City Of Worcester: Now Accepting Applications
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The City of Worcester is moving forward with a plan to develop an application that would allow users of Blackberry handheld devices to document and report problems such as potholes.
It might not be long before the city of Worcester is channeling the spirit of Ethel Merman, cooing “anything you can do, I can do better” and directing the message towards Boston and the city’s shiny new iPhone application, Citizens Connect.
The application allows iPhone-totting Bostonians to photograph potholes, broken streetlights and unsightly graffiti and send requests for repairs to City Hall, complete with the GPS coordinates of the problem. From there, the request is given a tracking number and, after the work order is filed, the person who made the request will receive notifications from the city updating the issue and alerting them when the problem has been resolved.
If Worcester has its way it will be rolling out a Blackberry application that offers its citizens that same basic service but with a bevy of additional features.
Early Bird Applications
“Working with the government, if you have an idea you can’t just speak about it, you have to act on it,” said City Councilor Frederick Rushton, who is a proponent of this new technology debuting in Worcester. “The early bird catches the worm a lot, but it’s the bird that’s persistently looking for the worm that catches the most.”
Rushton definitely could be considered an early bird for this technology push, since it was he who first contacted the developer of Boston’s iPhone application. It was back in the summer when Rushton read a Boston Globe article forecasting the Citizens Connect application in Boston. By 8:30 in the morning that same day, Rushton had the application’s developer, Dave Mitchell of Connected Bits in Nashua, N.H., on the phone discussing the possibilities of a similar application for Worcester.
However, Boston’s finished product may be just the starting point for what Worcester’s can achieve.
As Mitchell explains, in order to make this technology functional, the city of Boston needed a customer relationship management system (CRM), which it purchased from Lagan, a Belfast, Ireland-based company, for about $5 million. By contrast, the city of Worcester — under the direction of Public Works Commissioner Robert L. Moylan in 2002 — began developing its own customer database to manage interactions between citizens and the city.
And because that system has been in place for some time, the city already is equipped to process requests for services, everything from snow removal and animal control to trash pickup.
There are still hurdles to overcome, both on Mitchell’s end as the application developer and on the city’s end, as it updates its system to coordinate with a smart phone application.
“We have a system in place,” Mitchell said. “The hard part was developing it in a way that would integrate with the back ends of the systems so they could communicate the reports to whatever CRM system was being used.”
Because the city of Worcester wants a Blackberry application over the iPhone — a decision made after research showed that there are more Blackberry users than iPhone users in Worcester — Mitchell and his team will need to tweak their application to be Blackberry compatible.
Connected Bits may work out a deal with the city where the company would host the server necessary to communicate with all the phones. It could prove to be a cheaper alternative, since the city would not be required to purchase, license and maintain a server of its own.
The city’s technical department is focused on upgrading its customer service system to support a smart phone application.
“There’s a lot of technical work for us to do,” said Tom Zidelis, the CFO for the City of Worcester. “It would be premature to put a date on it (when an application could be available), but we’re working toward having these capabilities.”
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