Robert Bell: March 2010 Archives

It's a good saying, because it expresses two valuable ideas.  First, an organization should be structured to carry out its strategy, not the other way around.  And second, not even the best strategy will work unless you put the right structure in place to accomplish it.

Besides, they are wonderfully hard-edged business terms, aren't they?  You feel wise and powerful just saying them.  Compare that with saying another word that ICF uses far more often.  Collaboration.  It isn't quite the same thrill, is it?  Yet, in Intelligent Communities, lasting transformation is usually the product of collaboration among many partners.  And this year's Smart21 Communities demonstrate that making collaboration pay off takes - you guessed it - both strategy and structure.     

Many  communities take a collaborative approach to developing strategy.  The city of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia assigned a team at the local university to develop a plan called Ballarat ICT 2030.  The work took on the rigor and cross-disciplinary depth of a major research project.  The team consulted with state and local government, local businesses, ICT firms, and community leaders. They identified trends, uncertainties and linkages with the power to shape the city's future.  Over 220 people contributed through interviews, surveys, panel discussions, workshops and briefings over four months.  Stir in a generous portion of data on national and global trends, and the Ballarat ICT 2030 strategy was ready to go.  It called for making the city a globally competitive ICT center by creating the infrastructure (broadband) and support system needed to create, attract and retain tech companies. 

Collaboration can also provide the structure for a project.  In 1994, Besançon, France became the first French city to deploy a metro fiber network, even before the 1998 liberalization of France Telecom. It was a cooperative project of local, regional and national government agencies, which were soon joined by semi-public organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and local university.  Collaboration was structured through co-ownership of the assets, with defined terms for joint network usage and maintenance.  The backbone provided by the cooperative network has enabled Besançon to launch multiple award-winning educational programs.  Interestingly, this approach finds its mirror image in an American community, Cleveland, where a nonprofit called OneCommunity also assembled a fiber network serving members of a public-private cooperative.  The OneCommunity network helped to put the city and greater region (Northeast Ohio) on the list of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year, not once but twice.   

An American member of the Smart21 - Riverside, California - has made collaboration an integral part of both strategy and structure.  After hiring a new city manager to reverse years of drift, Riverside involved leaders from business, government, community groups and the city's four colleges and universities in crafting a vision for the future.  The resulting vision called for Riverside to deploy an advanced broadband infrastructure and use it as a foundation to aggressively attract technology companies to this low-cost location only an hour's drive from Los Angeles.  Those companies, in turn, would generate demand for the thousands of students graduating from the city's universities, who had long taken their skills and earning power elsewhere.  To carry out the strategy, Riverside mayor Ron Loveridge formed a nonprofit corporation called SmartRiverside.  Its board included the CEOs of Riverside's existing high-tech companies.  They formed an advisory group called the CEO Forum, which began issuing recommendations for attracting and retaining tech businesses.  At each stage in the city's development since then, the CEO Forum has played a part, from pushing the hiring of Riverside's first CIO to a decision to deploy a WiFi network for public safety services, citizens and businesses. 

Communities are not businesses.  Decisions are not rendered in executive suites and passed down through the ranks.  Decisions are shaped by politics - the art of the possible - and by culture and recent history, which makes collaboration a necessity and truly effective collaboration a competitive advantage.  But as the Smart21 show, collaboration alone is just a good conversation.   In an Intelligent Community, collaboration follows strategy. 

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.