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City of Norfolk, Va.
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March 13, 2006 (Computerworld) --
Norfolk, Va.
www.norfolk.gov
- Business: This municipal government with 5,000 employees serves a city with nearly a quarter of a million residents, the world's largest naval base and the East Coast's second-largest shipping container terminal. Norfolk has an $882 million budget for fiscal 2006.
- IT department: 126 employees
- Project champion: Hap M. Cluff
- Project payback: The average time to process building permits was cut from 19 days to three. Citizens no longer have to spend six to eight hours per application chasing forms through the approval process, saving 100,000 man-hours on 14,000 applications annually. The city has more than 5,000 forms left to automate.
Municipal governments enjoy monopolies within their city limits, but that doesn't mean they can get by with giving bad service. Right next door is another city that's more than willing to bring in new businesses and the accompanying tax revenue.
"We wanted our permitting process to be better than anyone else's, since it was the only way we could compete in our highly competitive region," says Hap M. Cluff, director of IT for the city of Norfolk.
The problem was that it took 19 days, on average, to get a permit approved. Residents and builders had to make multiple trips downtown to chase applications through departments scattered among six different buildings. Citizens complained about the wasted time and lost applications.
"This was not an acceptable time frame for something as simple as a driveway or a patio or a single-family dwelling," Cluff says. "It was not a good way for the city to do business."
The obvious answer was to use business process management (BPM) software to automate the process.
"A lot of government agencies aren't worried about revenue but about saving costs, and it will make people more productive to have managed processes in place," says Colin Teubner, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "They also want to provide better customer service to their constituents the way Norfolk did, by lowering the permit cycle time."
Sharing the Load
But there was a lot more than just building permits that needed automation. The city has more than 5,000 paper forms, and even doing one a week would stretch the task out into the next century. And there was no money in the budget to hire consultants to take over the job. Norfolk needed a framework for IT to push the automation out into the hands of those who use the forms.
In order to economically automate its numerous proc-esses, the city decided to use existing software and personnel.
Norfolk already had a license for eWork BPM software from Metastorm Inc. in Columbia, Md., which could be used to automate any number of processes. Cluff then created a bureau within IT called eAccess and Process Automation. The bureau's initial target was to tackle the permitting process, which it did within the first 90 days.
With the cycle time being cut down from weeks to days, however, associated activities also needed to be sped up. For example, it used to be that street addresses weren't assigned to vacant lots by surveyors until after the submission of a building permit application. Now those are assigned ahead of time and entered into an ESRI Inc. geographic information system database so the permit staff can enter the data into the electronic forms. It was easy to adjust the electronic processes as needed.
"The citizens, for example, were not used to getting their permits this quickly, so they didn't bring their checkbooks with them to pay for the permits," says Mary White, office automation supervisor. "We had to quickly create a stage to freeze the process until it was paid, but because it was an in-house process, we were able to put that in in a matter of minutes."
Since the successful deployment of the new permitting process, the city has automated other processes, including its vendor applications, which it reduced from four days to one hour, and its voice adds/moves/changes, a complex procedure involving 34 departments. Hundreds of other projects are in the queue throughout the city's operations, with thousands more to follow. But the work isn't all being done by IT.
"The best part of it is we have abandoned the old, traditional approach where IT owned and controlled everything," says White. "Now we have customers taking responsibility for their own training, marketing, and documentation of their eWork processes."
Robb is a Computerworld contributing writer.
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