With citizens today going online for everything from ordering groceries to booking travel, government agencies are being pressured to follow suit.

The Alameda County Public Works Agency (PWA) is wholeheartedly embracing e-services and recently rolled out an online permitting system that’s built on MaintStar software. MaintStar is a Microsoft CityNext partner that specializes in software solutions to help municipalities be more efficient and provide better citizen services.

PWA designs, builds, and maintains the roads, bridges, flood control systems, and other infrastructure in Alameda County, which sprawls along the east side of San Francisco Bay and is home to 1.5 million people.

The agency’s permit system had always been paper-based and manual, requiring that builders and developers drive to the agency’s Oakland office to complete and submit paperwork. Alameda County is huge; if you live at the outer edges, you have a 60-mile drive each way. So, if the county required changes to an application, even more driving ensued.

It was just as bad from the county’s end. A small army of people processed permit paperwork and stored it in four different systems (corresponding to review, issuance, inspection, and archival phases). If office workers or field inspectors needed to consult that paperwork, they had a hard time laying their hands on it.

PWA issues 1,000-plus permits a year, so the inefficiencies were multiplied in a big way.

PWA brought us in to help solve the twin problems of poor citizen service and poor staff efficiency. PWA already used a couple of our solutions, the MaintStar Asset Management & Maintenance System and our Mobile Citizen Service Request System. It uses these to, respectively, digitally track all physical assets and give citizens an easy way to communicate with the county.

Using the MaintStar Permits and Inspections Module of our Community Development Management System, we helped PWA digitize the whole permit process. Our software uses Microsoft SQL Server as a database and runs on the Windows Server operating system. Microsoft software delivers maximum performance, scalability, and reliability. Plus, most of our customers, including PWA, are Microsoft shops, so our software interoperates well with what they already have.

Today, with PWA’s new online permitting system, builders and developers can complete their permit applications, request inspections, and review the status of their applications—all online.

If the county requires changes to a plan, inspectors digitally notate the plan and send it back to the developer. The developer can make the changes and resubmit it online. Over the course of a project, builders or developers save five to six trips into Hayward—that’s about 10 to 12 hours of drive time. Valuing their time at around $100 an hour, that’s a $1,100 average savings. Multiply that times 35 builders a month doing business with the county, and that’s an annual savings of around $211,000 for private industry.

For the agency’s part, it’s able to offer modern, convenient online services to constituents. It’s removed one full-time person from its paperwork army and reassigned them to the field, where they help with inspections.

And the field inspection process is far more efficient. Everything inspectors need is now available in digital form on mobile devices. Instead of driving into the office each morning to get a stack of inspection assignments, they receive their assignments digitally, complete with the daily driving route already mapped out. All the data they need, including past inspections, forms, and photos, are available digitally with a few taps on mobile screens. No more trips back to Hayward with associated delays.

Consequently, inspectors save one to two hours a day, which the county estimates adds up to a per-inspector savings of $187,500 annually. They use the extra time to do more thorough inspections or more inspections each day. And that’s more efficient use of taxpayer money and a pretty good return on investment to Alameda County Public Works Agency.

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That scenario is exactly what MaintStar is trying to eliminate. We create technology solutions that are meant to drive operational efficiency for small towns and large cities, so they’re more responsive to their citizens. And most importantly: we want to improve citizen engagement through mobile apps that make it fast and simple to report problems.

The need for better engagement

Citizen engagement is a big issue for most cities today, and it’s a two-way street: citizens want to feel more engaged with their community, and need to feel their city leaders are listening to them, while municipalities and cities are seeking to connect more closely with residents and become better at responding to their needs.

One of the reasons we’re a Microsoft CityNext partner is that we know that Microsoft is committed to improving citizen engagement worldwide. We were especially excited when we learned Microsoft was starting to focus on serving municipalities with populations under 100,000 – exactly the kinds of cities we were looking to get into. That’s why it was a natural fit for us to partner with Microsoft on Mobile Citizen, our mobile app that citizens can use to better connect with their city leaders.

Empowering citizens to take action

Mobile Citizen, which can be downloaded to any Android or Apple smartphone, empowers citizens to take action and quickly notify the proper public works departments of non-emergency infrastructure incidents or problems. For example, citizens that notice streetlight outages or flooded intersections can open the app, take a picture of the light or street, and submit the image through the app. Once the item is submitted, the app automatically processes the photo and GPS location of the incident and sends it to the MaintStar Service Request System, which is based on Microsoft SQL Server database software and hosted on Windows Server.

Within seconds, a city employee receives the report and a work order is created. An automatic reply is sent to the citizen who submitted the report, and subsequent emails are sent when the work order is created and the incident is resolved by the city. It’s a seamless process, designed to shorten the time it takes for cities to address infrastructure issues.

Although we’re still in the process of rolling out the app into new places, we’re already seeing great success in cities like Pleasanton, California, Alameda County, California, the Merrimack Valley area of Massachusetts and Seminole County, Florida.

Connecting citizens and cities

With Mobile Citizen, we’re trying to connect citizens with their cities in a way that wasn’t possible before. With this app, citizens are more engaged with city officials and feel like they’re directly contributing to making their city a better place to live.

By the same token, cities are able to be more responsive and provide a better level of service to their citizens. It shows residents that cities are listening to their concerns and working to more quickly solve problems. And cities can also immediately learn about infrastructure issues they might not have discovered for another day or two.

Driving new efficiencies

Mobile Citizen is also helping cities drive new operational efficiencies. Instead of relying on aging systems that required manual intervention, city departments can take advantage of the integrated workflow in our service management system. Every new incident report that comes in can be automatically processed and tracked, without any city employee needing to do a thing.

Cities can also use the data they collect through the app to be proactive about infrastructure. For instance, they can track how many potholes were reported during a fiscal year, so they can better concentrate their resources on looking for and fixing roadways going forward.

Learn more about MaintStar’s smart city solutions on Twitter. Follow Microsoft CityNext on Twitter for news, trends, and smart city solutions.

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