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| | 1. | | Call to order.
Minutes note: Meeting called to order at 10:01 a.m. | | | |
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| | 2. | | Roll call.
Minutes note: Present - Arroyo-Vega, Totoraitis, Fleck, Kruschke, Domurat, Zimmer, Larson, Madison, Richter, Siettmann, Owczarski, Schroeder, Roedel, Bohl, Henke, Spiker
Excused - Schroeder, Jaeger
Nicole Fleck serving in place of Jackie Carter, Anniemarie Domurat serving in place of Bryce Peplinski, and Charles Roedel serving in place of David Klein for this meeting. | | | |
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| | | | Also present:
Minutes note: Brad Houston, City Records Center Manager
Gene Eckhart, Program Manager for ImageSource (vendor)
Travis Noll, Co-Founder and COO of Just Appraised (vendor)
Ann-Elizabeth Shapera, UCC Manager
Gabriel Terrell, Policy Administration Coordinator, Mayor's Office, | | | |
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| | 3. | | Introduction of members.
Minutes note: Members, both existing and new, made brief introductions. | | | |
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| | 4. | | Review and approval of the previous meeting minutes from March 5, 2026.
Minutes note: Meeting minutes from March 5, 2026 were approved without objection. | | | |
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| | 5. | | Records Retention and Data Governance.
Minutes note: a. Proposed departmental record schedules for review and/or approval.
Mr. Houston presented. There were 6 proposed schedules. 5 were from Milwaukee Water Works relating to water quality and related data and records. An existing water quality data series would be expanded to allow finer gradation. The schedule for DNS would retain permits and permit applications to support migration to a new system and management of those records.
Member Roedel moved approval, seconded by member Madison, of the retention record schedules. There was no objection.
b. Presentation on mobile records.
Mr. Houston commented. A link to a training video was forwarded to members. The video had two core messages: do not store City records on personal devices (phones) and to get City records off of personal devices. Devices may be inspected as part of a public records request or may even be seized outright if subject to subpoena There was a 2-step evaluation criteria for determining whether something on a personal device was a record. He would like feedback on any missing content and on disseminating the training. There was also available a transcript of the video.
Members discussed integrating with existing mandatory training platforms used for safety and cybersecurity, rather than creating a standalone training, and that Workday would be the long-term plan to house trainings for employees.
Chair Spiker concurred that employees would benefit to have formal training.
Members were strongly encouraged to watch the training video.
c. Update on State Records Board approval of previous schedules.
Mr. Houston said that approved schedules from the prior quarter had no issues and would be sent to affected departments.
d. Update on the Electronic Records Management System project.
Mr. Houston commented. ImageSource was engaged to conduct a design study for the City’s ERMS system. Workday was coming online, and the City needed a way for disparate information systems to speak the same language while meeting operational efficiency, compliance, and records retention requirements. ImageSource would engage with each department to schedule interviews and surveys. He would forward ImageSource’s data sheet on their ecosystem ECM methodology to clerk staff to forward to members.
Gene Eckhart, ImageSource, commented. His firm was engaged to perform the design study and analysis for the City's ERMS system. It would be the foundational step before procuring a platform. The study would inventory where content and structured data lives, how it flows, how departments share it, and where silos exist. On-site interviews were anticipated in August. The engagement was expected to conclude within a couple of months with a detailed report of findings, recommendations, and requirements to inform a future RFP. | | | |
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| | 6. | | Department of Administration and Information and Technology Management Division
Minutes note: a. Presentation and update on the deployment of the Front Desk AI Voice system for the Unified Call Center.
Vice-chair Henke, member Bohl, and Mr. Noll presented.
The City contracted earlier this year with Just Appraised for Front Desk, an omni-channel virtual agent for requests for information or service via phone, email, chat, and SMS. The current phase focused on the voice agent front-ending 286-CITY. The purpose was to provide quick answers to common questions, reduce wait times and abandoned calls, and provide a uniform experience across shifts. Approximately 30,000+ calls per year involve 3+ minute waits and result in abandonment. The intent was augmentation, not replacement of UCC agents.
The UCC currently has two staffed shifts; from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. weekdays and 1 a.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Monday, calls roll to the City Hall Operator who has many other duties. The deployment plan would entail a soft launch next week during overnight and weekend hours when call volume was lower. A full launch for 1st and 2nd shift UCC agents would occur a couple weeks later. Future expansion was being discussed with Parking Enforcement and Water Works for their call centers.
The virtual agent would be multilingual with automatic language detection. Spanish performed exceptionally well. Hmong was tested and described as very basic due to limited training data. Traditional language line with human interpreters would remain for those cases. The agent would scrape data from City and ancillary webpages for its knowledge base. There was ongoing opportunity to make improvements to the virtual agent. 414-286-5777 was the access number.
Vice-chair Henke gave a live demonstration. Calls were made relating to garbage collection lookup, library hours, bulky items and drop-off centers, and transfer to a live agent.
Members inquired about public outreach, a full launch, systems used by other peer cities, target audience for the soft launch, emergency messaging, guardrails against misuse or subjective prompts, data and reporting.
Vice-chair Henke, member Bohl, Mr. Noll, and Ms. Shapera replied.
The pilot was not being made public yet, and they were looking at branding the system “MIL” short for Milwaukee Information Locator with a cream city brick mascot. Public outreach would come with daytime launch. A full launch was tentatively around September. The omni-channel platforms used by other cities varied. Most used the voice agent to frontend their 3-1-1- call systems. Some would use text and email. Systems could be customized accordingly to a city’s preference. During overnight/weekend pilot hours, about 50% of calls are from MPD officers requesting services (routed directly to operator); of remaining citizen calls, about half, or 25% overall, are informational (parking, sanitation lookups). Emergency messaging could be inserted into the knowledge base and greeting prompt. Windstorm, snowstorm, or flooding messages could be inserted on demand. There would be the ability to retroactively analyze a corpus of calls for topics like overnight parking, percentage transferred vs. resolved, and identify gaps. The process had already revealed conflicting information across City webpages.
Vice-chair Henke gave another demonstrating testing the voice agent on subjective prompts. The system rejected those calls and responded to only being able to assist with calls related to city services and information.
Chair Ald. Spiker requested that there be a measurement of drop rates before and after the soft launch for evaluation and that ITMD prepare for media and public interest for the full launch.
b. Discussion on updates to the City website and on web record responsibilities.
Mr. Terrell presented. Their office conducted a January survey with 440 responses from residents and City staff on website experience. About 35% of feedback focused on navigation and search not returning relevant results. Google Analytics review (January through mid-September of prior year) showed the following top traffic: garbage/recycling schedules (9% of all traffic, just under 1 million hits); parking information (323,000 hits); water bills (272,000 hits); job listings (269,000 hits); property lookups and (180,000 hits). Together, top service pages accounted for nearly 20% of traffic.
Their redesign approach would entail reorganizing the City’s homepage to surface high-traffic services prominently; reviewing best practices from Boston, Nashville, Denver, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Atlanta; and adding prominent links to Engage.Milwaukee for active projects, direct links to elected officials, and to the open data portal (zoning, assessments, budget, crime stats). Estimated launch was in July.
Vice-chair Henke added that ITMD was considering a chat agent on the front page for search, which was uncommon for municipal homepages but used by State of Wisconsin. Discussions with the City Attorney's Office were underway regarding obligations if users enter personal information such as SSN or credit card numbers, disclaimers, and vendor terms. Vendor has agreed to controls but final language ws pending.
Mr. Houston then reminded departments of web records responsibilities. Most website content was convenience copy, a pointer to the official record kept on a share drive or system, not the official record itself. Departments should remove obsolete information. Some departments were keeping official records only on their websites with no other preservation, creating authenticity and preservation problems and violating ordinance requiring transfer to the City Records Center and Municipal Research Library. He runs a simple web crawler capturing some records but an enterprise service would be needed for comprehensive capture, which was currently not funded.
There was discussion on departmental capacity. Titan CMS would require significant personal bandwidth for departments to update their own webpages.
Members asked if ITMD or Mayor's Office would provide staffing beyond training.
Vice-chair Henke and Mr. Terrell responded. SOPs were being developed for new features, with copy-paste code templates for video and news/events embedding. Training remains available via support ticket for new or existing staff. Free tools for broken link checking exists with paid tools like Silktide used by Milwaukee County for ADA compliance and broken/obsolete page detection would cost an estimated $25,000-$30,000 per year based on crawl volume, but would still require department resources to fix issues.
Member Bohl said that his office were working with their enterprise AI platform engineers on an AI agent that could audit departmental sites for factual errors, conflicting PDFs, and timeliness, and that training on that tool could be paired with redesign outreach.
c. Presentation on cyber security training results by departments.
Member Siettmann presented. Citywide completion over last five months was at 80% overall, average 60 minutes per learner, and on-time completion at 82.47%. By-department monthly view highlighted in red where under 80%, with June as a low point attributed to vacations. Phishing simulation results improved significantly to 6% citywide failure rate, down from over 15% at last report. There were some reporting limitations.
The original plan to manage through Workday did not materialize, so reporting was done manually through the InfoSec platform, which cannot auto-identify departmental ownership. She has been sending monthly reports manually and had set up self-serve reporting for Water, Fire, Library, and Police.
Member Siettmann inquired about the reporting going forward.
Members had discussion. Monthly reports were useful and should be forwarded to data managers and field supervisors. There were challenges with field staff, confusion about ongoing monthly trainings, and training fatigue.
Member Siettmann commented. DER safety trainings were 20-30 minutes each. Cybersecurity trainings typically were at or under 5 minutes. At least four notifications were given per month. The dashboard shows all incomplete trainings, completed history, and failed phishing tests. Bookmarking the dashboard would allow staff to check anytime without waiting for an invitation and to complete on phone during work time, not personal time. Some staff have sent nasty emails about mandatory training, which she had handled with empathetic response.
Member Madison said those negative responses should be escalated to leadership as unacceptable.
Member Siettmann added that DER trainings were complete for the year after July, which may reduce load. She was considering shorter "quick reminder" trainings, would continue monthly reports, and add any department upon request. | | | |
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| | 7. | | Departmental IT updates and/or announcements.
Minutes note: a. Department of Public Works - Water Works.
Member Zimmer gave an update. His office had completed a new-level Comptroller audit focused on security and disaster recovery documentation, including its proprietary EQUESTA billing system, which is now awaiting first review. As part of hardening, the team installed Windows Secure Boot certificate refreshes for trusted-boot compliance and implemented 6-digit MFA for privileged logons in the air-gapped SCADA domain.
On asset management, after DPW could not agree on a single suite in 2023 and Fleet decided to stay on AssetWorks, Water Works proceeded unilaterally to replace TMA with an RFP. Vendor interest has started, and unlike prior cycles most vendors including OpenGov now have an Esri partnership for enhanced GIS mapping of tower distribution and main breaks, with award targeted for next year.
For virtualization, Broadcom's acquisition of VMware was driving 300-700% increases with about 19 months left on Water Works' 3-year contract. They were planning migration options with ITMD and service vendor Capital Data to move business-side servers to the cloud like EQUESTA, while the air-gapped purification/SCADA side remains physical with reduced cores.
Security was bolstered by a $100,000 WEM grant awarded for Dragos OT intrusion detection and mediated response for plant automation, and acceptance into CISA's CyberSentry program, which provides two free black boxes for business and SCADA networks for active monitoring at no cost, with no local dashboard or visibility into other participants.
Vice-chair Henke commented. He endorsed the common hardware/virtualization direction and tied it to Citywide planning. He asked that the TMA RFP include Workday integration costs for time tracking, HR, finance and inventory. On VMware, he noted ITMD's own hardware/virtualization was aging out this year and next, and proposed a common platform at the 911 data center and the 809 Building, both with redundant power, UPS and cooling, where ITMD would manage hardware/hypervisor like a cloud provider and departments manage OS/apps. He added the City already runs a similar capability to CyberSentry called Albert via CIS, a nonprofit CISA partner, monitoring the perimeter for all departments on City internet, and that Water Works' business network was already covered by it. | | | |
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| | 8. | | Review of the 2026 committee meeting schedule.
Minutes note: Chair Ald. Spiker commented. The committee scope was expanded and the cadence changed to bimonthly, with the understanding a meeting may be canceled if there was no business. Remaining meetings for the year were Thursday, September 3rd at 10 a.m. and Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 1:30 p.m. | | | |
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| | 9. | | Next steps.
Minutes note: a. Agenda items for the next meeting.
Item from Chair Ald. Spiker to include an update and discussion on the rollout of GovAI relating to department use cases, challenges, successes, and further innovations.
Other items to include a presentation on Workday pre-implementation from the Comptroller’s Office and a progress report on the ERMS design review.
Remaining items to be determined.
b. Next meeting date and time.
i. Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 10 a.m. | | | |
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| | 10. | | Adjournment.
Minutes note: Meeting adjourned at 11:39 a.m.
Chris Lee, Staff Assistant
Council Records Section
City Clerk's Office | | | |
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| | | | Meeting materials from this meeting can be found within the following file: | | | |
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260393
| 0 | | Communication | Communication relating to the matters to be considered by the City Information Management Committee at its July 9, 2026 meeting. | | | |
Action details
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