The Mayor Should Add an 11th Priority to his agenda

Death at an early age at 1304 Columbia Road.N.W., Washington, DC. (the title of the first book by Jonathan Kozol). Photo by Terry Quillen. Source: www.dcfd.com

Last week, the Mayor introduced a list of 10 legislative priorities that were listed in a blog entry last week. I suggest adding an additional priority that isn't legislative, but executive...

On Sunday September 25th, a 10 month old child died in an apartment fire, which likely started from a candle used to light the baby's room--the electricity had been turned off for non-payment, but a request had been filed for emergency assistance. According to articles in the Post, the paperwork had been approved, but not forwarded to Pepco, because the person who was responsible for transmitting the request took the Friday off. The fire occurred early Sunday morning.

This wouldn't have been a problem if the process had been automated using a set of procedures and a workflow software application that could have immediately transmitted the order to PEPCO once it was approved by the DC Energy Office.

In the mid-1990s, "Business Process Redesign" and the "Re-engineering" of business processes was all the rage in the private sector and even "Reinventing Government" called for similar activity in the public sector. Workflow software applications are the way to implement this. Big companies use really complicated software programs, but workflow applications don't have to be that complicated.

Creating online forms, automated transmission to the parties that have to approve, and forwarding the response to the next link in the decision chain isn't that hard.

Here, the lack of such a process in the DC Energy Office likely contributed to the death of a 10 month old child.

My sense, from talking to various current and former DC Government employees that many such procedures that could and should be automated in such a fashion aren't.

Even if such organizational sloth doesn't usually contribute to killing someone, it does make getting things done a lot harder for citizens and for government employees.

See:

-- Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
-- Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology
-- Reinventing Government : The Five Strategies for Reinventing Government
-- The Reinventor's Fieldbook: Tools for Transforming Your Government
-- John Verity. 1993. "Getting Work to Go With The Flow." Business Week, (June 21). 156-161.

Verity interprets workflow in the context of business process reengineering. While it is very difficult to rethink and rebuild business practices, workflow offers a good place to start the process, as well as enabling an analysis of the present organizational processes. Verity is concerned with form- based workflow systems, where the network and email systems play a large role in the ability to automate.

The constant theme is that it is not enough to automate, but instead, business process need to be analyzed and contemplated to remove extraneous steps or optimize them. Many workflow systems enable a workflow "map" to be drawn and modified on-line.