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Playing "blue pages roulette" will soon be a thing of the past for the town folks of Whitby, Ont.
What phone number to call to report a pothole on the road, or to find out the library's summer hours, or what day is garbage pick-up for that old television cluttering the basement?
The town of Whitby recently implemented a geographic information system (GIS)-based customer relationship management (CRM) system to integrate the array of municipal services it offers its citizens.
"A GIS CRM addresses many of the issues that the 311 initiatives underway in other municipalities do, except you don't need CRTC approval of a dedicated line, and it can be done on a smaller scale," says Barry Kelly, account manager for the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) at ESRI Canada, a Toronto-based GIS provider that worked with the town of Whitby.
In 2004, the CRTC approved the use in Canada of a 311 telephone service for access to municipal non-emergency services. The objective of the initiative is to transform the way municipalities interact and communicate with their citizens by streamlining the call process and tracking citizen requests from beginning to end.
But many smaller municipalities lack the necessary back-end systems to support a full-blown 311 service, says Alex Miller, president of ESRI Canada and chairman of the Ottawa-based Geomatics Industry Association of Canada (GIAC).
"311 is just the number you dial. For many municipalities, the biggest problem in 311 implementation is gluing all the government departments together," he says.
He explains that GIS technology is used to some degree in most municipalities across Canada. Almost all of them use GIS for property management to graphically define boundaries, buildings, roads and landmarks and link this to underlying information about these structures. A natural next step is to overlay infrastructure such as sewers, utilities, and "street furniture" – signs, light posts, and so on – over this basic layer. The final step is to link the management of these municipal information systems, and 311 is an extension of that.
"Geography tells you what's there. If you're calling about a sewer problem, any call-taker can immediately see the water services in the area on a map even if you're not connected to the water services department," says Miller.
Since GIS is a generic platform, many smaller municipalities didn't have the budgets and resources to build their own applications in the past, he says. But many out-of-the-box GIS applications have been developed recently, so GIS enhancements are now more affordable for even the smallest municipalities.
The town of Whitby went live in February this year with the first phase of its GIS CRM in its operations areas, says Gary Cudmore, manager of IS at the town. Although the town had a GIS foundation in place for property and infrastructure, it had a manual, paper-based system for customer calls, service requests and field work.
"It was a real struggle tracking the calls that came in. This system takes away the paper, files and carbon copies stuck in a binder," he says.
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