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Issued: August 2004

SUMMARY

This report presents the results of our audit of the City’s implementation of the 311 Citywide Customer Information Center (CIC). This audit was approved by the Council Audit & Finance Committee as part of our office’s 2004 service plan. The purpose of our work was to determine what is and is not being implemented and to identify associated risks.

We found that management is using a phased approach to planning and implementing the call center, in part due to staffing and funding constraints, and in part to allow a learning period with baseline functionality before moving on to planning and implementing more advanced features. Phase I of the CIC implementation, currently underway, includes establishing the call center facility and systems and integrating selected departments and service areas into the call center.

Departments are being implemented into the call center at three different levels, allowing the call center to manage requests for many of the more frequently requested services, provide answers to frequently asked questions, and transfer calls requesting other City services not handled by the call center. Because of the limited service areas configured in the CIC Customer Service Request system (CSR), the CSR data and reports at Phase I will not be a complete representation of citizen input and requests.

We found that management’s approach to implementation in Phase I appears sound, addressing some best practices. The approach uses a systematic process for integrating service areas into the CSR while allowing a testing period and gradual increase in call volume before final go-live.

However, a comprehensive plan does not yet exist for expanding system capability beyond Phase I, limiting policy makers’ ability to give input on the direction of future plans. Some features that better facilitate service delivery, while discussed or anticipated by management, are not included in Phase I. These are deferred for further assessment and include mobile interfaces with field crews, mapping of requests by geographic area, and establishing interfaces with various City systems.

Costs for the call center are estimated at approximately $2.5 Million through FY05, although issues of adequate budgeting and cost tracking remain to be addressed. We found that past audit recommendations on improving budgeting and cost tracking of IT projects in the City had not been implemented for the CIC project. In addition, we have not verified that funding for FY05 will be adequate to achieve identified enhancements.

Because cost tracking in Austin has been problematic and because available cost information for other cities is incomplete and may not be fully comparable, we are limited in our ability to draw conclusions from comparing Austin’s CIC costs to those of other cities implementing 311 call centers. Nevertheless, we have included in this report some of the kinds of comparisons that would be valuable. Based on these comparisons, Austin’s costs appear lower; however, the potential exists for Austin’s costs to increase.

We identified some issues for further study that were not fully addressed during this audit, including citizen and department experience and impact on service delivery, usefulness and reliability of reports, ongoing system development approach, operational plans and staffing, corporate use of system data through proactive reviews to identify trends, strategic issues related to the organizational placement of the call center, communication about call center expectations, and coordination among involved departments.

Recommendations in this report are directed at successfully completing Phase I, achieving full 311 CIC/CSR system potential, facilitating decision making, capturing and appropriately reporting cost, effectively budgeting IT projects, and addressing identified issues for further study.

Click here to go to our audit request form to request a hard copy of this report (Report No. AU04103) or download the entire text of the 311 Citywide Customer Information Center (CIC) Implementation (Size: .97 MB) in Adobe Acrobat. You will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view these files.

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