There is a reason most IT initiatives fail, especially in government where budgeting is necessarily fixed. The community development department staff needs to come up with permitting software requirements and plan for an annual budget. The building permit software requirements determine a scope for the work the permitting software or licensing software vendor is to perform. Once the scope is complete the traditional permitting software vendor needs to move on to the next project and the community development staff is stuck with whatever was delivered for the budget. The permitting software vendor typically provides support within the project scope to fix bugs or issues under a maintenance…
What is your process for monitoring, escalating, and resolving issues that will arise during the Project?
We maintain an issue list during the project. Issues that are not getting resolved get escalated to project leadership for resolution.
Based on the information provided in the RFP and experience in working with other cities, what is the Proposers perspective on the most significant risks to this Project and how do you plan to mitigate these risks?
As a pay-as-you-go cloud based software and service that includes unlimited support, many traditional project risks are already mitigated. With Citizenserve a permit application can be created with a review workflow and related outputs and a fee schedule in less than a day and this includes citizen portal features where applicants can apply, pay, schedule inspections and upload documents. Citizenserve already support thousands of community development professionals in hundreds of jurisdictions, so technology performance and underlying infrastructure issues are not notable risks. The main risks are making sure there is executive sponsorship and department level commitment to determining the desired processes. If there is confusion over what to do, then it is hard to implement. Citizenserve also has the benefit of easy configuration changes. As well as being easy to create; permits are also easy to modify and all configuration is on-the-fly with no programming/coding or downtime.
Becoming Paperless Overnight
Somerville is located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts just two miles north of Boston. Occupying slightly over 4 square miles, its population of 75,754 makes Somerville the most densely populated community in New England. Hired in 2013, Inspectional Services Superintendent Goran Smiljic was charged with modernizing the Somerville Building and Health Divisions. With more than 4000 permits and 1500 licenses issued annually the department functioned entirely with manual and paper systems. Inspections were tracked on index cards, plans were stored in various locations in the office. Solution: All permit and license applications were setup on citizenserve to be submitted electronically. Multiple kiosks were located throughout the Inspection Services offices to…