Baw Baw Shire Council walked away from a tender for new customer management software, then decided to adapt sales-centric customer relationship management software to serve its citizens, but found the costs beyond its means. So why is its approach set to be adopted by dozens of other local government areas? Simon Sharwood explains.

Phil Stone,
Director of Planning
and Information,
Baw Baw Council

When Phil Stone decided to do nothing at work, he experienced “quite an exhilarating moment.”

It may be tempting to joke that Stone, Director of Planning and Information at Baw Baw Shire Council, was acting out standard practise for some local government workers, but his inactivity was actually a considered response to the information technology industry’s tepid response to a tender.

The tender was hoped to be the first step in the expression of a bold new strategy for the Council, a 4027 square kilometre, 40,000-population Shire whose largest town, Warragul, is 100 kilometres east of Melbourne.

Stone arrived in Baw Baw in late 2005 and quickly saw that the Shire needed a comprehensive IT strategy.

“We were coming off a very low base of under-investment in IT,” Stone recalls. “The service was as relevant as the investment that had been made. So our theme in 2006 was making IT strategically relevant again and making it the thing that enables good business change, but not the change itself.”

Stone therefore “worked heavily with the business on the strategy” and eventually reached a point where it was decided. “We wanted to make our service customer-centric and make the customer the centre of everything we do. We saw customer management as the frontispiece, because everything we do is about the customer and their relationship with us, our services or a property they own. We wanted to be responsive and stop the runaround for the customer through first point of contact resolution.”

Stone’s vision imagined a scenario in which a resident called the council to report smoke on a neighbouring property. Council’s call centre workers would be able to view the caller’s property on a map, so they could ask which adjacent property was the source of the smoke. Once the call centre had indentified the source of the smoke, they would then be able to view all recent or relevant interaction with Council to understand if the fire was expected. If, for example, the owners had arranged a permit for a controlled burn-off, this information would appear before a call centre worker so the caller would be informed of the reason for the fire. While the caller might be grumpy that their neighbour had arranged a burn-off without telling them, they would at least be well-informed about the reason for the smoke!

With this vision in mind, Stone and his team developed a motto,“challenge the boundaries, be the difference”, to encapsulate their desire to act as an advocate for the Shire’s citizens and deliver them improved services. That attitude became important when the Council tendered for tools to create its desired systems. “In 2007 our highest priority was to create a customer request system,” Stone recalls, “But the marketplace was quite low on choice. There is a bit of a monopoly going on with six or ten companies and it is all fairly closed.”

After reviewing incoming bids, Stone initially felt he had little choice but to make a selection. “It seems to be the culture of local government to go to tender, and then you kind of have to make a decision,” he says. But Stone and his IT team were uncomfortable with that notion and, thanks to their values of challenging boundaries and making a difference, were not willing to settle for second-best.

“Just because something was done that way before does not mean it has to be done that way again,” Stone says. “So when we were reviewing the outcomes of the tender, someone raised the issue that ‘this does not answer any questions.’ The products we were offered were all either asset-focussed, or spatial-focussed, or property-focussed.”

None were customer-focussed and Stone insisted, “If we did not have customers we would not exist.”

Frustrated that the tender had not produced a satisfactory candidate and committed to his vision for customer service, Stone decided to ignore the convention of making a reluctant purchase. “I realised that we did not have to do anything,” he recalls, and it was that decision that created the moment of exhilaration. “That decision supported the whole customer-centric vision because it showed we were willing to live the vision.”

From “C” to “X”

While Stone’s attempt to develop a customer request management system had foundered, the vision for new tools to improve citizen/council interactions persisted.

“The executive backed the decision to cancel the tender,” he says, and also supported an ongoing search for a solution. That search led Stone to Microsoft, which has created a Citizen Services Framework that Stone says, “Seemed to be okay but was quite embryonic.”

Intrigued, Stone nonetheless kept the lines of communications open. “We had some strategic discussions with [Microsoft] for eight or nine months.” As those conversations continued, it became apparent that the heart of the proposed solutions was customer relationship management (CRM) software.

While the results that software can achieve are obvious and impressive, Stone wondered if it could cross over into local government.

“Our initial reaction was ‘How the heck do you take a sales tool and use it for relationship management?’” he recalls.

Intrigued, Stone nonetheless continued to investigate the idea of CRM powering a council’s systems.

“It was not one single event that got us over the CRM hump,” he says. “It took a lot of relationship building. We started turning over a lot of rocks with some pretty heavy hitters inside Microsoft. They came up with this concept of ‘XRM’ – it is not about C for customers, you can manage relationships between any entity.”

“It did not have to be a person – it could be a bridge, a room, a road. When you think like that it shatters the blinkers and you can see that a relationship management system is just about managing relationships between entities. That was one of the defining moments for us.”

Show me the money

Next, Stone had to convince his executive that the “XRM” approach was valid. Not entirely convinced, they authorised the CIO to “see how far you can get without spending a lot of money”, Stone therefore proceeded to conduct a “fit-gap analysis” to determine how much customisation would be needed to deliver the hoped-for system.

“The software was 85 percent of the way there, but the 15 percent [of customisation] we needed was going to take about 75 percent of the project’s budget.” Those costs were hard to swallow, as if 75 percent of the project’s budget was consumed by software alone it would leave insufficient funds for other essential components. “When we realised the cost, we said if we cannot find another way to fund it, we’ll walk away,” Stone says.

Happily, other funds became available. The Microsoft eGovernment Innovation Fund, an initiative established in 2002 as part of the Victoria Government’s software licensing agreement with Microsoft, offers grants to projects that benefit government. Stone bid for, and won, a grant that would enable him to turn CRM into a new hybrid for local government, but imposed one important condition along the way.

“We insisted that the intellectual property we created should be freely available to any council in Australia. Microsoft agreed to that.”

Building XRM

To build the new system, by now dubbed “CouncilRM,” Stone turned to a pair of local Microsoft partners. “Corporate Strategic Systems knew local government and knew CRM,” Stone recalls. Together, the two set to work on adapting Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM suite and SharePoint products to create the new applications.

Early versions of their work were piloted on the Council’s Rangers, a group Stone says “are not that interested in IT. If it was going to be hard with them, it would be easy on everything else.”

The Rangers were asked to use CouncilRM to enter data about their activities, so that the tasks they performed while off-site could be recorded and tracked.

“They said it was easier to use than they thought it would be. The other pilot group was the customer service team, who were champing at the bit to get more done!”

Those positive experiences have seen the Council move to integrate its roads and properties information into the new application, allowing delivery of scenarios like Stone’s inquiry about an unexpected fire.

Booking of Council facilities like sports grounds and community venues is also live, and Stone and his team are busy looking to bring more data into the CouncilRM system in order to create more services.

“We know of other systems that can tell us if a ratepayer is on the footy team, on the board of the hospital and a business owner.” Integrating those through CouncilRM, Stone can now see, creates all sorts of interesting possibilities.

“You might want to send a mail to people who are business owners about a sporting club,” he imagines. “That kind of thing means you can do so much more than request management.”

Now Stone is busy planning that so much more.

“One thing that surprised is there is no end to what it can do. We want people in the field more, delivering services, with laptops in their cars. We can do this by replacing home and community care software and the systems we use for meals on wheels and elderly and aged home visits.”

Going national

Other councils are already taking note of Baw Baw’s project.

“I’ve been around to Perth and Brisbane,” Stone says. “We have become a reference council and there are a lot of other CRM distributors interested in what has been done here and a lot of councils interested in seeing what we have done.”

“In fact, we have a project now in the business case development phase to link six Gippsland councils to our system,” an arrangement that will see Baw Baw’s CouncilRM used by these other councils under a shared services model.

To cope with this interest, and its own growing use of CouncilRM, Baw Baw is currently building a second data centre, and Stone is happy that his vision has seen him become so very busy.

“We do not have a problem with investment,” he says.

“That’s the problem with success – you have to build your capacity at the same time.”