Tag Archives: Municipal Purchasers

CHANGE OF DATE – Free Training Webinar – Living Through a Ransomware Breach

                 

NOTICE OF CHANGE OF DATE

Due to circumstances outside our control we have had to re-schedule this free training webinar to December 17th.  Our apologies for the change in date.

muniSERV is proud to partner with industry expert Valencia Risk, to invite you to a complimentary 90-minute emergency cybersecurity awareness session on December 17th at 2:00pm EST, Living through a Ransomware Breach.

Presented by Aron Feuer 25 year veteran of the cybersecurity industry, and developed in collaboration with our senior colleague Richard McDonald (former CIO of CSIS and CSE). This session is intended to inform City managers, CAOs CFOs, IT and IT and cybersecurity staff responsible for respond to a breach.

Session Audience

This session is for City, Town and Municipal employees that would be involved in a breach response or information protection. We invite CAO, CFO, CIO, Legal, and Emergency response executives, Council, and Privacy professionals to attend.

Session Description:

When an attack hits, executives must act quickly. In a ransomware breach, City managers are coming in cold, navigating uncharted waters with untested tools and playbooks. This session will describe the importance of being prepared for an attack through sharing the experience of a ransomware outbreak – from initial breach to recovery.  Attendees will learn:

  • What to expect from their cyber-insurance provider, MSSP, and tech partners
  • Where to act fast, and how to make informed decisions during a breach
  • What to measure for Cybersecurity health
  • Why a cybersecurity audit or assessment isn’t the best tool
  • Protecting yourself when you work from home
  • Recovering from a breach post-incident

To register for this event send your RSVP to [email protected]

About Aron Feuer, Managing Director of Valencia IIP

Aron is the managing director of cybersecurity at Valencia. Before Valencia Aron founded Cygnos IT Security as head hacker, and sold the firm to Grant Thornton in 2015. Valencia IIP specializes in cybersecurity, privacy, and cloud. Aron’s work is with the federal government, cities, provinces, fortune firms, national retailers. He’s responded to hacks by Anonymous, lead classified security projects for the government, and run hundreds of penetration tests, risk assessments, simulations and security incident responses. His certifications include CISSP, CISA, CRISC, CRMA, CDPSE and CIPP/C, MCSE

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Customer Service Excellence – Maximizing Efficiency and Improving Customer Service

AccessE11 Citizen Issue Management – Municipal 311 Software Designed for Local Government

Produce better relationships with citizens through automated status updates with a highly-integrated platform your staff will love.

  • Is your municipality looking for ways to improve your complaint and service request management?
  • Do you want to better understand the issues citizens are bringing to your municipality?
  • Would you like for your citizens to be able to view and update the issues they bring to your municipality?
  • Would you like valuable reports for your department heads and council?
  • How about collaborating with staff on the issues they are managing?
  • Want to streamline services requests and effectively manage them?

AccessE11 is a cloud-based, easy-to-use software solution to assist municipalities in better managing, tracking and reporting citizen inquiries, issues and complaints impacting your community.

Register for our Webinar to learn about all of this and more!

Presented in Partnership with The Ontario Municipal Leadership Institute

     

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Customer Service Excellence – Maximizing Efficiency and Improving Customer Service

AccessE11 Citizen Issue Management – Municipal 311 Software Designed for Local Government

Produce better relationships with citizens through automated status updates with a highly-integrated platform your staff will love.

  • Is your municipality looking for ways to improve your complaint and service request management?
  • Do you want to better understand the issues citizens are bringing to your municipality?
  • Would you like for your citizens to be able to view and update the issues they bring to your municipality?
  • Would you like valuable reports for your department heads and council?
  • How about collaborating with staff on the issues they are managing?
  • Want to streamline services requests and effectively manage them?

AccessE11 is a cloud-based, easy-to-use software solution to assist municipalities in better managing, tracking and reporting citizen inquiries, issues and complaints impacting your community.

Register for our Webinar to learn about all of this and more!

Presented in Partnership with The Ontario Municipal Leadership Institute

     

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How COVID-19 Permanently Digitized Site Selection

Have you ever had a meal, gone on a date, or enjoyed a vacation so good it made you never want to repeat the lower quality experiences you’ve had in the past? Why would you want to eat bad food, date a loser, or suffer scratchy hotel sheets when you knew there was a better way for you to live and you could keep living that way? That ah-ha moment is the same realization that happened with corporate site selection during COVID, and why professionals will not go back to the old way of doing business.

The global pandemic was a disaster for business expansions and relocations, including foreign direct investment (FDI). The data is clear that these projects declined significantly as a result of the COVID pandemic, just like the overall economy. It was natural that businesses were unsettled by the economic upheaval, so they were uncomfortable making multi-million-dollar corporate location decisions without physically and personally “kicking the dirt” as part of their due diligence.

Economic developers couldn’t physically travel to meet with businesses considering a prospective location expansion into their community, especially internationally, due to legal restrictions. Likewise, corporations weren’t travelling to meet with real estate developers or EDOs. The risk was too great; death from a virus or becoming quarantined outside of a home country made even aggressive businesspeople reconsider traditional operating procedures.

When traditional business practices fail, new strategies get implemented to overcome the obstacles; no companies want to be stuck being unable to take action to move their company forward, even in an unprecedented pandemic. And that’s exactly what happened with corporate expansions and site selection projects.

The only way to do site selection analysis leading to corporate location expansions in a non-physical world was to go digital. As a result, business, corporate real estate, and economic development engaged in a test of purely digital site selection out of necessity. But the result of the experiment was that it worked. The outcome of this positive result is that many businesses are discovering there is an alternative and better way to do site selection.

Of course, the transition toward online site selection has been a gradual trend that has been growing for decades. The difference is that COVID was a stress test to see if corporate site selection could be accomplished 100% digitally. Like other industries, this trial-by-fire accelerated trends and is normalizing new practices into standard operating procedures.

Digitization was not an experiment and trial run that was unique to economic development:

 Like these other digital experiments, digital site selection has revealed new advantages and proven theories. Digital site selection:

  • Enables companies to consider more communities faster
  • Communities can be more easily compared with objective and consistent benchmark data
  • Assumptions about the need for in-person were proven incorrect and that they were replaced with web meetings
  • Taking multiple web meetings gets more accomplished and is faster than flying and driving to numerous in-person meetings
  • Economic development GIS site selection software met the challenge to deliver relevant location information and site selection analysis in real-time

Two key reasons that companies will not go back to the old way of doing site selection are 1) they have discovered digital is an acceptable/preferable alternative and 2) their success story is being amplified in awareness to CRE peers and CEOs in other companies through mainstream media.

What does this new digital reality look like for the process of site selection? How are site selectors themselves doing things differently? Join us tomorrow for Part II of How COVID-19 Permanently Digitized Site Selection.

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Municipal 311 Software Designed for Local Governments

AccessE11 makes service request management seamless. It fosters simplicity, reduced administration effort and cost, and stronger decision making as well as enhanced compliance across four specific focus areas within local government operations.

1. Citizen services, complaint, and issue management
2. Job assignment and tracking
3. Administrative Services: Management, compliance reporting, and evidence-based decision making
4. Citizen Relationship Management: Contact management including tagging and interaction history

Discover how our cloud-based Citizen Issue Management software can manage any request and ensure effective and fast resolution of issues across all departments. Join us on October 14th for our free webinar.

Click Here to Register for the October Webinar

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New! Drive time data for cars, trucks, walk time on ZoomProspector

We’re thrilled to introduce yet another new feature on ZoomProspector: adjustable drive time analysis for cars, trucks and walking. This is a game-changer for prospective investors who need to assess transportation logistics, commute times and travel distances for target clients travelling in different ways, on different days and at different times. In keeping with GIS Planning’s ongoing commitment to excellence in the user interface, we’ve designed this feature to be intuitive, visual and easy for your website visitors to find.

The new drive time analysis is easy to find – it’s an enhancement of the radius/ drive time buttons at the top of every single property and pinpoint report. Now when you click “Minutes,” you’ll see icons that let you select car, truck or walk, with an additional option to click on and adjust the date, time and destination – from or to the selected location. We’ve made it even easier by also adding these options directly on the map for those website visitors who prefer to make adjustments over there.

Miami Dade ZoomProsepctor walk drive truck timeIt’s easier than ever for economic developers to inform site selectors and businesses making location decisions as they research long and shortlists of suitable communities and properties. You can read more about our new adjustable drive time analysis here. You can also click here to learn more about the other map tools that make ZoomProspector the most innovative and user-friendly online GIS data tool for site selection?

Would you like to learn more about how ZoomProspector can help drive investment to your community? Click here to schedule an online meeting and demo.

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How ZoomProspector makes you look like an economic development rockstar

GIS Planning’s clients range from small towns with a single economic development person (who often also handles duties at the chamber, the city manager’s office etc.) to large cities or regional and statewide economic development agencies with large staffs.

But no matter the size of the EDO is, they always have more projects and incoming requests than people or time.

Fortunately, GIS Planning clients can rely on the equivalent of an extra staff member with ZoomProspector working for their region.

Closeup portrait happy excited young economic developer celebrating successZoomProspector is available to answer questions 24/7 from anyone who comes to your website, whether they’re a potential investor, site selector or local entrepreneur. The industry’s leading GIS web tool for economic development can always be relied upon to offer accurate, up-to-date information in clear, visually compelling ways. And while it can’t crack a clever joke in meetings, celebrate birthdays or join co-workers for drinks after work, it will also never take a vacation, steal your lunch from the fridge or leave the coffee pot empty.

Reliable, smart and unflappable, ZoomProspector is the staff member every economic developer wants on their team. It makes everyone around them look good by helping them succeed. It makes you look like a rock star by facilitating quick, reliable research and helping generate beautiful, branded reports and polished proposals.

We have clients who speak with businesses only after that business has (in effect) qualified themselves by gathering information and answering questions, using the powerful analytical tools and extensive datasets provided by ZoomProspector.

In a fast-paced digital world where people want that information before they take time to pick up the phone and connect in person, ZoomProspector offers a critical competitive advantage. In many cases, simple questions about a community’s demographics, labor force, businesses, wages, etc. can be answered on the public ZoomProspector site using a few clicks of a mouse button.

As the most intuitive and user-friendly GIS site selection data tool on the market (by a long shot), they don’t need training or guidance to do so. You can rest confident that you aren’t losing leads before you even know they exist.

When more extensive data requests or RFP’s come in, GIS Planning clients have the ability to pull down and compose sophisticated reports on their community, with custom mile or drive time analyses around specific available sites or buildings, or around a pinpoint on a map. They can easily build and export reports from ZoomProspector in a few minutes. When our economic development clients receive incoming requests from elected officials, members of their community, academics or journalists, they too can be handled easily and quickly. Thus such request is transformed from a time-consuming nuisance to an easily handled opportunity to network, engage and build or bolster relationships with stakeholders.

Our drag and drop proposal generator now enables our clients to begin a response to an RFP, or begin crafting a proposal, with one click, and from there it’s easy to include available sites and buildings with relevant data reports, even include video and photos.

Best of all, anyone can perform the same high-level, detailed analyses on ZoomProspector at any time of day or night. GIS Planning created ZoomProspector to be a public-facing, easy-to-use source open access data portal. Economic developers can simply point to their own public website to answer basic questions, direct marketing campaigns to the website as a “call to action”, and make their website an integral part of their information toolkit.

With our ZoomTour platform, our clients can go even further and offer an online immersive experience, using media ranging from still photos to video to drone footage, and (of course) GIS Planning data tools, to provide a guided tour of a community (or a part of the community like the downtown area, or specific business clusters etc.), available 24/7, 365 days per year.

Learn how GIS Planning’s innovative GIS data tools for economic development can serve your community. Book a demo today!

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How to Persuade Employees to Embrace Records & Content Management

Records and Electronic Content Management (RM/ECM) solutions increase effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance with regulations. A big challenge can be to convince employees to actually use the new software. Unfortunately, nearly a third of RM/ECM migrations fail due to a change management issue.

Issues can arise in a number of forms, such as: 

  • Employee fear. Employees may be afraid that they will lose their jobs because the new system will make them redundant. Such employees may be actively hostile to the change and attempt to sabotage the transition; 
  • Employee routine. Some employees may have worked with a paper-based records management system for decades and be very comfortable with it. These employees may be hesitant to change their routine if they believe that they will be unable to work with the new software;
  • Key people averse to change. Even if the majority of employees are willing to change, the transition may not work if key members of the team aren’t. If the team lead or an otherwise respected or admired employee refuses to change, this attitude may spread to other would-be RM/ECM converts as well; 
  • Employers not putting the time in and/or abandoning the project. Managers can be very busy and if they don’t see quick results they may stop pushing for employees to adopt the RM/ECM solution and move on to their next project;
  • No culture shift. Switching to an RM/ECM solution is a big shift, not only in terms of efficiency and effectiveness but also in how employees think of their work. In an RM/ECM system information can be easily shared across departments, eliminating silos. RM/ECM solutions also reduce the need to print information. If employees don’t adopt these new ways of thinking it can be problematic;
  • Non-supportive software vendors. Vendors are often unaccustomed to working with local governments and don’t realize their unique needs. These vendors may be unwilling to shift their policies or customize their software to meet government requirements.

Luckily, Ricoh has over a decade of experience working with local governments and boasts the ability to implement efficient and effective transition processes. We recognize when local governments perform this transition well. One particular municipality who excelled in its transition to RM/ECM was the Township of Springwater, Ontario. Springwater implemented several of our best practices as it: 

  • Created a team including members from different departments who met frequently and discussed desired results. This ensured that the departments could request the functionalities that they needed;
  • Started the transition process from the top down. First they convinced the council to switch over to the new system, then senior management, and so on. This ensured that employees weren’t change-averse due to the attitudes of those above them. Employees could also ask their superiors if they had any questions about the system. As the superiors had received training first, they were able to effectively answer these questions;
  • Maintained open communication. Springwater regularly polled staff to learn of any questions or concerns about the software and allayed any issues. This also involved assuring employees that the RM/ECM solution would make their lives easier and not harder as some of the monotonous tasks they did before could now be automated, allowing them to focus on more important things;
  • Addressed the culture shift resulting from the transition. Springwater’s transition team spoke to each department about their current information silos and how that would change as information became easy to share. The team also spoke to employees who were used to piling paper on their desks and explained to them how the new system would make their lives easier; 
  • Replicated the old filing structure within the new repository so that employees would feel comfortable with working on the electronic records. Springwater also kept the paper records during the beginning of the transition process until employees were sufficiently comfortable with the new system and saw that the paper system provided no benefits; 
  • Arguably most importantly, Springwater decided to work with a knowledgeable RM/ECM vendor – Ricoh! As Ricoh is extremely experienced in working with local governments and creating custom solutions, Springwater received exactly what they needed. Ricoh provided extensive support throughout the transition and ensured that everything was running as requested. 

Effective RM/ECM solutions make employee lives easier and allow them to work faster. However, employees often need to be convinced of this fact. Follow Springwater’s lead and persuade your employees to adopt RM/ECM. We’ll help you do the rest.

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Unlock the Power in Your Citizen Service Request Data

There is no question that the Covid-19 pandemic is creating hardships for local governments as recreation, illegal parking and transportation revenues decline and more money gets directed into public health initiatives. Budget cuts, where not already underway, are looming and municipal governments will need to find operational efficiencies and direct scarce resources to where they are most needed and have the greatest impact. In this post, we look at how 311 or citizen service request data can be an extremely valuable component in the toolkit of a local government trying to maintain services with fewer resources at its disposal.

It comes as no surprise that, as part of the open data movement, larger cities have been at the forefront of investing in data hubs that consolidate data from 311 service requests and multiple other sources. New York City, for example, has been relying on sophisticated data analytics for several years to measure performance and better inform the allocation of the city’s financial resources, equipment and personnel. Like many large North American cities, New York maintains a portal where the public has access to critical performance measures from multiple agencies. The benefits of this treasure trove of data for city managers are obvious, however, the very significant investments in time and cost required to get there are out of reach for smaller municipalities.

But concerns about cost or complexity should not prevent these smaller municipalities from pursuing a data-driven approach to finding efficiencies in their operations. The trick is to have a clear idea of the keys to success and the right set of tools to get there. For example:

Data Focus

When considering a goal of optimizing resource allocation in the face of budget constraints, the value across various types of data is not necessarily equivalent and therefore prioritization is needed. 311 service request data is particularly powerful because properly implemented, there should be a documented record of every touchpoint with the concerned citizen and assigned staff from the time an issue is raised to when it is resolved and closed. From a management perspective, this is extremely valuable.

The Right CRM

Regardless of municipality size, aggregation of the required data is unlikely to be successful without leveraging a CRM to manage service requests. CRM implementations should not, by default, be cost-prohibitive and there are cloud-based solutions available today that are easy to adapt and built specifically with the needs of smaller municipalities in mind.

Seamless Data Collection

The aggregation of comprehensive service request data that can be used reliably to inform operational decisions needs to happen by default. Local government service delivery will likely continue without staff increases for the foreseeable future, meaning that technology used needs to make the work of municipal staff easier in general and at the same time avoid any extra effort to collect and store the desired performance-related data. And since the primary data sources are the citizens themselves, an omnichannel approach that makes it simple to report service issues is critical. Citizens that are engaged in the way that best suits them will be far more likely to participate in making their communities better.

Flexible Analytics and Reporting

Once the data is available in one place, making sense of it is the next challenge. For smaller municipalities, the tools needed to visualize and report on service request data will, ideally, be baked into the solution used to manage day-to-day requests. Regardless of the technology that is applied, however, there are several imperatives that should be in place to fully benefit from this type of data analysis initiative. In all likelihood, various stakeholders including the city council, CAOs, and departmental managers will have different objectives when looking at the data, and these objectives will evolve over time. This speaks to the need for simplicity and flexibility for configuring and saving reports and dashboards on an individual basis. Access to configurable GIS views of the data can be highly useful as well in identifying trouble spots, prioritizing work plans, and scheduling the activities of field staff.

The bottom line is that there are opportunities for governments of any size to invest in a data-informed and results-oriented approach to finding savings in their operations. And although the pandemic will hopefully be in the rear-view mirror soon, it is not too late for municipal governments to start unlocking the power of service request data. This is a natural evolution for those with a suitable CRM already in place, but even where not the case adoption of suitable technology does not need to be onerous. Doing so will help with the immediate need to recover quickly from pandemic-induced shortfalls, and will continue to pay dividends for many years to come.

 

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Customer Service Excellence – Maximizing Efficiency and Improving Customer Service

June 16th 12pm – 1 pm EST

Customer Service Excellence – Maximizing Efficiency and Improving Customer Service

AccessE11 Citizen Issue Management – Municipal 311 Software Designed for Local Government

Produce better relationships with citizens through automated status updates with a highly-integrated platform your staff will love.

  • Is your municipality looking for ways to improve your complaint and service request management?
  • Do you want to better understand the issues citizens are bringing to your municipality?
  • Would you like for your citizens to be able to view and update the issues they bring to your municipality?
  • Would you like valuable reports for your department heads and council?
  • How about collaborating with staff on the issues they are managing?
  • Want to streamline services requests and effectively manage them?

AccessE11 is a cloud-based, easy-to-use software solution to assist municipalities in better managing, tracking and reporting citizen inquiries, issues and complaints impacting your community.

Register for our June Webinar to learn about all of this and more!

Presented in Partnership with The Ontario Municipal Leadership Institute

                               

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