Communicating with your customers; here’s how they do it in London, ON – which is where our city manager hails from.

By Pepper Parr

BURLINGTON, ON  November 1, 2012  You want to talk to someone at city hall; you know the department but you don’t know the full name of the person you want to speak to. Or you know their name but don’t know their phone number.

Learning who does what at Burlington city hall is a challenge – and that’s the way the city wants it.  They don’t want you calling people, who are in meetings more often than not.  Kim Phillips, a city general manager who oversees Budget and Corporate affairs wants to drive the public to the city web site, which if you haven’t noticed, hasn’t won any awards for ease of use.

City General Manager Kim Phillips will handle the e-government file – is she a true believer in getting useful data into the hands of citizens or is she more concerned about cost containment and keeping her staff off the telephones?

Phillips once said to a committee meeting that she didn’t want to see the city staff directory on the web site.  Her preference is to drive traffic to the web site where citizens can learn what they want to know.  Have you ever tried to navigate that web site?  Have you ever tried to do a search for something?  It’s easier to just call someone – they can usually give you a fast answer – if you can catch them at their desks.

City Manager Jeff Fielding thinks his staff hold far too many meetings and that the meetings they hold last far too long.  And if you ever find yourself in a meeting with Fielding – don’t expect to be there very long.  This guy wants you in and then he wants you out.  Nice guy, friendly, very helpful but he isn’t there to talk about the weather.

When you want to find someone in London, Ontario, former roosting spot for our city manager. It was easy to find any of the rascals. Don’t expect to be able to find the same level of access in Burlington.

London does it quite a bit differently.  Go to their web site and just pick out the staff directory from the city’s web site; it’s there on the main menu.  Type in the name and you get the person, the title, the telephone and the local and which floor of the building they are on.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

Burlington put in a new telephone system a while ago – it was chaos for more than a month.  At one point the women at reception had to deal with three different telephone sets.

Any other corporation installing a new telephone system would never tolerate this level of service.  Crews would arrive on the Friday to install everything and it would be fully operation on the next work day.  For some reason the municipal world seems to be able to get away with this kind of really sloppy service.

It is not all doom and gloom.  There are services that are fully electronic – and they work very well.  Just not enough of them.  One that we found to be excellent, was getting an on-street parking permit while the drive way was being paved.  Went on line at 2:00  am, (insomnia) and it was a breeze.  The only hitch was that it wanted the second part of the Street name (Ie: Drive, Avenue, Crescent) which wasn’t immediately evident to me.  After that I just typed in the data and got a document to put on the dash board.  These permits allow you up to 15 days a year of on street parking at night.  The document you get tells you how many days you have left.  That’s service, which perhaps makes Kim Phillips’ point – drive them to the web site.  Fine – but deliver top level service so that I don’t have to phone anyone.

City Manager Jeff Fielding was very recently awarded the first ever Local Government Program Alumni Society Award of Excellence.    There just might be some bright days ahead for Burlington taxpayers.

Hope they are working hard on making it real easy to vote on line.  No more election night lineups – easier to get rid of the rascals.

The City is providing adequate online service delivery in comparison to other municipalities, but needs to evolve its model to remove the risk of falling behind. The e-Government Strategy proposes that Burlington be positioned as a Digital City – a city that uses technology to its full potential and fully engages the community in delivering excellent, innovative and efficient customer service. This innovative model will provide Burlington a competitive advantage for attracting knowledge and technology based business and community initiatives.

The city`s e-Government Strategy presents four strategic cornerstones for successful delivery of an effective e-Government program:

1. Build a Customer First Service Delivery model. Design and build programs and services in a truly customer first way.

2. Build a Customer Centric Technology Architecture. Build a core foundation based on new and enhanced portal

technologies that deliver more robust, flexible and updated functionality and provide integration to a Customer Relationship Management system.

3. Prioritize an Internet First model, while supporting channel choice. Design services so that the Internet is the primary service channel over other costly channels, while supporting and enabling delivery through conventional channels.

4. Embrace Open Government, Citizen Engagement and Government 2.0.  Embrace Open Government and Open Data initiatives to encourage participation, interaction and transparency.  The strategy requires an investment of approximately $2 million in technology and resources over the next three years. This will build the technology platform to power the e-Government and online service programs for the future.

There a lot of those buzz words bureaucrats like to use.  But the essence is that they want you to go to the web site and get your water from that tap and don`t come into the kitchen with your cup in hand.  It costs the city too much to provide the number of staff needed to answer all the questions.

That`s good cost containment talk but it doesn`t do much for the citizen wanting information.  Burlington has a population that is aging and at the same time there are sections of the city with young families and parents on the go with smart phones in their hands far too often – even as they drive.  Dumb.

Christrine Iamonaco, on the right, was brought in to develop a Citizen’s Engagement Charter for the city – her document goes to a Council Committee this month – don’t expect it to be smooth sailing.

Much of that spending on e-government  got the chop in the 2012 Budget – the civic administration wasn’t really ready, and at the time they weren‘t effectively staffed up.  A former IT type who did one round of changes on the city web site found greener grass at the federal level and moved on.  Cuts at the federal level brought him back to Burlington. 

This file gets back to the committee – let`s see what we can get done this time around.

The Citizen`s engagement Charter comes up at about the same time.  Some had hoped that e-government, a process that would make tons of data available and result in a citizenry that had everything they needed to work with city hall to advance their fondest hopes and dream, gets to put its best effort on the table as well.  We will keep you up to date on how that one goes.

Will the zeal that he had in his early days as part of the Shape Burlington committee still be there when the Citizens Engagement Charter gets put before council?

Councillor Blair Lancaster was an original member of the Shape Burlington Committee; left to run for public office. Will we see any serious commitment to the concept of citizens having strong rights and access to the information they want? Is Lancaster positioning herself for a shot at the top job when Goldring decides to retire?

Many of the people who were heavily involved in the development of the document think it is too long – will real life get breathed into it before the end of the year?   Don`t hold your breath.  City Council as a group isn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy about the idea of an Engagement Charter – most went along with it as a motherhood and apple pie issue  – they didn’t know how to say no to what the Share Burlington report was recommending.

The two council members who were members of the original Shape Burlington committee that produced the report went on to bigger and better things and now sit on city council where they will determine the fate of the Charter that is being put forward.

It will be interesting to see how Councillors Lancaster and Sharman stick handle this one.