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As we course through the systems and people who keep Ventura Water flowing, we’ll focus on the specialized staff who support our mission to provide safe and reliable water and wastewater services to our community. Technology is something that can be taken for granted even as we rely on it every day. We log on to our computers and with a few clicks, we’re off and running. At Ventura Water we utilize multiple applications—programs or software designed and written to fulfill a particular purpose. One is used to collect data from our smart meters, another to process our customers’ water usage data and a third to convert it into information useable for billing purposes or to detect possible leaks. Another application is used to manage our assets, for example, to know how often pipes need to be maintained or to keep track of work orders requested by our customers or generated internally.
Ventura Water staff working in customer service, water conservation and resource management all depend on these software systems. Not only are they necessary to properly bill our customers and to help them save and use water more efficiently, but also for reporting to the California State Water Resources Control Board, who oversees our state’s water resources. These numerous applications need to be monitored to ensure they run smoothly and reliably—the task of computer systems experts.
Systems Analyst ll Liwen Chen has been with the City for three years after working in Information Technology (IT) at Ventura Unified School District and before that, at a private IT company. Liwen earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in her native country and followed that up with coursework in computer science here in the U.S. Her background is the hands-on side of software—coding, so she was hired by the City of Ventura as it was upgrading from local to cloud-based data storage, management, and processing.
One of the most challenging aspects of Liwen’s job is that after a particular system has had a problem resolved, when it’s restarted, often not everything comes back working correctly. At that point Liwen must go in and manually fix the new problem. She says that this was more difficult when she first started working for the City but now that she’s very familiar with the applications she can fix them much more quickly. Liwen says her favorite part of her day is helping staff solve issues they may have when utilizing the many applications. She says when they’re happy then she’s happy!
Next, we'll look at the expertise Ventura Water relies on to maintain financial accountability.
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