ALL ABOUT IT
By Hap Cluff
The Culture of Process Automation
a Success Story:
The City of Norfolk, Virginia - Pretty
Lake Permitting Office Automation
do this? Of course not. In the future, the
bulk of electronic automation will not be done by IT either.
The departments, the business experts, and the process owners
are the ones who know best what is needed. So why go, or try to
explain it, to IT?
In the paper world if you need a form, you
get out a blank piece of paper, a ruler, and a pen and draw up
the form. On the back you put the routing instructions and
rules. Then take the draft to the print shop and get it printed
in three part NCR paper. Voila, presto, you have just automated
a process. This is the city’s automation vision. Their
automation tools on every desktop will be the blank piece of
paper, the ruler, and the pen of the future. This is the only
thing that makes any sense if there is any hope of getting the
5,000 forms and countless other manual processes electronically
automated. The vision is to take us from this place to the new
realism. I envision the day when the process automation tool is
as commonplace as Excel is today.
One critical process the city needed to
automate was its permit request process—the procedure for
requesting residential or commercial construction permits. The
city was challenged with maintaining its service levels and
keeping up with permit requests, which were at an all time high
due to recent city revitalization efforts that were generating
new office, retail, entertainment and hotel construction
downtown, new residential development along the rivers and bay
front, and revitalization projects in many of its
neighborhoods.
The office responsible for permit
processing only has a staff of six people and processed 14,000
permits within the last 12 months. In addition, much of the new
development was taking place outside of downtown Norfolk, that
required applicants to drive downtown—sometimes as far as
20 miles—to physically visit multiple departments and
hand deliver the application for submission and processing.
With multiple departments in six different buildings and many different
conditions requiring examination and compliance involved in the
process approval, applicants would sometimes have to visit
numerous times to track the permit through to completion.
To manage continued growth, city officials
need to be able to improve
The author is the Norfolk IT Director.
ounded
in 1682, Norfolk, Virginia is home to more than 242,000 people
and boasts the largest naval base in the world and the
second-largest shipping container terminal on America’s
east coast. The city’s mission is to provide leadership
and direction responsive to the needs and desires of all
citizens of Norfolk. We strive to do this in an efficient,
equitable, cost effective manner that leverages available
resources for the maximum benefit.
CHALLENGE
The city of Norfolk has approximately
5,000 employees and over 5,000 paper forms, and thousands more
human processes, ranging from parking permits to pet licenses. Managing
these processes manually has become inefficient and
unproductive, and employees lack visibility into critical
status information. City officials have recognized the need to
improve these processes to improve efficiency and reduce
bureaucracy. Each one of these 5,000 forms represents a
business process, a routing procedure, that could potentially
be electronically automated.
It would take the city’s IT
(information technology) department 25 years, even if they
could automate one form every single business day. One a day is
totally impossible, as is waiting 25 years. This points to the
need to approach the automation of processes in a completely
different way. In the past, a department would say, “IT,
tell us when you can get this done and how much it will
cost.” When someone thinks about creating a paper form,
or setting up a manual processes, do they think let’s get
IT to
