Case Summary

The city of Camden, New Jersey decided to team up with Microsoft and their new Citizen Service Platform technology in order to help them track and complete their residents' service requests. Now all of Camden's city departments are connected, the mayor is able to oversee service request processing like never before and residents are able to call any department or go online to report their request.

Business Challenge

The processing of service requests for the residents of Camden, NJ used to be confusing and inefficient. Citizens would be calling multiple city departments in order for their claim to be addressed while city workers were never quite clear whether a service order had been taken care of or not. The Camden Success Project relieved the city from this major headache by introducing two systems, Contact Camden and the Mayor's Digital Dashboard. Contact Camden connected all of Camden's departments through a database where any department could enter or track a service request. This made calls from residents to the wrong department not an issue anymore since the request could be entered into the database and automatically be sent to the right department based on the ticket number.

The Mayor's Digital Dashboard allows the mayor of Camden, NJ and the city's chief operating officer to monitor just how well citizen's requests are being processed and whether there needs to be a change implemented in order to meet the desired performance levels. The Dashboard can also generate financial and budget reports for each department along with the status of their individual service requests.

Approach Taken

In order to implement The Camden Success Project, Camden partnered up with Microsoft and used their Citizen Service Platform to track service requests. Microsoft provides free templates of their Citizen Service Platform to local and state governments in order to smooth their transition into e-government. The governments must of course adopt the Microsoft software first if it hasn't already done so. These templates are then improved upon and changed over time, eventually to be redistributed to Microsoft's government clients.

Residents are also able to enter service requests into Contact Camden either via the internet or by phone.

Results Achieved

The Camden Success Project has dealt with 15,000 service requests since its implementation in November of 2006.

It's estimated that between 200 and 300 new requests are added each week.

Camden, NJ has 1,300 city workers all of which have access to Contact Camden.

There have been glowing remarks, such as those from Tasha McCoy, an administrative analyst in the Office of the Mayor for Camden (this quote is specifically about the Mayor's Digital Dashboard system).

"This is the most accurate and the best way for the mayor and COO to gauge what's going on,'' McCoy says. "There's no way these numbers can be altered. It's a true representation of what's being accomplished within the departments, and they have the information right at their fingertips.''1

"We can track problems with our constituency, offer better services, and deliver cost savings. Everybody seems happy about the services, and that gives us accountability. That's what every city needs."
-Gwendolyn Faison, Mayor of the City of Camden, New Jersey 2

The system has proved so successful that Camden is now looking to incorporate more add-ons and templates from Microsoft to their existing system. One add-on under consideration is an alert that will let a city worker know if a request hasn't been completed within a certain allotted time frame.

Lessons Learned

The transition to e-government might not be as scary of a move for government, as we can see as evidenced by this example, Camden made the transition without any major problems and is more efficient in their regard to handling service requests.

This case also shows there is great potential if private corporations (Microsoft) and government (Camden) team up together to lead the transition towards a collaborative e-government.

References

1.http://statetechmag.com/events/updates/camden-streamlines-services.html
2.http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:XBdEMOZoU5UJ:download.microsoft.com/download/6/a/4/6a4759a5-8408-4d3b-88c2-cd38a192b179/CityOfCamden.doc+Camden+Success+Project&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a