.

According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of workers leaving employment cite lack of opportunities for advancement as a reason for leaving, only slightly behind low pay. Creating opportunities for our colleagues to continue in their professional growth is an obligation for all of us in the technology industry.

There are three pillars to creating opportunities for advancement: learning, practicing and creating a career path. The goal is to challenge our colleagues and let them grow and feel the success of that growth. If we can provide those opportunities, we can help them elevate their careers.

Provide Access to and Time for Training

"The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay." -Henry Ford

There are a lot of IT training resources online at affordable rates, so I won't go into this subject in detail. It is important that managers find these resources and make them available to staff, and that managers to provide time for staff to utilize these resources.

Allow People to Practice Their New Skills

Creating cross-training opportunities between groups and between senior and junior members lets the senior members benefit from the assistance of junior members and learn management skills, while allowing junior members to practice their skills and benefit a colleague. In addition, we can help our colleagues to grow by removing unnecessary obstacles and delegating responsibilities to them when we find they can handle them.

Create a Career Path

Finding a career path can be difficult without help from leadership. There can be a great distance between our different roles within the IT sector. Shrinking that distance can help. In Alaska, we created flex positions for some roles to establish career ladders, but we do not lose the original position when a staff member is promoted. The flex positions allow employees to learn and, upon achieving specific knowledge and abilities, move up to the next level.

We also provide cross-training so that team members learn one another's jobs. With cross-training in place, there may be internal hires who will be a natural fit when we have job openings. We worked with our leadership to ensure most of our positions can grow so that our staff can earn promotions without having to wait for vacancies to open up. This creates career paths that employees can follow from the front lines all the way to senior networking or into application development. Career paths allow all our people to challenge themselves at their current levels and set goals for the future.

Shay Wilson is the chief information officer for Alaska's Legislative Affairs Agency.

2024 NALIT Legislative Exchange (NLEP)-Call for Participants

On behalf of the Executive Committee, we are inviting NALIT members to participate in the NALIT Legislative Exchange Program (NLEP).

Legislative IT personnel handle unique responsibilities and play essential roles within their institutions. The LEP gives selected participants the opportunity to learn about processes and procedures employed by other state legislatures. Additionally, the exchange facilitates the sharing of ideas and innovations, resulting in a mutually rewarding professional development experience.

Selected participants will be matched with a host state, where they will spend three to five days observing and working with legislative staff. The exact agenda for each visit will be worked out between the exchange participant and the host state.

Those participating in the program are responsible for their travel and lodging expenses. However, to help partially offset these costs, NALIT will award a small stipend to each participant. The amount of this stipend will be determined based upon the number of program participants.

We encourage you to discuss this opportunity with your supervisor and apply for the 2024 program. For more details on qualification requirements, please see the attached NLEP application. Only complete applications will be considered.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to Sept. 30, 2024.

Please do not hesitate to contact Kae Warnock should you have any questions.

NALIT NLEP: Missouri-Wisconsin Exchange

By Lane Trezise

The IT profession is just as much about communication and collaboration as it is about the technology that we support. In that spirit, the NALIT Legislative Exchange Program was established to practice collaboration beyond one's own team and state. This trip provided an opportunity for me to learn how the Missouri legislative IT team supports its customers, as well as share my own experiences, challenges and successes from my time working with legislative IT team in Wisconsin.

Trip Details

• Technical Services Team

• Learned about the help desk system, created in-house by the development team, and saw how tickets are created and how offices can place orders for supplies.

• Visited the Assembly chambers/hearing rooms and discussed the various supports in place for sessions and hearings.

• This aspect of the tour was especially fascinating because I was able to experience the culmination of each team member's work-from the technical infrastructure both in and out of the physical chamber, to the session applications developed in house by the team's software engineers, to the support that legislative staff could expect during each of these meetings from technical services.

• Development Team

• Was introduced to several of the in-house applications used throughout the Missouri Legislature.

• This was particularly effective after meeting with each of the House divisions because it gave context to the applications and helped me better understand their purpose.

• House Division and Training

• Toured the Missouri Capitol and met with various members from each House division.

• Discussed training tactics, struggles and successes with my Missouri counterpart.

• This meeting was one of my favorite parts of the trip. I am relatively new to the training lead position in Wisconsin, so to have a conversation with someone who understands the unique challenges that come with my specific role was remarkably gratifying.

Recommendations for Future Participants

• Allow yourself to think beyond your legislature's structure. One of the most pleasantly challenging parts of this trip for me was gradually piecing together which teams and applications supported different individuals and agencies within the Missouri Legislature. One behavior that I found myself repeating was trying to figure out how each piece then related back to the work that we were doing in Wisconsin. While certainly not an incorrect approach, I found that disengaging from the Wisconsin legislative structure that I had perceived to be the "standard" allowed me to be more present and curious throughout the trip. It can be easy to fall into the trap of trying to compare each agency to its counterpart in your state. But each legislature is different and might not have an exact match to what you are accustomed to. Keep an open mind and be prepared for not just different legislative applications and support tactics, but different legislative structures entirely.

• Feel comfortable asking team members about challenges and pressure points-but be respectful of your host's boundaries. This exchange provided me an opportunity to ask questions to one of a handful of teams in the country that understands some of the deeply specific hurdles that we face as a legislative IT shop. It seemed appropriate to ask, within reason, what pressure points they faced, including processes that they would like to see improved, as well as non-tech-related hurdles (financial, bureaucratic, interpersonal, etc.). Discretion is a key component to our work. It should go without saying that mutual respect needs to be at the forefront of this exchange and any subsequent discussions. Out of respect for my hosts, who answered my questions patiently and honestly, I have no intention of disclosing these particular conversations. But we face many of the same challenges in an environment where it can be difficult to find others who can relate to our work. Discussing these challenges could pay tremendous dividends for both teams involved.

• Collect business cards and involve your team in the conversation. I really enjoyed representing my team during this trip. However, there were aspects of our work in Wisconsin that I felt I could not speak to as effectively as my colleagues. It seemed only fair to allow those individuals to speak for themselves on the applications that they work on each day. I would absolutely recommend gathering business cards from team members of the host state and connecting them to members of your team upon returning from your trip. It lessens the pressure on you as a participant to know anything and everything about your legislature's technology infrastructure, and it also provides an opportunity to practice cross-team collaboration even after the conclusion of the exchange.

• Ask to push the button. Maybe this one only applies to me, but I will say it anyway. Let yourself be curious. Ask to push the damn button. Be curious and ask to try things that you otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to try in your roles in your home state. Like pushing the buttons on the voting board during a demo!

Conclusion

Every legislative IT team faces its own unique challenges. From physical infrastructure to state ordinances, to team structures and divisions, each legislature has specific needs that require specially tailored solutions from its IT professionals. But despite these differences, there are also many components and experiences that we share that can greatly benefit from cross-team discussion between states. This exchange was an in-depth and highly informative opportunity for such collaboration. I would absolutely recommend the NALIT LEP to anyone interested in sharing and exploring solutions that have been tried and tested by fellow professionals in the legislative tech field.

I would like to thank NALIT for the opportunity, as well as everyone at the host state of Missouri who took the time to present their Capitol, made me feel like a part of the team, and (perhaps most importantly) allowed me to ask "what does this button do" at just about every turn. Their hospitality, preparedness, flexibility and patience made this trip remarkably effective and genuinely enjoyable.

Lane Trezise is a technical services analyst for Wisconsin's Legislative Technology Services Bureau.