THE BEGINNING

Today we visited The Office of Information Technology and Innovation (OITI), one of the numerous departments within DDOT. We met with Jose’ Colon who is the lead representative of the OITI SYEP division. Jose’ has about 20 youth working under him. The youth are helping OITI with a number of things including file transfers, document management, and other software systems. One of the task that the youth have is creating a training manual for a permitting online system entitled TOPS. The training manual makes it easier for the public to get permits online. In addition to permitting they work on IT support, safety data, dashboards, and a work water management system called Cityworks. OITI is in charge of over 25 software systems. There are over 70,000 files that need to be organized and transferred into a document library, SYEP participants have already completed approximately 30,000 of the file transfers. After talking with the youth they all conveyed that they like their jobs because they love computers and their learning valuable working skills that they can carry along with them after the summer program ends. The youth are also working on a Geographic Information System(GIS), which is similar to the works of Google Earth and Mapquest. One SYEP employee is working with the telecommunications division under OITI. Her duties include installing headsets, wireless cards, working with digital phones, updating software systems and creating spreadsheets. All the love these students have for computers will definitely show once they get the opportunity to take a computer apart and rebuild it.