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$4 million and two years for a database program?
By adamg on Sun, 04/06/2008 - 10:13am
Globe: Despite Menino's vow, a system to track citizen calls is still years away.
Somerville: Ha!
Steve Garfield: What are these consultants selling the city? Garfield then does a little research and finds an off-the-shelf application that could easily handle the city's needs for $149 a month.
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Comments
What are these consultants selling the City?
Billable Hours!
C'mon, it's an IT project, and they're
consultants.
SAAS Solutions
There are any number of Software as a Service (SAAS) solutions that can be outsourced via nominal subscription fees, and I might add that the solution that is referenced may not even be the best one from the POV of integration. There are industrial strength databases, development environments, and even licensed versions of turn key hybrid systems that combine the bast of hosted solutions with more traditional big bux public sector software.
Of course, this is a new phenomenon - using web20 for the public services sector, and the various consultants that do municipal system IT will not like it one bit.
I could understand why you might want to keep this inhouse
Privacy reasons, to start.
Still, I'm struggling to figure out how this could be a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project. Unless the city's IT infrastructure is so fundamentally flawed the consultants are having to work around basic interoperability issues - which I suppose could be possible.
More privacy breaches in Internal systems
AMR had a sub-report section that estimated that internal IT systems in the municipal sector had poor trac records regarding data theft, and unreported breaches, than off-premises data warehouses and NAS facilities.
help desk problem, help desk solution
this sounds like a typical help desk situation, and a help desk solution could easily be the answer. Something as simple as Request Tracker could allow a person answering phones to take details of the trouble and pass it along to another department.
I suspect, however, that the problem is much bigger. I would guess that the city of Boston's departments don't have IT systems that talk to each other, making a solution such as Request Tracker unfeasible.
I'm glad I live in Cambridge. Not that Our Fair City has everything shiny shiny perfect, but things certainly seem to run more smoothly than in Boston.
Boston already has a complaint tracking system
It's online, the Globe missed it, but that's OK, because it doesn't work very well, either, Michael Pahre writes.
On the other hand
On the other hand, the online constituent complaint system itself seems to be working pretty well, even if the tracking isn't. I used it Monday to report some one-way/do not enter signs that had been stolen and defaced in my neighborhood, and to complain about Comcast having threaded cable through (and under!) the branches of the trees in my back yard instead of attaching them to the house itself like all of the other Comcast installations in our block. Last night Comcast came and removed the offending cables, and this morning I saw that the one-way signs had all been replaced.