The city of Dalton mayor and Council voted unanimously on Monday night to confirm the hiring of new Information Technology Director Jorge A. Paez. Mr. Paez was named as the sole finalist for the position from a field of five candidates last month. Tuesday is his first day on the job.
Mr. Paez is a graduate of Dalton State College where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a focus on management information systems. He has worked in the IT field since 2014, most recently as an IT system administrator and tech for a local manufacturing firm in Dalton.
“I’m very excited to have the job,” Mr. Paez said in his office on Tuesday. “This is the next step in my career. I came from being a lead technician to being an IT director, I think that’s a big step and like one of my coworkers told me, my career’s never going to be the same after taking this position and having this title, so I’m veryn very excited.”
The city’s IT Department manages the deployment of technology in support of approximately 350 employees at more than 15 locations. Mr. Paez says that his first task will be performing an assessment of where all of the various departments stand with their technology needs before putting together a long-range plan for the IT Department.
“And then, we’ll plan out a vision, but I can tell you that something is going to go up in the cloud,” Mr. Paez said, referring to off-site data storage which is typically referred to as being “cloud based.”
“I know we have a lot of stuff hosted here and it’s scary to talk about the cloud, but my vision is that a lot of things are going up to the cloud and hopefully we can get to some kind of cloud that’s government based,” Mr. Paez said.