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form, which runs on Amazon Web Ser- vices’ infrastructure, was deployed for $450,000. The solution also reduced maintenance costs by $540,000 per year.
Dustin Laun, senior adviser for tech- nology and innovation at the FCC, had suggested using a cloud-based system to reduce costs and speed the agency’s process for communicating informa- tion about complaints. He said Zendesk offered an alternative that allowed the FCC to get the Consumer Help Center “up and running quickly, while also significantly reducing implementation costs and the time-to-launch timeline.”
Although the company had esti- mated that it would take a year to de- ploy the streamlined filing process at the FCC, it actually took less than six months.
The SaaS model eliminates opera- tions and maintenance costs and re- quires the FCC to pay renewal fees rather than paying for each change, as the previous system did.
“Cloud computing systems are gen- erally less expensive to operate, more secure and more agile than much of the IT systems you see in today’s federal government IT landscape,” Laun said.
Additionally, as the FCC makes im- provements to the Consumer Help Center, the number of licenses needed to support the enterprise system will decrease and the renewal cost will go down as a result.
In 2016, the agency decided to open some complaint data to the public us- ing a Socrata-powered open-data site and API. Companies use the informa- tion in the Consumer Complaint Data
Center for a variety of purposes, in- cluding developing call-blocking tech- nology and providing general informa- tion to customers about problems in specific geographical areas.
With the Consumer Complaint Data Center now averaging 2.3 million calls a month, FCC Consumer Data Adviser James Brown called the Socrata API hugely successful for the agency’s in- ternal stakeholders.
“What used to take someone many hours or even days to piece together through an enterprise-level business intelligence tool can \\\[now\\\] be accom- plished in a matter of minutes,” he said.
Other organizations have taken no- tice. The Consumer Help Center was one of 30 finalists for ACT-IAC’s Ignit- ing Innovation awards, which were presented in April. •
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