At the heart of a performance-driven culture for
city government is a "Citizen Relationship Management" (CRM) model that
provides a single environment to integrate departmental systems to
capture, analyze and answer constituent-driven requests. It engages
constituents and government employees as key stakeholders, provides
streamlined access to government information and services by encouraging
interagency IT initiatives that, while improving constituent services,
also consolidates disparate systems, decreases paperwork, increases
productivity and saves money.
To emphasize this, a model can be
found in New York City with an approach that demonstrates how best to
deliver this model through executive leadership. Upon taking office in
January 2002, newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg, inspired by similar
systems that were being piloted in a handful of cities nationwide,
announced as one of his first acts in office plans for the creation of a
3-1-1 Service Center for New York City. This service acts as a
centralized repository for citizens to make requests, lodge complaints
or simply get straightforward answers to questions about the city
government and its services.
It is now a model of excellence for
all municipalities based on the platform supporting service delivery
automation with CRM which allows the City to not only more efficiently
respond to calls and the program is also designed to proactively address
with situations that lead to a high volume of calls or incidents. This
proactive approach is what Mayor Bloomberg means when he says, "It's not
just a citizen service hot line, it is the most powerful management
tool ever developed for New York City government. I can't imagine
running the city without it."
Now, the City of New York has
delivered on the potential transparency and accessibility functions by
launching the Citywide Performance Review (CPR) that is a
comprehensive reporting vehicle to track the effectiveness of municipal
services based on a series of indicators. It does not discriminate from
the good news or the bad news using CRM and Business Intelligence tools
that result in dashboards and scorecards for the public to view how well
their public resources are used.
Traditionally, CRM has been a
commercial business application to provide business a more strategic
competitive advantage by delivering a seamless, unified customer
experience for interactions regardless of internal organization. Now,
CRM is an attractive tool for government organizations as they transform
themselves to foster the translation of citizen-relevant data into
actionable information by providing the right information to the right
person at the right time. Also, CRM embeds a proactive culture as it
extends an understanding of citizen needs throughout an enterprise thus
enabling all functional areas to make informed, citizen-based decisions.
As CRM can capture incoming data from multi-channel inputs, a 3-1-1
program highlights a workflow process for citizen contact, workload
tracking process and finally, performance management. With careful
thoughtful leadership such as the model Mayor Bloomberg delivered in New
York City, a service delivery regime can be transformational,
streamline processes and align service and program tasks more seamlessly
to drive down costs and enhance decision making.
Several
municipal jurisdictions in North America currently have 3-1-1 programs
and in Canada, the Region of Halton in Ontario and the City of Calgary
are leading the way with their comprehensive business models and tools
to support a complete citizen experience. Now we see more opportunities
for smaller municipalities to engage in 3-1-1 collaboratively with other
communities despite their lower population bases as regionalization of
programs that share resources and information regardless whether it is
across municipal boundaries or jurisdictions is a major new trend for
3-1-1 and CRM programs to drive better performance reporting.
David Gourlay, an expert in Citizen Relationship Management systems, is the Ottawa-based Director for Business Development, Public Sector, Canada for Oracle Corp. He can be reached at david.gourlay@oracle.com.
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