ServiceTrends Online

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2012

Manny communities and officials demand to understand how taxpayer dollars are spent, but making this information available under an appropriate medium can be difficult. Miami-Dade County started an online initiative to educate constituents about taxpayer money. "Service Trends" is an online reporting application designed to enhance both internal performance-based management and public value by tracking information on citizen requests for service reported to the 311 Answer Center, in Miami-Dade County and other local municipalities. The creation of this user-friendly, GIS-driven reporting model provides department directors, elected officials and the public with valuable information on “results that matter”. The data analysis widget displays results and provides users with the option to view charts of performance activity based on the criteria entered and print or export the results. The application also protects user privacy since the service requests displayed on ServiceTrends have sensitive data, such as requester name or phone number removed from them. As a result of the introduction of the application, the generation of manual service request reports and the associated costs in staff time has been eliminated. Additionally, due to the re-use of the web service with customer service data, less development time has been dedicated to programming applications that display and analyze this data. A total of 2,724,019 service requests are exposed now online and available to the public for search.