When I moved to Bryant in 2000, I immediately fell in love with the city's charm and serenity. I had a long-standing interest in community and wanted to get involved with the people and build our future in Bryant. On January 1, 2011, I am honored to say that I was elected to be Mayor of the beautiful city of Bryant.

I have always embraced technology, and found that government entities often use archaic processes that are inefficient. The City of Bryant was no exception. One example of this was the process for evaluating our city employees. We have 200 employees who get annual reviews each year. In the past, evaluation forms had to be emailed to a manager who would then have to print it, fill it out, walk it to the HR office where they would hand-deliver it to the HR staff, the HR staff would retype, make recommendations, get back with the manager and then the employee being reviewed had their review meeting with the manager and HR. This was incredibly time-consuming and evaluations became a chore for the managers. We needed to find a creative way to improve this process.

In 2011, I helped implement Google Apps to streamline many of our internal processes -- especially our employee evaluations. Instead of a manual process to begin the evaluations, managers now fill out the evaluations directly in Google Docs, which is then shared with the employee and HR. Now, managers spend more time providing feedback to the employee and less time laboring over the logistics.

After having such success with the employee evaluations, we started using Google Docs to create the State of the City Address as well. There are typically 8 departments who contribute to the speech, and Docs allows us collaborate simultaneously. It's an easy and efficient way for everyone to work together to see what we've accomplished over the course of the year.

Google Apps has helped us streamline outdated processes within our government, helping us to better serve our community.