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CaseStudy
ment can ask the carrier to ping the
person’s location, and police officers can respond to that precise location.
Similarly, OPCD has recently started integrating Quick Base into Everbridge’s emergency notifications service. If there’s a shooting in New Orleans, Quick Base sends a coded message directing Everbridge to alert responders. If that shooting is a homi- cide, Quick Base sends another alert instructing Everbridge to let detectives know via a text message.
In 2016, the city merged 311 and 911 services under OPCD. The 311 call center was open only during regu- lar business hours and provided no updates on the resolution of requests. Morris built an app that city residents can use to enter service requests online. It sends notifications to those who need to perform the work, such as repair a pothole, and to request-
ers to keep them up-to-date on the job’s status.
Besides making the service avail- able around the clock, the app pro- vides OPCD and other departments with timely data and more operational visibility. For example, Morris now has better insights into how long is it takes a department to close a ticket. “Before, the departments were send- ing weekly updates,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of good data in that week by not using it in real time.”
Other city agencies in New Orleans are building apps using Quick Base, and because they are all on the same platform, those apps can be linked together. For instance, if a constitu- ent reports a problem via the City Council’s app, Quick Base can pull up all the 311 tickets for that person’s address.
It might be a “totally different appli-
cation, but because it’s on the same platform, the data is there,” Morris said. “If the data never gets in front of the decision-maker, you can’t really make a good data-driven decision. My goal within the organization or any of the city departments that we service through 311 is to get the data in front of them in a format that is easy to interpret, easy to query and easy to manage so they are inclined to make those really, really good data-driven, intentional decisions.”
Many aspects of software develop- ment rely on savvy developers, said Jay Jamison, chief product officer at Quick Base. “What we’re trying to do is [similar to] WordPress or Medium or Twitter — make it a lot easier for people to publish information and get it out there over the internet and have it distributed without having to know how to be a web developer.” n
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