The trend is clear. Cities all over the world are implementing 311 systems. This is not a surprise: there is value in letting citizens inform the work that a city must do. It saves oversight costs. Instead of having your department of sanitation track and check every restaurant for rats, you can rely on citizens to point where the rats are. Same with many other city needs.
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and plenty of other large and medium north american cities have 311 systems in place. Yet, there is no clear market leader. Cities have developed custom solutions to meet their needs. This, I believe, occurs because local government has strict internal rules and regulations that force software customization. That is why you have many consultancy groups implementing custom solutions even when 311 needs don’t largely defer. Salesforce is a tool of preference. In-house Microsoft too.
In the large landscape of 311 solutions, some are lackadaisical. Call Centers are expensive. Self-service applications are imprecise when assigning service requests to city departments. Backend models are convoluted. And government operators cannot handle system change requests made by other departments. The problem is that government rarely pursues 311 improvement, even when it is easy to achieve.
Take Chicago as example. Right now, Chicago has the possibility of modernizing their 311 Salesforce system by leveraging Agentforce to create bots that better route service requests and answer calls from citizens. Chicago could be saving big in Call Center operations, and could be working in efficient service request routing. But the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC), owner of the Chi311, has a full plate managing the platform and is short in staff. Even if executives at OEMC decided to modernize Chi311, bureaucratic barriers impede and discourage such work. Local government is not ready for innovation. It’s immature and understaffed.
So, how do you flood this millionaire, up for grabs market? I don’t know. But here is an idea.
Let’s start by building something together. If you are interested in improving 311, contact me. I think it will happen with or without me or you. Because the market is too large, and it keeps growing worldwide. I believe this is a key window in time. One that correlates with other government technology windows.