Context

Municipal Services

Municipal services are critical to keeping a city clean and livable while accommodating for the future needs of its constituents. However, the effectiveness of municipal staff can be hindered by the old legacy systems they use as well as suboptimal processes that make it difficult for staff and constituents to communicate meaningfully with each other to make improvements to their city. 

Fortunately, SimplyAsk provides unique software solutions – including our Symphona platform and consulting services – that can help municipalities modernize their operational systems, transform their data, and help optimize their constituent-facing processes, helping them reap massive time and money savings while improving constituent communication and satisfaction. 

SimplyAsk can help with the following common problems with municipalities:

Old, Inefficient Legacy Systems

Many municipalities operate using older systems, due to two worries:

1. Needing to prioritize allocating budget to other operations
2. Concern that digital transformation initiatives may cause disruptions to vital and essential municipal operations

While the first concern may be valid, investing budget into modernizing old systems is not a poor use of money. In fact, legacy systems are likely bottlenecking a municipality’s throughput, making its entire workforce inefficient, whether it be long loading times, lack of integration with newer technologies, or other hindrances. Modernizing these systems would lead to an outsized improvement in performance and ability to respond to constituent requests. 

In terms of the second concern, digital transformation initiatives have become more thorough, secure, and easier to implement. It is possible for municipalities to undergo a phased approach where architecture and systems are slowly introduced over time, allowing staff to learn the new tools while keeping essential operations available to the public. 

Municipalities using older legacy systems are impeding the performance of their entire staff. Setting up new modernized systems will unlock a new level of performance for your municipality. 

Inefficient Approval Processes and Constituent-Staff Communication

Many approval processes are critical to shaping municipal infrastructure and systems, such as developmental approval processes (DAP). However,  much of the time and resources that go these processes are wasted due to inefficient business processes that fail to:

• Connect constituents and their proposals to decision-makers in a timely manner
• Make proper use of municipal staff once a development is qualified
• Receive feedback and concerns/objections from the public

For example, DAPs require constituents to submit requests for developmental approval. Clerks have to sort through these requests and schedule meetings for valid requests. Further review is done before a decision maker issues a determination. In each stage of a DAP, there are processes done manually that can be expedited through automation and AI technology to improve constituent-staff interaction and speed up each stage of this process. 

By improving these processes, constituents would have a better experience in submitting proposals and planning committees would have an easier time managing and evaluating approval processes. 

Solutions

How SimplyAsk Helps Municipal Services

Strategic Planning and Architecture Design

If your municipality feels its current infrastructure and architecture is failing to support its needs, SimplyAsk can help plan and execute your new infrastructure and architecture goals. Our team will help clarify your goals, plan resource allocation, and account for potential risks.  

SimplyAsk develops infrastructures with scalability and flexibility in mind, ensuring our solutions can adapt to your evolving organizational needs and accommodate growth. We select technologies that enable seamless expansion without sacrificing performance or reliability. 

Application and Data Migration

SimplyAsk can help municipalities modernize various aspects of their digital systems, data architecture, and processes, including but not limited to:

• Updating and modernizing legacy systems
• Modernizing approval processes and systems 

Our migration projects typically follow a phased approach, where we perform a comprehensive assessment of existing systems to create a detailed migration roadmap for your organization, including activities, milestones, and resource allocation.

SimplyAsk can also assist with expediting constituent data transformation. By using our Symphona Migrate tool and our AI-powered conversion tools,  SimplyAsk can dramatically expedite the data migration and transformation processes while managing fallouts and ensuring data integrity and compatibility. 

Process Optimization and Automation

Knowledge Centralization

Municipalities can train Converse’s generative agents on any knowledge base and use for a variety of capabilities, one being as a search engine for their documents, information, and bylaws. 

By training a Converse generative agent on a municipality’s digital knowledge base, the agent will learn about all the information it receives, including its location, applicability, and how it relates to other information in the system. The agent will speak using organic and formal language. By leveraging its LLM technology, the agent can accept and reply to queries submitted by staff about locating or verifying specific internal business information. 

With Symphona generative agents, no municipal worker ever has to wonder where a document or bylaw is again. They can simply ask an agent and receive the information they’re looking for. This can result in massive time, cost, and mental bandwidth savings for municipal staff. 

For example, suppose a city has a team of 100 municipal workers, each making $45.47 / hour (the average government salary rate in Canada). If each worker saves 30 minutes per day by using a knowledge centralization chatbot to search and obtain internal information, that municipality will save $5,684 per employee over the course of a year, or $568,400 every year. By using Symphona agents to expedite information recall, municipalities can save over half a million dollars – and this number can grow for larger towns and cities with more employees. 

Since information accuracy is critical when searching for internal information, knowledge centralization chatbots for municipalities are designed with low response variability, which prevents hallucinations from occurring. If a chatbot is unable to find information corresponding to a query, it will simply reply that it was unable to obtain a result. 

Converse can integrate with many popular tools, including platforms like Microsoft 365, SharePoint, ESRI, Posse, and more, ensuring that setting up your internal knowledge chatbot will not be a burden or disruption to your current tools. 

Automating Approval Processes

Symphona can help automate a variety of municipal approval processes, helping to expedite both staff and constituent tasks and processes and help get more things done at City Hall. 

For example, here’s how Symphona can help automate developmental approval processes (DAP ) through each of its stages: 

Zone Regulation Identification

Municipal staff can leverage Converse to respond to inquiries and FAQs about zoning identification. They can train a generative AI agent on a knowledge base of zoning and DAP guidelines, so that it can automatically answer questions about those topics. 

This agent can also communicate with Flow to manage email handling and book an initial consultation with a city staff member after bylaws and development guidelines are qualified. 

Consult with Planning Staff

Once a constituent goes through an initial consultation, Flow can make follow-ups easy by integrating with scheduling tools (e.g. Calendly) and connecting with developers and other municipal staff to set up a pre-application meeting. 

Application Submission

Once a pre-application is approved, Flow can send out application links to relevant personnel for submission. Once application materials are received, Flow can categorize these documents for municipal staff to read. 

Planning Staff Reviews Applications

Once an application is submitted and organized, Flow can generate review tickets that can be routed and assigned to appropriate departments and personnel. AI models can be trained on zoning regulations, bylaws, and official plans as an aid alongside manual review, which can help save time on the review process while still ensuring thoroughness. 

Once a reviewed application makes its way to the planning committee, Converse can send unique communications to the public and to municipal staff about the application. In particular: 

• Converse can connect with the constituent database and use SMS, email, and other communication channels to send an automated message containing the details of the development and asking if the public has any concerns or objections
• Converse can connect with the municipal staff schedule and book a meeting time that works for the constituent and municipal staff

Decision Maker Issues a Determination 

Once the planning committee makes its determination, Flow can push the meeting results and comments to Converse, which can then notify the result of the DAP to the appropriate developer. 

By using Converse and Flow to help qualify proposals, municipal staff save valuable time with their attention only being required once a constituent’s inquiry and proposal is qualified through both Converse and a consultation. 

Flow also makes meeting coordination and the application process easier for both applicants and municipal staff by automatically finding the best times, sending appropriate application links, and organizing application files for easy review. 

By sending review tickets and training Flow to help review documents, Flow makes the review process more efficient without sacrificing due diligence and quality inspection.

In all steps, using SimplyAsk tools makes DAPs more efficient, satisfactory, and easier for both constituents and municipal staff without losing the rigour required for proper review. As a result, citizens will be able to see faster and more effective changes and developments in their communities. 

Constituent-Facing AI Chatbots

Municipal staff can create and train a generative AI chatbot on common policies and bylaws and implement it on their websites and online applications, allowing the public to ask questions about their city and receive intelligent answers with sources. Converse chatbots are multilingual, allowing them to interact with a wide variety of constituents. 

As mentioned in the Automating Approval Processes section, municipalities can connect workflows and services to this chatbot, allowing constituents to submit forms or request services that can be collected as service tickets in Serve, saving municipal staff time in collecting and processing forms and requests. 

Overall, for every aspect of your municipality’s systems and processes, SimplyAsk solutions can help modernize and optimize them so that you can spend more time and effort on fulfilling the needs of your constituents and improving the quality of your city. Contact our sales team today and get a free consultation on how your municipality can use SimplyAsk solutions.