Project Successes Featuring Intelligent Automation

This week, we continue our series on Reinventing Civic Services with Intelligent Automation with a look at the role intelligent automation plays in enabling internal business process for effective service outcomes.

Intelligent Automation

While improved civic engagement and sustainable revenue growth are the core drivers that spur smart cities to innovate digital service experiences, it is important to recognize another focus point shared by Philadelphia, Albuquerque and Douglas County. In each jurisdiction, innovation initiatives focused on intelligent automation were leveraged to meet the needs of both external and internal stakeholders creating legitimate win/win scenarios across the entirety of the organization.

Freed from legacy systems yielding poor data integration and unwieldly processes, each of these award-winning agencies designed automation empowered workflows to realize substantial process efficiencies for front-line staff while also delivering elegant user experiences for citizens.

To better serve the needs of both citizens and colleagues alike, each of these digital communities followed a best practice approach in their adoption and delivery of automation technology:

To maximize both citizen and organizational reach, a leading-edge enterprise scale permitting, and licensing solution (POSSE PLS) was identified as the optimal platform to deliver a broad range of automated workflows for both internal and external users.
For each agency, their chosen solution featured a highly configurable business rules and workflow management platform, capable of supporting a robust set of licensing & permitting processes. This ‘best of both worlds’ approach provided the versatility to imagine and design new workflows, while also leveraging the ability of existing deep feature product modules to increase project ‘speed to market’ to deliver new services on time and on budget.
With a solid foundation of big data and intelligent automation now firmly established, our trio of agency innovators were each quick to embrace a new delivery model predicated on optimization of automated workflows to achieve both significant gains in response times and quality of outcomes.

In this new model, online self-service modules empower builders to expedite permit applications, inspection requests & schedules, and review inspection results on a timely basis. An accelerated review process moves permits through the workflow: tracking and recording all data at each step, with email notifications sent based on business process triggers such as impending inspection and license expiration dates.

“Project eCLIPSE will transform the way residents, business owners and developers do business with the City of Philadelphia. It will eliminate redundancies and the need for in-person paperwork and payments while emphasizing accessibility and convenience for citizens. Over time, Project eCLIPSE will improve public safety, government efficiency and delinquent tax collections, reduce vacant and blighted properties across the city and help attract new businesses and development by easing the application, permit and payment processes.”
Former Mayor Michael A. Nutter
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania