One of the first 311 call-center systems was implemented in Chicago in the late 1990s. In the design of the 911 center, a backup facility was part of the overall design to ensure redundancy and reliability. Rather than having that facility sit empty for 99.8 percent of the time, a plan to use it to take in non-emergency calls was developed. 

The Chicago 311 center was born and has handled many non-emergency calls from street issues to answering various questions about licenses and services. Chicago's configuration is not typical. In listening to other 311 center directors from other cities, their layouts are not the same.

Their 311 centers are not directly linked to their 911 centers as a backup. They are standalone centers. To me, that's not the most efficient design you could implement to maximize the investment needed to build both the 911 and 311 centers as well as the service life of each center.

If You Can Measure It, You Can Manage It

Cities and counties that don't have automated systems tallying up service calls, service requests and the dispatching of city resources can't effectively manage their resources.

Simple questions can't be answered when you don't have a quick way to summarize total service calls, type of requests and lengths of responses for fixing potholes, cleaning up debris and hundreds of other services cities are expected to provide to its citizens. 

By collecting different information that can be as simple as types of calls, their totals and the amount that have been dispatched and completed can really help manage resources as well as determine services that can be eliminated without much impact to overall services.

This simple example shows how you can look at the type of calls coming in to see what services demand the most resources as well as what areas of the city might be requesting more services. Any municipality that is faced with a declining revenue stream has to take a hard look at investing in these types of tools for several reasons:

• Managing resources and establishing baseline service levels
• Tracking and improving response times for service calls
• Uncovering service-level deficiencies
• Eliminating unused or less-requested services
• Cutting costs

Without these types of tools, there is a question of whether or not every dollar spent on resources and services is getting a dollar's worth of benefit. More and more politicians and city administrators are seeing the benefit of these types of tools to better manage the provisioning of services.

The old method of providing services and then trying to figure out how to pay for all the unforeseen overages has to be replaced in this era of uncertain revenue streams. Money is not as easy to come by for any organization.

 Good City Services

Just as every layer of infrastructure is important to attracting and maintaining corporate facilities and businesses, having these types of overall managing tools to maximize the usage of resources is critical to supporting those layers of infrastructure.

The bottom line is that you can't run a city in a 1950s services mentality. You also can't depend on federal money to fund every municipal initiative.

 These types of issues as well as the current impact of both the residential and commercial property financial implosion will be part of my keynote presentation next week at the University Club of Chicago's civic affairs breakfast.

Carlinism: You can't function in a 21st-century economy with 19th- and 20th-century municipal services solutions.

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James Carlini will be speaking at the University Club of Chicago on Sept. 30, 2008. His topic will be "Beyond the Veolia Study: Intelligent Infrastructure": All members are invited to hear Carlini's presentation on this important study, which is a timely and important topic to Chicago in connection with the Olympics. A continental breakfast will be served at 7:45 a.m. and remarks begin at 8 a.m. You can reserve your spot online here.

Check out Carlini's blog at CarlinisComments.com.

James Carlini is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University. He is also president of Carlini & Associates. Carlini can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 773-370-1888.
Click here for Carlini's full biography.

Copyright 2008 Jim Carlini