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Back to SAG Winners 2004
City of Grand Rapids
Project Goal
Public Inquiry is part of a comprehensive strategic tool set (The Right Tools) available throughout the City. In short, The Right Tools provides citizens with direct interaction into the processes of government, and transform government through real time monitoring of operational performance and establishing the equitable and measurable distribution of municipal services to the citizens of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Built with ArcIMS, these tools marry GIS and data warehousing technologies with backend operational management systems such as Computer Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), nuisance complaint tracking, permit processing, document-workflow management, asset management, etc, resulting in centralizing customer service processes, immediate feedback to the public, and Citywide operational performance oversight.
The City’s GIS-IT program and The Right Tools are designed with three core tenets:
The development of GIS and supporting technologies into a comprehensive strategic management tool assists in work-culture transformation, strengthens the decision-making processes, reduces operational costs, and provides a return through operational efficiencies.
Interactive Internet tools assist in supporting the partnership of Community Oriented Government (COG) initiatives thereby aligning citizens, citizen groups, and neighborhood associations, with City operations.
Enhanced regional intergovernmental partnerships and technology progression occur by setting the ‘yardstick’ for progressive government.
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Business Problem Solved
The business goals and achievements for Public Inquiry were:
1. Improve and standardize the collection of service requests and eliminating redundancies of backend management systems.
2. Improve tracking of service requests establishing a single management source assuring that no request gets lost or unattended to.
3. Enhance internal communication between operations so service requests and work activities can seamlessly traverse across departmental boundaries.
4. Centralize customer service and provide immediate feedback to the citizen requesting service providing online status and resolution oversight.
5. Provide for the efficient and equitable delivery of service, established by measuring the performance of services to individual neighborhoods resulting in the characterization of neighborhood needs.
6. Institute proactive strategic planning of services and capitol improvements based on neighborhood characteristics and repeat events.
7. Increase the openness of GIS and operational activities of government to the citizens and regional partners.
8. Provide for Citywide operational oversight and performance management of work activities with resolutions identified for each request for service.
Additional Information:
The Right Tools: GIS
The Right Tools: CMMS
The Right Tools: Asset Management
May all be found at http://www.ci.grand-rapids.mi.us/index.pl?page_id=1450
Technology Implemented
ESRI’s software as well as its business partner products are used daily by the City to support their business needs. This includes ArcInfo, ArcView, ArcSDE, ArcIMS, and ArcPAD. Some of the integrated third party products include Azteca Systems’ Cityworks, Accela’s Permits Plus, Miner & Miners’ ArcFM, Omega Group’s CrimeView, analysis-modeling packages such as XPSWMM, MW Soft’s H2O Net, MicroPaver, etc.
All solutions are supported by a multi-facet distributed Oracle relational database, with extension databases in MicroSoft SQL Server, FileMaker Pro, Pervasive, and Access. These data structures serve as the City’s data repository, which is evolving to a data warehouse supporting temporal data subsets.
Development Team Biography
This was very much a team effort, with many participants in the development of The Right Tools. Three firms assisted the City in its development:
Northrop Grumman Information Technology, to which all GIS-IT support services are contract for the City of Grand Rapids,
Woolpert LLP, who assisted in getting the City started and successful with ArcIMS development and CMMS deployment, and
Velocitie Integration, Inc, who strategically brought the City to functional use of a geodatabase and continued our enhancements in architecture and ArcIMS solutions in so many ways.
Special recognition should be given to the following individuals for their programming efforts of Public Inquiry and associated ArcIMS solutions:
Tim Vroom (previously with Northrop Grumman, who took an idea and made it a reality), and Matt Kaiser and Jeremy Gerrits (both currently with Northrop Grumman,, who develop The Right Tools).
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