Hi, I'm Gord Boisvert from the Active Network. Picture this:You're driving home late at night. The streetlight in front of your house isburnt out. And going along, all of a sudden, bam! You hit this big pothole infront of your house. Car is stuck. Shock wave is so huge, this tree fell overon your car. This is the problem. You want to get hold of the city, you don'tknow how to. This is one instance, obviously a little extreme. There's otherreasons you may want to get hold of City Hall. Noise, general complaints, maybeyou just have a question. "When is my garbage going to be picked up?""When does the library open?" There's many reasons you want to getahold of City Hall.
In this particular scenario, you're going to go into yourhouse. You're going to phone City Hall. Someone at City Hall can take the calland they are eventually going to figure out, "It goes to publicworks." Public works, they'll dispatch a truck. The truck will come overhere, and they will take, haul your car out, fill it up. Now this could havetaken a day. It could have taken 2 days. It could have taken 3 days. Now, theycome back here, they check it off. Public works is done. Problem, they can'tlet City Hall know, and they can't let you know. It's not that they don't wantto; they just have no way to do it.
We have a solution for this, called CSR, Customer ServiceRequest. How it works, is either over the Web, or in person, or whether youphone in. Basically, you will connect to someone in the city and it creates anincident. Now what this incident does, it's associated to you. So, as it goesthrough the whole flow of the process, you can keep track of it at any point,at any time, to see what's going on. What the CSR app does is it uses word flowto ask questions. "How big is the hole?" "What's the size?""Where is the hole?" "Is that a dangerous hole?" If it is asmall hole, that's a tiny thing. It may take a week to 2 weeks to fix. No onereally cares. In this particular case, this is something important, and needsto be dealt with right away.
How this works is it gets hold of the public worksapplication. It connects to it directly and it'll spawn a work order. Now thatwork order will get it fixed just as before. But what happens is, when theycome back and check it off, is it actually connected back to the customerservice request app updating the incident. The incident then pushes to you ande-mail to let you know it's done. So now, you know and are happy because youknow what's happened at any time, and are informed when it's done.
The other part of this is has reporting. The reporting workson their GIS layer. GIS is Graphical Information System. It's a bunch of datathe city has about the structure of the streets and all that kind of stuff. Sowhat it'll do is, you can get nice little maps, and you can start plottingthings, like holes. So, if I want to look at the holes in the northwest part ofthe city, you can see what is going on. So, this works for the City Manager,CIO. Anybody in the city now can look at this to see what is going on. So, itstarts making them accountable for what's going on. So you are happy becauseyou are able to keep track of what's going on. They are happy because they knowwhat's going on. They are accountable. So all in all, the entire city wins.
