eGovernment Solutions that Pay for Themselves | |
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Richmond B.C. Finance and Corporate Services
General Manager Jim Bruce stands beside one of
the electronic kiosks that helped them eliminate
line-ups for city services.
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eGovernment Solutions that Pay for ThemselvesRichmond BC's passion to stamp out line-ups has spawned an eGovernment facility that any municipality can afford.
In the early 1990's Richmond B.C.'s corporate service manager Jim Bruce had a meeting with one of his city residents. This resident conveyed to Jim his observation that the line ups, and telephone hold times required to access the city's services were too long and that he should explore ways to do something about it!
As it turns out these comments were not coming from just another irate citizen. They were in fact coming from David Leung, now retired from TELUS, who was then President of the TELUS subsidiary SRI Strategic Resources Inc. charged with delivering IT consulting and solutions to Municipal sector organizations. This Municipal Practice team now part of the TELUS' Web Solutions team had a vision of what automated services could do to improve the lives of citizens and at the same time lighten the load on city hall. Over time Jim Bruce and the rest of the city of Richmond came to share that vision, as they worked together to help make Richmond B.C. one of the most online municipal governments in Canada.
"It all started in 1992", says Jim, "we were just going into tax time and we agreed to work with the TELUS Municipal Practice team to set up a trial which would allow our citizens to obtain their tax information over the phone, by using their telephone touch tone key pads to access their personal tax information. The system is referred to as an Interactive Voice Response system or IVR." The results were phenomenal! |
Jim Bruce was on a mission to automate just about every process that involved citizen line ups or telephone hold times.
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City staff were happy because they didn't need to field hundreds of phone calls from people who had misplaced their tax bill; tax payers where happy because the information they needed could be accessed 24/7 without long hold times; other citizens and businesses were happy because city staff were now more available to help them with their other problems; and finally the city's finance department was happy because the over time charges usually associated with tax time had been kept to a minimum.
From that success Jim Bruce was on a mission to automate just about every process that involved citizen line ups or telephone hold times. From the tax department success, the city moved to provide community kiosks where citizens could access public computer terminals in order to pay for everything from garbage bag tags to their property taxes, using their credit card, and without having to line up to see a city clerk.
When the Internet arrived around 1995 it opened up whole new areas of opportunity. Instead of needing to go to community kiosks, citizens could now access city services online from the comfort of their own homes.
"One of the areas that was causing confusion for us at that time" explained Jim, "was the fact that we had six community associations in Richmond. In order to access the city recreational facilities you needed to belong to the association that managed the facility you wanted to use. In order to go swimming at one location, take judo lessons at another, or cooking lessons at a third, you might have to pay membership fees to two or more community associations." To address this issue Richmond again partnered with TELUS' Municipal Practice team to create an online
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Fort St. John B.C. is taking the technology
one step further by partnering with TELUS to
develop a generic system that can be leased
to municipalities for a monthly usage fee.
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registration and fee collection service, that allowed Richmond citizens to register for the activity they wanted, without requiring any general membership fee. The fee for a specific activity was collected online then dispersed to the community associations providing the activity that the person had subscribed to.
Another example of a Richmond/TELUS partnership produced a system that can be used in libraries, which will allow a library user to book access to an Internet terminal in advance of their arrival at the library. This guarantees that a terminal will be available when they expect, without the need for a long wait or line up. Once they are on the terminal their session is automatically time limited so their access will end at the time that the next person had reserved for their session to begin. "This has been very successful" says Jim, "so much so that TELUS is now rolling this system out for other major libraries all across Canada and the U.S., including cities of Toronto, Ottawa, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and West Palm Beach "
Part of the vision for Richmond included the concept of software reusability. It wasn't his goal just to make Richmond BC, Canada's most online municipal government, his goal was to partner with Richmond to create the tools and systems that could help municipalities everywhere deliver better services with fewer line ups.
TELUS Web Solution's team continues to apply the learning's gathered from working from working with Richmond; this time in a smaller city, Fort St. John in the northern part of BC. City Manager John Locher informed us, "Our city wants to be known for having the most comprehensive eGovernment service in Canada." In addition to being able to: buy almost everything the city sells online; and fill out almost every application form the city owns electronically; our citizens will be able to access our GIS service. This GIS or mapping system will allow Internet users to find any property in the city on an expandable city map, and then zoom in to access all the information available that is related to that property, things such as the zoning, the owner's name, and the tax assessment.
TELUS Web Solutions intends to eventually rent the use of this fully fledged eGovernment system to other cities for far less than it would cost them to build and operate it on their own. In principle, the eGovernment system being used in Fort St. John could be used to sell dog licenses in Toronto. The user interface would need to be modified to show that the purchaser was doing business with the City of Toronto but it could be the same software, running on the same server, selling dog licenses in Fort St. John and in Toronto and perhaps in many more cities across Canada.
Far from costing Fort St. John an arm and leg to implement, John Locher told us "The system will actually be saving us money from day one, or at least allowing us to deliver highly improved services to our citizens at no increase in costs." TELUS has signed an agreement to co-develop this system with Fort St. John for their mutual benefit. In the end the services that are implemented by the partnership, will be maintained by TELUS and then leased to the Fort St. John, in order to avoid the need for a large capital investment on the part of the city.
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