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Municipality of Anchorage Code Enforcement Goes Online
Hansen Web Access Allows Citizens to Electronically File and Track Complaints
RANCHO CORDOVA, CA—April 12, 2007—Hansen Information Technologies (Hansen®), a leading provider of enterprise applications for the public sector market, today announced that the Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska, has gone live with Hansen Code Enforcement. Citizens of the Municipality of Anchorage (Municipality) can now file and track code enforcement complaints instantly via a new, state-of-the-art Hansen system. On Friday, March 9, 2007, the Municipality flipped the switch and brought code enforcement live to its citizens. Through a Web interface, citizens now have a simple to use and easily accessible way to submit and track code enforcement related complaints.
The Web interface is a "public" view into the Municipality's new Hansen Code Enforcement tracking system. The new system enables employees and code enforcement officers to efficiently track, manage, and resolve violations of Anchorage's codes, ordinances, and rules. Prior to the new system, the various agencies responsible for code enforcement used a mixture of incompatible systems and different processes to deal with code violations, which often resulted in uneven enforcement, confusion, and delays. The old disparate systems were "desk-bound," forcing field officers and employees to rewrite and transfer notes to the appropriate systems when they got back to the office.
"I am very pleased with the work the teams produced. We were within our budget and within the implementation time frame. We all hear about how projects of this nature can drag on and on. It just wasn't the case with Anchorage," reported Keith Ziolkowski, the Chief Technology Officer for the Municipality. Keith added, "I know that Hansen's Code Enforcement system will help provide our citizens the prompt service they expect and assist our employees in doing their jobs better and more efficiently."
Employees and code enforcement officers will now operate from a single, standardized set of business processes when resolving code violations and do it from a single system that is also accessible from the field via a wireless connection. The standardized processes means employees and code enforcement officers can now efficiently deal with complaints that cross agency boundaries and take care of complaints faster. The Municipality can now track each violation against a specific address and maintain a history across different agencies. With the new Web interface, citizens can also easily submit and track code violation complaints and keep informed about the status of a complaint as it moves through the system, 24 hours a day.
"The code enforcement system is an important step in the Mayor's E-government initiative to implement technology that will enable citizens to have better communication and access to their local government," reported Fred Carpenter, Chief Information Officer for the Municipality.
Approved by the Anchorage Assembly at the end of 2005, the launch of the system purchased from Hansen Information Technologies is the result of more than a year's worth of work involving more than fifty staff members from the Information Technology Department and eight code enforcement agencies. The groups teamed up to complete an initial analysis, application development, training, and weeks of testing. The outcome: a state-of-the-art code enforcement tracking system used in the office, in the field, and online by citizens.
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