Playing "blue pages roulette" will soon be a thing of the past
for the town folks of Whitby, Ont.
What phone number to call to report a pothole on the road, or to
find out the library's summer hours, or what day is garbage pick-up
for that old television cluttering the basement?
The town of Whitby recently implemented a geographic information
system (GIS)-based customer relationship management (CRM) system to
integrate the array of municipal services it offers its
citizens.
"A GIS CRM addresses many of the issues that the 311 initiatives
underway in other municipalities do, except you don't need CRTC
approval of a dedicated line, and it can be done on a smaller
scale," says Barry Kelly, account manager for the Greater Toronto
Area (GTA) at ESRI Canada, a Toronto-based GIS provider that worked
with the town of Whitby.
In 2004, the CRTC approved the use in Canada of a 311 telephone
service for access to municipal non-emergency services. The
objective of the initiative is to transform the way municipalities
interact and communicate with their citizens by streamlining the
call process and tracking citizen requests from beginning to
end.
But many smaller municipalities lack the necessary back-end
systems to support a full-blown 311 service, says Alex Miller,
president of ESRI Canada and chairman of the Ottawa-based Geomatics
Industry Association of Canada (GIAC).
"311 is just the number you dial. For many municipalities, the
biggest problem in 311 implementation is gluing all the government
departments together," he says.
He explains that GIS technology is used to some degree in most
municipalities across Canada. Almost all of them use GIS for
property management to graphically define boundaries, buildings,
roads and landmarks and link this to underlying information about
these structures. A natural next step is to overlay infrastructure
such as sewers, utilities, and "street furniture" - signs, light
posts, and so on - over this basic layer. The final step is to link
the management of these municipal information systems, and 311 is
an extension of that.
"Geography tells you what's there. If you're calling about a
sewer problem, any call-taker can immediately see the water
services in the area on a map even if you're not connected to the
water services department," says Miller.
Since GIS is a generic platform, many smaller municipalities
didn't have the budgets and resources to build their own
applications in the past, he says. But many out-of-the-box GIS
applications have been developed recently, so GIS enhancements are
now more affordable for even the smallest municipalities.
The town of Whitby went live in February this year with the
first phase of its GIS CRM in its operations areas, says Gary
Cudmore, manager of IS at the town. Although the town had a GIS
foundation in place for property and infrastructure, it had a
manual, paper-based system for customer calls, service requests and
field work.
"It was a real struggle tracking the calls that came in. This
system takes away the paper, files and carbon copies stuck in a
binder," he says.
He says that any CRM system would have enabled the town to
automate, track and categorize service requests, but GIS-based CRM
offers graphical advantages that work with the human need to
understand and analyze problems visually, thus boosting speed and
efficiency.
"If you get 30 calls relating to potholes in a month, by
geo-coding that layer by type of incident on a map, staff can look
and decide if the road needs resurfacing and plan for future
roadwork," he says. "With plain CRM, we would not be able to see
clusters of incidents visually."
GIS also enhances call taking by eliminating duplication with
its geographical component. "With geo-coding, the request is
entered into the system, and it searches for other similar requests
using spatial query. The system uses mapping to find other requests
in the same area, and informs the call-taker if there's already an
existing call," says Kelly.
This visual component also played a major role in making
call-taking staff and work crews comfortable with the new GIS CRM
system. "After training, it was second nature to them. We didn't
expect it to be so well-received," says Stephanie Mazer,
application development analyst at the town of Whitby.
Kelly says once service request information is recorded, a great
deal of trending, analysis and reporting can be easily performed by
linking these requests to information about infrastructure that's
already in place in the municipality's GIS.
"The town had to fulfill many provincial reporting requests such
as municipal benchmarking, compliance with maintenance standards
and so on. It had to go through quite a process to get these
reports together from paper information," says Rob Santos, senior
project manager for the Ontario region at ESRI.
"What's unique about Whitby is that it's implemented a library
information database where a lot of information that used to be
stored on paper is centralized, and any user can access that."
In the next phase of the implementation, the town plans to
extend the GIS CRM to other areas beyond operations, such as the
mayor's office to automate calls for action from department heads,
councils and senior management, says Cudmore.
"This system is the back-end that will work in conjunction with
our 311 service in the future. Ultimately, we must work with a
phone company such as Bell Canada when we move forward on our 311
implementation," he says.
Miller sees many more opportunities to interconnect municipal
services on top of GIS platforms to enhance services provided to
citizens in the future.
"With healthcare services, the biggest problem now is
integration between doctors, hospitals, long-term facilities and
home care, particularly in transitioning people from one to
another.
"There are some complex geographical issues here in doing a
facilities inventory to know what's available in the region and
tracking patients as they move through the healthcare system. This
area is still in its infancy, but there are some big opportunities
to improve services."
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