- Bleeding Edge Government

Click to see the Seattle's online services

Why does government lag so far behind private business in the application of new technology to customer service, constituent service and government operations? Examples:
•   At the City of Seattle, for example, you can pay bills with a credit card or bank account, but the City’s website won’t “remember” the information – each month and for each bill you have to completely enter all the information again.
•   We print a million pages of utility bills (electricity, water, solid waste) and then mail them out each month, but there’s no option to receive bills electronically, as offered by most private utilities.
•   You can watch a City Council meeting via www.seattlechannel.org and you can actually pull up and watch any City Council committee meeting since 2003 there as well. But, in this age of You Tube, you need to download Real Player software in order to watch our meetings!
•   In an era when many private companies totally automate purchasing and hiring processes, City agencies still use paper documents and pen-and-ink signatures for most of this work.
Yet the City of Seattle is a leading adopter of technology, winning “best municipal web portal awards” in 2001 and 2006, and “top municipal TV station” in 2007. We are on the leading edge! Of government.
But clearly we’re NOT on the leading edge of what our customers and constituents use when dealing with their insurance companies, banks, and when they do their shopping on the web and Internet.
What gives with government’s apparent position on the “tailing” edge?
Well, first of all, we’re NOT on the “tailing” edge. Although many national or statewide private companies have robust retailing and transaction presence on the web, few mid-size or smaller businesses have much other than a “shopping cart”.
Next, we have to be careful. Damned careful. We are shepherds of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars. We have many “feet on the street” services to fund with those dollars – cops, firefighters, paramedics, parks, potholes, inspections, public health. We cannot afford costly experiments with technology. We need to let the private sector test and prove technologies. This also whets the appetite of consumers/constituents. Only then should we adopt new high tech. Plus, once a technology like web payments comes into mainstream use in banks and financial institutions, it will be cheaper for government to implement.
Finally, we have to be careful, damned careful. We are shepherds of personal information on hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. You – the customer – have a choice of a bank or an insurance company. If you give such an institution your name, date of birth, social security number and credit card number, and they misuse it or lose it, not only must they make it right, but you can choose a different place to do business. Government is held to a much higher standard because it compels constituents to turn over their personal information. And constituents have a very powerful voice when their government makes mistakes: a little event called “re-election”.
I want the City of Seattle to be on the “leading edge” of the mainstream adopters of technology. NOT the cutting edge or bleeding edge. We’ll let large private businesses break the ice of new high tech, and we’ll follow right on their “tails”!

P.S. You-Tube video (also known as MPEG4 or “flash”) is coming to www.seattlechannel.org at the end of August. Electronic billing – replacing paper, retaining of bank accounts and credit card info is coming to the City of Seattle early in 2009.

- Nervous System of a City Government

Nervous System of Government? Click for more ...

Original post:  28 May 2008
I often say information technology in any organization is like the human nervous system.
You never think about your nervous system, do you? Gee, how many times have your breathed in the since you started to read this blog entry? Have you made sure that your heart is beating lately? Oh – and that mouse under your left (or right) hand – the one you’ve been using your index finger to click a button and surf to this page (or maybe, at this point, away from it!). Has that index finger responded to your brain? All of this occurs for each of us, of course, thousands and tens of thousands of times a day.
Until it doesn’t … maybe your heart skips a beat. Or perhaps you get a cold and breathing isn’t so easy for a few days. You never notice your nervous system until that really small of amount of time (for most of us) that it DOESN’T WORK!
Information technology is the same – in many senses it is the lifeblood of City government. What is government, except taking care of people – doing for the people of Seattle what they cannot do on their own, easily, as individuals or even in small groups: clean parks, clean water through the tap (and the unclean water down the drain). In the case of Seattle, electricity at the flick of a switch. A cop when you need one and a firefighter or EMT sometimes too.
How do you get all this service? Typically you call on the phone – 911 or 311 or 206-684-3000 (for a cheap thrill, give that one a try). Often, nowadays, you surf the web or send an e-mail. And all of this requires phone systems and computer servers and software.
And how do City employees coordinate their responses to your requests? Well, they use radio systems to dispatch police calls or fires or public utility crews. We use an internal phone system to call each other. We use desktop computers and utility billing systems and work management systems. And e-mail is ubiquitous to the tune of a million messages a week.  Oh … and Peoplesoft Financial Management system to track the cost and a payroll system to keep us paid.
And no one notices, until something doesn’t work.
As my telephone services operations manager – Stephanie Venrick – says, “dial-tone comes from God”.
Naw, it actually comes from the City of Seattle’s Department of Information Technology.
And that dial tone is there, 99.99% of the time.

Blogging Customer Service

Scouring Blogs - click imae for more

Original post: 28 April 2008
“Stormy Times for Comcast” is the title of an article in today’s Seattle Times, written by Bob Fernandez of The Philadelphia Inquirer, hometown newspaper at the Headquarters of Empire Comcast (the article is here).   Fernandez writes about Frank Eliason, a Comcast manager whose job is to watch blogs with complaints about customer service, e.g. comcastmustdie.com, contact the complaining customers and try to solve the problems.  A noble (if, in the case of Comcast, often fruitless) endeavor.  Both the blogging and the job performed by Eliason are a powerful application of Web 2.0 technology.   What a great idea!
Gee, could we apply this to City government?   Should we create a blog which allows the residents of Seattle to talk about their experiences – positive and negative – with our water (which is pretty good stuff) or electrical serivce, or pothole-filling service or (heaven forbid, because they work for me) our cable-customer complaint line?  Fascinating thought …