Revving up Connect 2022: Forward Together

The team from the city of Clearwater, Florida, geared up for in-person networking at Connect 2022 in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Everyone felt the energy. The excitement was palpable at the start of Tyler Connect 2022: Forward Together, hosted this year in person in Indianapolis, the “Racing Capital of the World.” More than 4,100 public sector leaders filled the Indiana Convention Center for learning, networking, and recharging after being physically apart for three years.

Together Again

What was the best part of being in person again? “Networking!” exclaimed Donna Hemberger, senior business systems analyst for the city of Clearwater, Florida. Her colleague, Budget Officer Kayleen Kastel, agreed everyone’s focus is so much better in person than virtual.

This was the first Connect for the school district central office team from Berlin, New Hampshire. Some had planned to attend the 2020 Connect in Orlando, but then COVID-19 happened. The Berlin Public Schools team came to Indianapolis to learn all they could about School ERP Pro, which they will be implementing soon. After poring through Connect’s course list of 700+ training sessions, they decided the four of them would divide and conquer.

Photo Album: A Connect 2022 Who’s Who

Who’s networking, learning, and having fun in Indianapolis? Connect 2022 participants, of course! Check out our photo album.

Tyler’s President & CEO Lynn Moore kicked off the opening session of Connect 2022.

Extraordinary Success

Kicking off Connect’s opening session on Monday morning, Tyler’s President & CEO Lynn Moore was humbled as he looked out over the seats filled with public sector colleagues. He reminded everyone of the “extraordinary success” they achieved during the pandemic.

Moore highlighted incredible achievements from places such as Shelby County, Indiana; DeKalb County, Georgia; Arlington Heights, Illinois; and Cheyenne, Wyoming – places where county courts, tax commissioner’s offices, school districts, and police departments have equipped staff with technology that not only streamlines their work, but also empowers them to create safer, smarter, and stronger communities.

In DeKalb County, Georgia, the Tax Commissioner’s Office used a new kind of ingenuity to address a last-minute tax change and its impact to residents just weeks before the tax digest deadline. In a Connect opening session video, Christy Huiel, director of property tax for Dekalb County, described the close collaboration with Tyler that enabled their staff to overwrite the frozen values for a newly formed city with the current assessed values. “This was definitely a critical project powered by trusting relationships between county teams, Tyler IT, and support staff.”

Connected Communities

At the heart of the countless success stories across the country are the government innovators who are bringing Tyler’s Connected Communities vision to life. Moore shared how communities are building connections across jurisdictional, process, and geographic boundaries – all made possible by the common digital foundation of Tyler solutions.

• In Public Administration, community members can submit and monitor requests through a civic engagement app, auto-generating work orders and triggering fieldwork.
• In Courts and Public Safety, the public can access self-service portals, video hearings, and online dispute resolution, providing conveniences to those with financial, travel, childcare, or other constraints.
• In K-12 Education, students, parents, guardians, and staff get real-time notifications of late buses, as well as the ability to securely access grades, file incident reports, record medical information, and update meal accounts.
• In Health and Human Services, HR staff track how their agency is resolving EEO complaints and automatically generate reports required by the EEOC.
• Through Tyler’s Transformative Technologies, governments are leveraging cloud-enabled environments to streamline operations, aggregate data for decision-making, and establish advanced security.

In Indiana, the Supreme Court’s Office of Judicial Administration implemented eFile & Serve to streamline 400 lower courts across the state’s 92 counties along with three appellate courts. In a video shown at Connect, Judge David Riggins of Superior Court 2 in Shelby County shared how the move to electronic filing cut time costs for litigants significantly. “It’s all about productivity,” Riggins explained. “It’s about getting information to the decision-maker, allowing the decision then to be made in a quicker fashion and getting that decision back to the litigant.”

Citizen Engagement

Real-time civic experience has become increasingly important over the last two years. Agencies have responded quickly to a public wanting and expecting digital, mobile, and easy user experiences. “Perhaps the most significant thing we did for citizen engagement in 2021 was acquire NIC,” Moore said as he introduced Elizabeth Proudfit, NIC division president.

Proudfit spoke of her excitement of seeing the new benefits for agencies and citizens made possible by the combination of Tyler and NIC. One of these enhancements is the introduction of a single payment portal for all Tyler products and other systems they may use. “This provides citizens with a centralized payment engine that transforms the entire citizen engagement experience by giving residents a single, consistent interface for all government payment transactions.”

Township High School District 214 in Arlington Heights, Illinois, offers students experiential opportunities outside of the classroom like access to local college classes, internships, and industrial certification programs. In an opening session video, Transportation Supervisor Nicole Hansen described how the district relied on Traversa to create an innovative shuttle-based schedule that mimics a standard public transportation system. “This lets students focus on their education and activities instead of worrying about how to get home at the end of the day.”

Cloud-First Future

The incredible advances in citizen engagement and the furthered realization of Tyler’s Connected Communities vision have been made possible through the benefits of the cloud. Tyler’s cloud-enabled solutions, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), are driving greater security, performance, and reliability within mission-critical government systems. Through the cloud, agencies can create better connections across departments and jurisdictions – and with the people they serve.

In fact, at Tyler the future is cloud-first, announced Tyler’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Puckett. Tyler will shift away from delivering solutions on-premises and will instead move toward exclusively delivering our technology in the cloud. “It’s clear that if we want to continue to provide the very best to our clients, we have to focus on cloud technology.”

“Don’t worry – we are not forcing our clients to move to the cloud before they’re ready,” Puckett reassured. “But we do believe so strongly in the benefits the cloud offers, that we want you all to understand why we’re on this journey, and why you should want to come along with us.”

Conquering Court Cases in the Cloud

The court system in Alvin, Texas, stood up Tyler’s Virtual Courts in less than 24 hours. The results? Staff cleared a pandemic backlog of 800 cases, reduced the failure-to-appear rate by 60%, and saved thousands of dollars in the first year. Read how.

At the Indiana Convention Center, the 4,100+ participants of Connect 2022 await the start of the opening session and three days of learning, networking, and recharging after being physically apart for two years.

Forward Together

The opening session filled Connect participants with equal parts affirmation of where they have been and inspiration for where they are headed. With everyone raring to go, Tyler waved the starting flag for three days of networking, learning, planning, and – yes – having fun. Connect 2022 was underway!