To facilitate e-government activities, the City had developed a citywide effort designed to bring virtually all City information and services to the Web in order to enhance customer service and achieve greater operational efficiencies. While working on this initiative and extending its citizen services, the City recognized the need to find a technology that would automate its many critical processes that were running the City and at the same time transform its operations into an automated environment. The manual nature of its processes lent itself to accountability issues and did not provide the adequate insight it required.

The City needed a technology solution that could be leveraged beyond one business application and was able to cross platforms, systems, and agencies. In addition, the City wanted a technology that was easy to deploy, intuitive and would integrate easily into its existing Microsoft technology infrastructure.

The City identified Business Process Management (BPM) software as the technology to fulfill its needs and selected Metastorm BPM® to serve as the foundation to automate its citywide processes. Moreover, as part of its overall IT strategy, the City has built an IT toolbox of solutions to help run its infrastructure and help provide superior services to its customers, and Metastorm BPM is now the preferred BPM vendor for the City.

Metastorm BPM is helping the City take control of its processes through automation. Processes deployed to date include a Security Access Privilege Request process that provides access to computer and technology resources for roughly 5500 city employees, and a Change Control Notification process that tracks and manages the release of changes to systems and applications. This process also notifies every employee in the City affected by the change and tracks the review and approval of changes by the Change Advisory Board before moving a change to production.

Another process the City has automated that has had the largest impact to date is its Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Status Report process – the procedure that gathers, tracks and manages all projects and initiatives going on in the City. The business driver behind the CAO status reporting solution was to provide the Mayor and the top City Administrator with critical information to help achieve strategic priorities and changes in the way the City does business. The status reporting process in Metastorm BPM is easy to use, timely, relevant, and information is easily gathered in order to communicate performance data to show how the City supports the Mayor’s strategic priorities.

Implementing Metastorm BPM software has given the City the ability to make the right strategic decisions on how to streamline and improve its operations – allowing them to create greater efficiency and improve citizen service.

The City now has automated and repeatable processes in place that track accountability and provide a means to also use information for reporting, analysis, and for archiving for future needs. The City reports that Metastorm BPM was easy to implement and considers it extremely easy to use.

The City’s new automated CAO Status Report process enables the system administrator to track the status of documents throughout the process and provide an escalated approval process to ensure department managers approve activities within their department or agency. With a standard template in place for all requests, all managers are now able to submit reports in a consistent manner and all status reporting periods are the same and due the same day and time. In addition, all status reports can be stored for easy reference at any time in the future, allowing the CAOs office access to history to validate report information.

The CAO can now identify department issues and risks in a timely manner, and information from the departments is now aggregated to determine and identify city-wide issues. The CAO is now able to organize resources to resolve problems that are identified across the City.

Due to the success of its Metastorm implementation to date, The City has identified a number of processes for automation and has set up a business technology planning process in order to prioritize this list and build a strong network of integrated and well-managed business processes. The City looks forward to its future with Metastorm and expanding the use of the Metastorm BPM suite to its citizens.