Starting Line Courting Order
PUTTING CUSTOMER SERVICE and government in the same sentence, says Michael Rary, is generally regarded as oxymoronic. “Like jumbo shrimp,” laughs the court administrator of the Fulton County State Court in Atlanta.
“There is an inherent bias or misconception that if the government is involved, something will be amiss. You’ve heard the old jokes: `I’m with the government,’ `Government bureaucracy can really change,’ `What’s with all the unnecessary red tape?'”
That cynical attitude may not be unfounded; Rary says there has been a prevailing Ivory Tower mindset in government circles. But his mission is to put a friendly face on the faceless bureaucracy for his constituents, including public defenders, magistrates, probate and juvenile courts, and the general public.
By his estimate, the court, which handles both civil and criminal misdemeanor suits, is more than halfway there.
Last December, with the assistance of solutions provider Hitachi Data Systems, Rary launched The Criminal Justice Information project, which links all offices to a central database of more than 100,000 cases. These cases are finely segmented by a host of data, including name, address, date of arrest, fingerprints, social security number, aliases and case number, and presiding judge.
Previously, each office within the campus-like grounds had its own database, which stymied efforts to update and move cases expeditiously through the justice system.
Imagine the redundancy: A police officer takes a crime report. That information is input into the department’s system. Then a district attorney requests the same data via telephone and waits for interoffice mail to deliver it. If the defendant is convicted, that report must be printed out, interofficed and routed to the prison, where it is keyed in once again. That “stone age” process continues for each subsequent request from interested parties.
Rary says the system will continue to undergo “refinements and upgrades,” and will ultimately link to nine other cities within the geographical boundaries of Fulton County that generate both misdemeanor and felony criminal case files that are adjudicated within Fulton’s courts.
The three-month-old Web site (www.fultonstatecourt.com) bows to citizens with the cheery tagline “Court leadership through innovation and customer service” at the top of every page. In its current nascent stage, the site includes basic information about garnishment, jury duty, landlord/tenant mediation and court calendars, and allows users to view the status of civil and criminal cases. Future plans will step up the interactive capabilities, including the ability to file suit online.
Government, says Rary, is not exempt from the CRM principles that guide private industry. In fact, he believes fellow public administrators may well lose ground to outside businesses if they refuse to change. “Here in Fulton County, our taxes, waste-water treatment, trash, street repair, probation services and activities are provided through private contract,” he says. “Government managers must adopt customer service philosophies to accommodate the demands of an educated electorate.”
Winter Reading CUSTOMER-CENTERED PRODUCTS Understanding what your customer needs early in the product development cycle and empowering employees to expedite the process is the theme of “Customer-Centered Products: Creating Successful Products Through Smart Requirements Management” (Anacom, New York), a new title by Ivy F. Hooks and Kristin A. Farry.
Hooks is president and CEO of Compliance Automation Inc., a Boerne, TX-based training and consulting firm. Farry is an engineer and pilot, and co-founder and president of Intelligenta Inc., a bionics company. The authors offer checklists and real-world examples illustrating the process of defining requirements, including “scoping” a project through a shared vision, determining how a project will be used in the real world and thinking ahead to testing and verification.
ACCELERATING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS Author Ronald S. Swift aims to provide a wide managerial perspective on the benefits of a customer-centric, knowledge-based info-structure in “Accelerating Customer Relationships: Using CRM and Relationship Technologies,” a new title from Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ.
Chapters cover defining the CRM process, the role of information technology, data mining and building a data warehouse. Swift, who is vice president of CRM solutions for NCR Corp., looks at the importance of implementing privacy in a CRM environment and discusses whether a company with a data warehouse can afford to ignore privacy issues.
Case histories from various industries around the world are also featured, including financial services (Barclays Bank), tourism (Kinki Nippon Tourist) and health insurance (Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield).
TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT Embracing the “engagement paradigm” – which “widens the circle of involvement, connects people to each other and ideas, creates communities for action and embraces democratic principles” – is what companies need today to thrive, according to Richard H. Axelrod, author of “Terms of Engagement: Changing the Way We Change Organizations” (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., San Francisco). Axelrod, a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, notes that this approach can work well for any company, from newly merged or acquired firms to start-ups or established companies where new technologies are introduced. The engagement paradigm helped leaders at Detroit Edison, he notes, by creating a critical mass of people to employ changes by asking: “Who else needs to be here? Whose voice needs to be heard?”
