Public services get a hand
- By Diane Frank
- May 01, 2000
Agencies are increasingly turning to the private sector for solutions and
partnerships that will help the government become more customer-oriented,
officials said at the Information Processing Interagency Conference in Orlando,
Fla., last week.
Many civilian agencies are struggling to create call centers and other
customer relationship management organizations to better serve citizens
and vendors, said Sandy Bates, commissioner of the General Services Administration's
Federal Technology Service.
After years of working with incompatible and sometimes unusable databases,
the Federal Trade Commission formed a call center to get a handle on the
many different types of consumer calls, complaints and allegations of fraud
the FTC receives daily, said Kathy French, manager of the FTC's Consumer
Response Center. All of the information can now be entered and accessed
through a single interface, allowing the agents to notice trends and coordinate
with other law enforcement agencies on where to concentrate investigations,
she said.
At a governmentwide level, the federal CIO Council is partnering with
industry consortium Highway 1 to provide a physical facility where the Center
for Excellence in Information Technology can demonstrate to federal managers
the IT best practices it has gathered, according to Jim Flyzik, vice chairman
of the council and CIO at the Treasury Department.
And to help agencies share information and work on an enterprise level,
Computer Associates International Inc. announced the formation of a new
subsidiary, Computer Associates Federal Systems Group, led by the former
Army CIO, retired Lt. Gen. Otto Guenter.