From ever-increasing cyber attacks, shifting infrastructure landscapes, and increased operating spending against shrinking ridership revenue to new workforce challenges; managing technology in transit—especially during a pandemic—requires creativity and resolve like no other time.
How are you managing these challenges? How are you keeping up with everything going on? Join your IT colleagues at special technology roundtables during ThinkTransit to learn, share, and discuss the transit technology space for 2022 and beyond.
Retention and recruitment are more challenging than ever. What are you doing to retain and attract talent differently now than several years ago? As project work increases, headcount doesn’t always keep pace. How are you avoiding burnout and keeping your IT team engaged? Are you cross-training to train your staff to mitigate the effects of longer absences and turnover?
Thanks to more people working from home, and a proliferation of externally facing systems, your systems need to be more accessible to the outside world. How are you balancing ease of use with security? How are you protecting your systems and letting employees get work done? How much of your technology has already changed, or needs to be changed, to do what you need it to? Is the supply chain meeting your needs for making these changes, or is the cloud part of your strategy to get there?
Security is always a concern in IT, but the frequency and impact of attacks have increased significantly during the pandemic. Many transit agencies have become targets of attacks that have left them crippled for days, weeks, or months. Can your agency react quickly to working with little to no tech to keep service running? Do you have failover and recovery procedures in place to get back up and running quickly? Can your plans, projects, and resources afford the type of disruption this kind of event can cause? How are you protecting sensitive data like customer info and payment information?
Now more than ever it’s a great time to grow your network and leverage the public transit community to improve how your organization uses technology! Online forums are good, but they are no substitute for being in a room and discussing big topics together live. With very few exceptions, transit agencies are not competitors in the marketplace, so everyone wins when you share information.
This year at ThinkTransit, we are offering two technology roundtables for exactly this reason. The topics in each session will be similar but designed for different sizes of agencies. If you are a small agency with 2-10 people in your IT organization then odds are hearing what an agency with 20-50 people is doing is not as relevant to your efforts, and vice versa. However, no one is excluded from attending both! Come and share your expertise with your peers or be a fly on the wall and soak it all in! Either way, please join us for a great discussion and networking.
No one agency has all the answers so take this unique opportunity for an open discussion with your peers on all things technology by joining us at ThinkTransit, March 20-23. These sessions will help answer your questions and let you make new connections that will last for years to come.
Bus
Rail
Paratransit
