Technically Sound, Politically Feasible

As a local government employee I was tasked to track requests and complaints that passed through the Mayor. I was given index cards for this. I would fill up a card for each request, noting who sent it, which Barangay he's from, what the complaint was all about and, most importantly, which office was asked to do something about it.

Several times a day complainants would come to my boss, an Assistant City Administrator, to inquire about their concerns. I'd dig through the cards so I could advise them which office their letter was referred to. The complainant would then have to go to that office.

I wanted to improve this service. Instead of sending the complainant to another office, I wanted our unit to be able to give him the information he needs. Since many requests at that time were referred to the Engineering Office, that meant I had to ask the Engineers about their investigation/action on these complaints in advance. I figured that if I could summarise the complaints referred to each Engineering Division, I could bring it to them and ask for their comments.

But there was no way I could do that with my index cards - there was no way I could copy data from the all the cards fast enough on a regular basis.

So I found an 8088 (yeah, it was that long ago), installed dBase IV+, then used a rapid application development facility to create a database, data entry screens, and report templates. Yeah it took my entire lunch break to sort a database of several hundred records, but the system was still much faster than index cards. With this simple database management system I could print, every week, a summary of all the requests referred to each unit in Engineering.

So I printed my summary and took it to them for updates. Reactions ranged from surprise to irritation to hostility. In fairness some Engineers were so well organised they gave feedback right away. What tipped the balance was the support of the City Engineer.

Because the Mayor found it useful, he asked all offices to follow Engineering. Soon all frontline service offices were giving us updates. In time we were covering all offices involved in responding to a request, from maintenance crews who did the initial investigation, to the folks who made Programs of Works and Estimates when the problem could not be solved by maintenance, to the Budget Office that monitored funding, to the procurement offices, and so on. We had to organise a new unit, the Projects and Requests Monitoring Centre, to manage all this data gathering and processing.

The little innovation that started it all was technically sound - responsiveness to citizens’ concerns is after all a part of good governance. The Mayor’s influence, declared and vocal support helped to implement it beyond its original locus (Engineering). It was sustained through two terms of the Mayor who supported the project.

In retrospect I think it also helped that I had sufficient time, skills, and knowledge to create the information system that was critical to the innovation. Also, at that time the Mayor was just introducing an organisation-wide innovation/service improvement program. That created an environment where technically sound ideas could get the political support needed for implementation.