Our management team was recently asked to set a couple of Goals based upon S.M.A.R.T (http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html) as a guideline to set and measure its success. One of our GIS team goals for the year really focuses on our customers and our attempt to educate them on availability of Web resources. We are calling this goal “Customer Professional Development”. For clarification a customer defined by our group is anyone that uses or can make use of our data and services.
First let me talk a bit about this goal setting process (briefly). To be honest, goal setting has/is not one of my favorite things to do and I started off with this request absolutely dreading it. Once I spent a little time looking over some of the work we have done in the past and trying to apply this SMART goal principles to these old projects, I began to see some of the valuable information I was missing. Sure I can look back on a particular goal, however I cannot see or show all the little steps, (set-backs and victories) we took to our achievements. So, even though I believed this to be just another task to do and watch, I have quickly become excited about this ongoing task and the periodic review process.
Now let me explain the “Customer Professional Development” goal. Here at Linn County, I believe our GIS capabilities are very good. We have a solid technology infrastructure and very skilled people that take on challenges in a way to help improve government and how it works locally. One of our major crutches is dealing with routine daily management of property records, specifically when we find problems with recorded documents, such as a property transfer (Deed). We process nearly 10,000 deeds each year that deal with property and/or property ownership changes. With this volume, we do expect some issues, however why not shoot for perfection? We began tacking all our work within a GIS Help Desk tool in September of 2009, which in and of itself is worthy of a Blog entry. Through this documentation process we have realized that a majority of the problems are issues that start and could end with the deed preparer verifying document for accuracy. To make this even more interesting, in most instances, we have found that our web services, if used, would vastly reduce issues on the recorded documents we have to process.
Therefor it is our intention to schedule appointments to meet all our Deed Prepares and their staff’s to make sure they are aware of Linn County Web services that they can freely use. Let me be clear, we don’t want to do their job or tell them how to do it, however we simply want to make sure they know of our products and how they may be able to apply them to their work flow. This group of professionals are one of our most important customers because without highly accurate ownership research and documentation our land management system would lose a lot of trust by its daily users, not to mention increase errors to our tax bills. So by allocating our staff time to spend with these customers, I feel we will spend less time having to deal with issues that show up in our office. This is a potential huge efficiency improvement for our work flow! Basically we want to take care of our customers, so we can continue to improve upon our product and services. As our customer base continues to grow we need to continually take it upon ourselves to find our improved efficiencies to keep up with our demand.
Stay tuned, I hope to be able to report back in several months with how this goal goes. If nothing else, we’ll be able to meet those that we are in contact with every day in person not just through paperwork.
