Recently I was invited to become an advisor to the board of The Future Cities Institute. This is an organisation committed to creating sustainable cities that are a great place to live and work. They believe this is done by creating an environment of economic growth and competitiveness.

My experience to date with working with cities has been two-fold. 1^st in supporting local commerce. For the past 3 years I have been on the board of the New Zealand Chamber of Commerce – Northland, two of those years as the president. The second has been in my career in the CRM industry. I will go into more detail on these in the future. However, part of any city is the Local Government that is in place.

As Local Governments continue to evolve into modern agencies, addressing the needs of their citizens in an effective way requires an understanding of the agency and the business processes that make up the daily activities of those staffing the agencies. Local Government is finding that the technology that allowed it to run yesterday will not take it into the future to becoming a future city. With fewer funds, but a need for greater service and transparency, agencies are starting to turn to best of breed solutions that allow them to offer a higher level of service. Software tools that allow them to collaborate and share information with their citizens like never before have become available and the one I have most experience with is Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The first thing to get past is the name CRM. For local councils/shires or counties, citizens are not traditionally seen as the customer, wrongly or rightly. But this has not prevented many councils from around the world taking Dynamics CRM and using the platform as a rapid development framework that has built-in features such as security, multi-device support and scalability. Here are some examples of solutions that are built for councils on the Microsoft Dynamic CRM platform:

1. Grants Management
2. Field Inspection
3. Contact Management
4. Cemetery Management
5. Personnel Management
6. Civic Events Management
7. Access Control Management
8. Stakeholder Management
9. Call Centre Management
10. Outbreak Management
11. Emergency Response Tracking
12. Dispatch Management
13. Intelligence Gathering
14. Threat Management
15. Security Approval
16. Recruitment Management
17. Task Management
18. Asset Management
19. Vehicle Management
20. Contracts Management
21. Maintenance Management
22. Workforce Management
23. Award and Decoration Management
24. Volunteer Management
25. Donation Tracking
26. Membership Management
27. Human Resources
28. Program Management
29. OHS Tracking
30. Complaints Management
31. Economic Development Management
32. Tourism Development

So my question for you: Is this a complete list or have you come across other applications of Dynamics CRM in Local Government?