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March 24, 2021

Digital Transformation Workplace Live - SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT: Going Digital To Enhance The Customer Experience

Courtesy of DC Government's Ernest Chrappah, below is a transcript of his speaking session on 'Going Digital To Enhance The Customer Experience' to Build a Thriving Enterprise that took place at Digital Transformation Workplace Live Virtual Conference.

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Session Information:

Going Digital To Enhance The Customer Experience

Over the past two years the District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) has implemented technology enhancements focused on creating value for our customers while improving transparency, accountability, and responsiveness. While there was no way of knowing the pandemic was coming, the agency’s digital transformation had the added benefit of allowing us to seamlessly transition from providing our services in-person to offering them virtually.

Upon taking the helm of DCRA in late 2018, Director Ernest Chrappah set out on a listening tour aimed at learning how best to improve the agency from a range of stakeholders. Using what he learned, Director Chrappah developed a roadmap to the agency’s digital transformation, which we call Vision 2020. Below are highlights from DCRA’s Vision 2020 plan that have resulted in easier and faster experiences for our customers:

  • Launching the Resident Inspector Program
  • Revamping the Customer Experience
  • Developing Accelerated Building Plan Reviews
  • Creating an Online Performance Dashboard

These are just some of the accomplishments DCRA has been able to achieve through our Vision 2020 Digital Transformation.

Session Transcript:

I did about our next guest directly from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. We have Ernest ... with us very excited to have you with us. Ernest.

Ernest ... is an experienced government executive as well as a successful entrepreneur with a reputation for finding innovative solutions to complex challenges. He was named by Washington, DC.

Mayor Muriel Bowser on November 20th, 2018 to serve as the director of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs upon taking the helm of the DCRI in 20 18, Ernest has set out on a listening tour, aimed at learning how best to improve the agency from a range of stakeholders using what he learned. Director ..., develop a roadmap to the eight foot transformation, which he called Vision 2020. And I'm very excited that our global audience gets to experience the vision and the details of that journey today. Ernest, thank you so much for taking the time to share that with all of us.

Thank you, Jose, for the incredible introduction and also for the PTO speakers and all the participants in today's session. Digital transformation is something that you've been hearing about quite a bit, and I'm hopeful that by sharing experience on how going digital has helped us improve the customer experience, you will learn a thing or two, and also be able to learn from things we find to be challenging and how we're able to overcome that.

What I plan on doing, is to give a bit of context about the organization that I run, where we started, how we went about crafting our organizational strategy around Digital First. The steps that, until in the process.

What the results turned out to be.

And also what we are currently working on, as we look ahead for a post pandemic perspective.

The CRAs mission, city, government agency, is to promote the health, safety and economic well-being and economic interests of my guests, our residents by business owners and visitors to our District of Columbia, the work that we perform, it's very familiar for most jurisdictions in context.

ErnestDCRI is responsible for issuing business licenses occupational licenses issue of building permits, administrative zoning regulations, conducting inspections, and taking enforcement actions on entities to accomplish this. We perform a number of core functions to deliver these services. To give you a sense of the scale of the organization.

Last year, we register at 14,000 corporations, relicensed over 49,000 businesses.

We issued about 54,000 permits, and we conducted over 144,000 inspections each month.

We filled more than 19,000 e-mails, 16,000 phone calls, and a thousand lives chart with only 475 employees.

If you go to Boston or London or to Cargo, or Austria, every city has a department around building permits, they also have separate departments around licenses in most cases.

But in the District of Columbia, we perform both functions, and that gives us the ability to scale and leverage the best of our resources.

When it comes to digital transformation, as I mentioned earlier in the introduction, we started by listening to our customers when I joined the agency.

I went on a listening tour to hear what they really expected of the city, government and tests or deliver your services.

More importantly, what I found out was that 31% viewed the interaction, will be AGC as Negative.

There was low level of customer engagement. In fact, between 2016 and 2018, only 1425 service had been completed. I also saw a lack of accountability, both on the customer side and the employee side.

There was no way to actually connect the feedback that we received to the service performed.

So, if you'd get a permit, there was nothing that says your satisfaction, or your survey feedback, is tied to the permits you receive.

So if you just upset, you can go and provide negative ratings a thousand times, Obviously, I'm exaggerating. But I think you'd get it just.

So we had a very tricky situation because we were delivering incredible value.

Yes, there was a significant number of customers who viewed the interaction with this negatively. So I wanted to figure out what we could do better.

Btog CTAWhat it dawned me through this Listening session was that customer's expectations had been shaped by what they experience in their day-to-day lives.

We were living in an environment where you can get a veterinarian, you can get a cab, you can get an Uber, you can even get somebody to come babysit your pitch. That pushes a button on their smartphone.

So consumers expect it, that same level of transparency, responsiveness, accountability, from city government. And we had to be the movement.

that call for us to be bold in our approach to improve responsiveness.

Strategic plan is what we call ... in 20 20, and this was to launch in 2018.

And the idea was very simple, less of every single service that we provide on demand.

That way, it is convenient for their customer, and it forces us to streamline our processes, understand the bottlenecks, and figure out ways to deliver services more efficiently.

There are a few initiatives that we've packaged as part of the digital transformation journey.

First, was revamping our website, making it mobile friendly, and helping the visitors or our customers self identify as a resident of business owner. That way, the navigational experience is driven by the point of view.

We also put together a product dashboard so that the public can track progress on all the initiatives that were going on in the agency.

And, more importantly, the public could see what our service levels, where, for every category that the agency provided.

So if it had to do with permit for large-scale, complex permits, we have 30 days service level to complete the first round of plan reviews.

If you want a housing inspection, we have a 15 day service level or a 15 day window to provide that service.

If you are looking for a business license, we provide that in one business Day.

So by publishing service levels and educating the public about what to expect from us, they put us on notice. And he also put them on notice as to what to expect.

And when we delivered a service, that could hold us accountable, That was a radical shift for us to just put everything out in the open.

And also, the key performance indicators that we use and the city leverages to evaluate the agency's performance in all our core services.

Another thing that we did around digital transformation was to shift the way we do inspections to a virtual environment before GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Microsoft Teams became cool. After that pandemic.

We had actually started a process and implemented a program where you can get your permits reviewed all virtually without having to set foot into our offices. I took around that. People cannot get privileged enough to join us, and it was all before the pandemic.

Another significant shift that we implemented as part of this digital transformation initiative was our customer relationship management model and also the implementation of a customer relationship management system. And I'll talk more about that an issue.

We also shifted to conduct in virtual inspections, offering our customers more convenient times where we can conduct safety inspections, or we can conduct construction inspections using commercially available tools like Google Draw Teams, where before it became cool.

Another significant step was consolidating data systems.

We have multiple databases for customers to tick a status of a permit, research a property history, check the status of their license, and we felt it was just way too confusing and it required several username slash password. You can imagine that calls to the helpdesk for password reset.

So, as part of our strategy, we consolidated most systems, and we implement a single sign on so that with that access, we could verify identity, authenticate users. Once they get in, they can have access to all the assistance that they need. This was both for internal audience and external audience.

The significant piece around digital transformation, that is, I usually talked about, is culture change.

Yes, we knew tech enabled initiatives could accelerate improvement, but if we didn't make a significant investment in people, and helping employees understand where we're going, and how they can help get there. And how they can also improve the professional and personal profiles. So then, we will not be so sexual. So, that wasn't aware initiative, and the digital transformation initiatives are now moved to elaborate, infrared, or some of these initiatives.

With respect to the Customer Relationship Management System, there are many tools available.

So, like most city agencies, we went through a procurement process, identified, a system identified event, and implemented it.

Event Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (1)What we did as part of this implementation was revamp our customer service delivery model.

We guaranteed anybody who interacted with it.

The longest use the established channels for communicating with the agency.

They will receive a response in three business days or less, about 90% of the time, and you worked.

We also put in place processes quae issues can get escalated.

When it comes into the CRM, as part of the CRM, we've put in place sentiment analysis so that we can mine the text of the content that a customer sends to us to understand The customer is frustrated.

It's upset, is happy, and puts the customer service agents in a position where they know what they are walking into, wants to interact with the customer.

We also went through this step of discouraging customers to send e-mails specifically to individuals because sometimes people get sick.

They don't need to come to work.

People go on vacation.

And we had to move away from the culture of transacting business in e-mail or Microsoft Outlook, towards a system where we can cascade and see all interactions specific to the customer. So what the customer never has to repeat themselves about why he's calling.

The representative can see prior communications, whether it works by phone, social, in person, or with all in one place, so they can provide better service.

With regard to these systems that we constantly did it, we had four different systems for tracking permits, licenses, and regulatory information and we thought that was just unusual, and that was unnecessary.

So as part of our strategy, we combined the databases, put a new user interface that we did a lot of, like, load testing and feedback. and, like, not blind shopping as well, so we can get a better feel of how people interact with the system. Then we went out and we bought Access Management system using Okta which had met FedRAMP requirements for security.

And those two systems together allowed us to have a single sign on.

And one system for tracking permissive licenses and regulatory information, Today we still have a number of systems that you can access to the single sign on platform by when it comes to permit and licensing and regulatory information.

Not only have to use one system, what are your come into, mobile channel, or the desktop environment?

Another piece of digital transformation strategy that I'm very excited about was the inspections market fleets.

We quickly realized that demand for inspections far outweigh the supply of full-time inspectors that we had.

So, in order to meet that demand, we created a program where we actually train DC residents to become building code, inspect this, and making money on this side.

This is the face of a crime program in the country, and people are calling it the Uber for Inspections, but it works more like a marketplace.

Way they inspect this. Can create storefronts list the prices after they've gone to a background check, within 75.

They've been trained when a business owner or a resident is looking for an inspection and we have met capacity limits.

They can go to the marketplace, put the requirements or the need out there, and choose one of these solidified and inspect this.

This has not only helped this, means the demand for inspections is created job opportunities and economic options for our residents who are best assets.

Large permitting projects, large construction projects typically involve something called plan review.

Way, you designed A building. You have an engineer to come up with drawings, and somebody has to review to see if it meets Building Code.

We've figured it out that the best way to solve miscommunication issues, and ensure that the customer's team that typically includes architects, engineers, and a host of our professionals, was to put them in the same room, with aplomb reviewers, by discipline.

So that we can look at their plans, identify the issues, provide feedback to their customer, And if their customers, and his professional team can make the changes on the spot, then we move forward towards permit approval.

This program was also a first of their kind, at a time, it was introduced, because most cities, we're not doing virtual plan reviews, Plan reviews were done in person, but we wanted to provide more convenient options for our customers, Because sometimes you may have a building project in DC.

Buy your architect lives in New York City, for him to come to BC.

For a medium means he has to get on the train or get on an airplane ticket, or get a rental car, pay parking, and all of that sort of transaction costs.

Am I moving to a gradual posture, a simplified the communication channels, and ensure that everybody was looking at the same set of lines and making comments.

It was a simple collaboration tool, but it's worth one this in helping us improve the speed of approving building permits.

We went further.

As I mentioned previously, culture change was a significant part of our digital transformation.

And the genesis of the culture change was, I realize there was no way we're going to be so sexual with any transformation.

If employees didn't have buy in court, if our employees did not see specifically, how did transformation will benefit them professionally? And personally, there's gotta be something in it for them.

Like the acronym, we FM. What is in it for me, was the question.

So we set out with a vision, Our vision was to change our culture.

Seems to a quarter that was innovative, data driven decisions, operationally efficient and excellent, and above all, we put our customers first. So what do we need to do to put our employees in upwards to succeed?

We did a baseline survey of the internal culture.

We provide our customer care training.

We revamped an employee needs, but that's what I think a frequent communication of what is happening across the tie, it to see what we can forecast the list.

We also did focus group sessions around leadership team members, and we provide it caveat constantly sessions.

Screenshot (4)Initially, employees will want, why are you giving this career counselors, as you want to lead the agency, NSF, far from it?

We want you to succeed here, or whatever your career takes you.

So, we brought in a consultant who brought in their team, and, for what a career counseling assistance to our employees, held to assign the resume, help them understand the various paths of growth and opportunities.

We did the agency, and within the city government.

And we also put in place a Digital Quotient assessment because we believed a lot of the interactions were going to be digital, and it was important for our employees to understand that when you're communicating the digital environment, it's a lot different than in person.

If a customer reaches out to you via chat session, they are not going to be patient and wait for six minutes to get a response. If they have a complex issue on chat, you can take that conversation or by e-mail or schedule a meeting.

But above all, we also had to change the way we process information in the digital world, We had to leverage Excel and our tools to understand clusters of information.

So that program was definitely a game changer, because employees realize where we're trying to go and dig gaps, everybody had, in order for them to, exceed the performance goals for them to meet the application.

And finally, we put in place employee recognition activities to be routine across the agency. We celebrated our employees for doing a fantastic job with customers.

We celebrated our employees, who faced challenges, and asked for help. And we made it part of our DNA.

That, it is OK to make mistakes as long as loamy the same mistake multiple times over and more importantly, taken advantage of the tools and resources that Agency provides.

With all of that said, the question becomes Neil Hodgetts Systems work together.

You probably figured out by now that we've put our customers and our employees as the cornerstone of our digital transformation.

When an interaction on Inquiry comes to the agency by for social media live, video session to the cloud.

Goes into I environment, and with tunnel it to the appropriate system, what I was asked CRM, well, customer interactions, call, Identity Management System using Okta, all to have electronic copy of the record in our file, it all has to do with backlog permit into a semi landmark system.

All, if you have to do with transparency, through our public dashboard where we use Tableau and SaaS, end, if it had to do with any sort of communication, only the tools that we have set up in I environments could be used.

So, that is how we architected our systems around our customers and employees.

So, with that said, the question remains, what were the results?

Remember, in 20 18, 31% of customers were dissatisfied with the service they received or with the agency.

In 20 22, we're seeing 90% and above.

In terms of satisfaction scores, we also saw high end and 74 people who are now available for on demand inspections we've created hired is 74 jobs.

We also cut back on the turnaround time for safety inspections, co-housing inspections, for example.

SLA, or, I said, this window was 15 days, were routinely performing this service in seven days. We also made it real fast to get permanent, use an Aboriginal collaboration tools, and also streamline processes.

For the first time, in three years, the agency met or exceeded all key performance indicators, this transformation would simply not have been possible without the technology, and they're investment in people, and above all calling our customers for it. That was our journey.

It took two years to get there, but it results have been fantastic.

We've learned a lot, and I hope you found some nuggets or kernels of information that could be useful.

What is the future for us now?

Having gone to the digital transformation, currently.

We are rolling out a five year strategic plan that creates Aboriginal the future that we want to see as employees and what the city needs from us. We are positioning the agency to be ready for the future. Nobody could have predicted the pandemic. When we started a digital transformation.

It wasn't because I, or somebody knew, there was coronavirus come in when the city sat down and we had to send all our employees home remotely.

We went digital in just one day.

Because of the investments that we had made.

Other agencies across the country scrambled to provide virtual services. But for us, it was a seamless transition because of the strategic thinking and plan we have put in place in 20 18.

So, as we think about our five year plan, it is small L building on our success, sustaining the excellence, and assist them with economic recovery.

We also going to launch that Permit Wizard, think of terrible attacks, or automated tools or filing your taxes.

We want to introduce that concept to permits so that if you need a permit, you don't really have to be that technical or understand the type of permit to meet.

By simply asking a few questions that wizard will guide you and take you through the processes for you to get your permits. We also plan on launching a contract, our radius system.

Yes, they are rating systems like Angie's List, Google yoke, but none of them has inflammation.

I bought a contract, this performance, with the city agency, as it relates to the quality of plans as submitted the past and fill rates for inspections.

So we are super excited about this initiated because it will provide information for consumers to make informed decisions about who to hire some edited, excluded hires, a general contractor, who hires an electrician, or any professional at all.

Finally, we are looking to tick our inspections marketplace, from pilots mode, to full production mode and expand the suite of services that can be obtained to the market. Is that, ladies and gentlemen, is a high level overview of the digital transformation of the Department of Regulatory Affairs in Washington, DC. I hope you enjoyed the presentation, and I'll stick around to answer any questions you may ask. Thank you.

Ernest, thank you so much for that.

What what a fantastic, what a fantastic journey you and the team have been on.

I encourage the audience to ask questions. Some have already come through, keep asking the questions.

I'm going to relay as many as possible to the in the time that we have a lot of here with earnest. What a, what a great journey you have been on. It's remarkable to see how much has been done since 2018 and then on top of that with a pandemic on, You, know that that happened.

Of course, you are the department look like geniuses, because you are set up for something they said that nobody could predict, and but you have those capabilities built-in, so let's go back to 20 18.

You are, you are coming into the, into the department, What was the motivation for you, for the transformation? And what what, You know, you mention, a few things that were going on there. But as you, as you start understanding what was happening in the department?

What was, what pushed your vision in this direction? What are some of the things that you felt early on that made you take this direction with the department?

You say, that's a very good question, I work for a male, who is bored, incredible, and bouba motivating hair style of leadership, is to celebrate the careers of people who are committed to public service. And I spent about a decade turning around different government agencies. So, I sort of develop a bit of a reputation for, you know, fixing things, But the Department of Consumer Affairs was the biggest undertaking for me at that time, because the frustrations that customers had.

We're very real at that time.

So, for me, I didn't him automatically. No digital transformation was a strategy. I didn't.

But in going to the Listening session is talking to residents, talking to business owners, talking to a CIO Council member is talking to stakeholders.

I began to see sort of wrestling. Come on Natalie's. one day, one of the things fast, you'll want things to be efficient, when it seems to be transparent, they want some sense of control.

So, it dawned on me that, one, we have your customer centric, we have to, so that we can become relevant and make loan, stay ahead a little bit if record of our customer expectations.

But, it was only by going digital, that we could have a wholesale improvement in all our core services. It only made sense to improve permitting. And inspection is being weak, or licensing being weak enforcement regime being week, We had an elevated again, and that drove the digital transformation strategy that was focused on improving our customer experience, and firing employees, and driving wholesale improvements across the agency.

Fantastic, Fantastic, Thank you for that William Fuller?

Well, before I go into William Fuller, Frank Harper is this saying, what a great demonstration of innovation, insight, initiative, influence interpersonal skills and integrity. So thank you for sharing this with us. So that's a comment therefrom Frank Harper, jumping into the question from William Fuller.

You talk about service level targets early on in the presentation, and, and, actually, service level commitments. I think.

William was interested on, how did you establish the service level targets before publishing them, as service level commitments. There's gotta be some discussion there internally, that you had to go through and decide that we're going to make this commitments, so we'd better be, we'd better be able to meet the commitments to the marketplace. How did that happen internally?

It was part of the strategic planning process.

Every district government agency has what they call, like, an annual performance plan.

The annual performance plan, gifts, what, I've got, a boring statistics. You know, your workload, measures, you know, number of demand for inspection, then a more phone calls that are most permits, you have to review, the stuff that, yeah, the aspects of that.

It doesn't mean a whole lot, if it doesn't come with a service level commitment.

ErnestSo, we reviewed internal processes, and what became clear to me is that we actually have service levels that the city uses to evaluate the performance. And employees had individual performance plans that were not tied to the service levels.

So we said, OK, we're not going to change anything yet.

Less. number one.

Tie your individual performance to the agency's performance so that you know, when a phone call comes in, you have to answer, in one business day or less.

When you answer, you have to provide meaningful substance to the customer and say, Hello, I've got your request, and now goodbye no understand the nature of the interaction.

So, by putting that in place, I felt comfortable that improvements will come over time with a digital transformation, but we had to commit to what was already on the books that we were not meeting.

And we had to be transparent about it, so that people knew that, Yes, you are not meeting your performance targets, but this is the performance targets set.

Up when improvements come, it is clear what it path has been.

Down the line, we introduced additional measures. one, I can think of is our three day service level commitment.

That was new, because I want a staff to know how to manage or self manage.

If you have 20 e-mails to respond to this, Realize commitments now is to give a resolution in three days. So be thoughtful about your responses to the issues, Talk to our colleagues. So, when you formulate the response, the customer is more likely to be satisfied because one inquiry constitute a tracking number.

The customer is getting Alex the clock, this winding down. And everybody is marching to the same team of music.

Very, very good, Very good. Yeah. And you know, earnest, if you go back to 20 18, when you started this journey, and you're listening to walk to the people, to the stakeholders at all different levels.

And you're kind of in your building or vision of what you need to transform into L point, Did it come to mind that, you know what, we gotta take this agency completely digital?

I mean, I went when at what point in the journey that that, that idea crystalized for you.

Look back, I think it was probably one day where it wants to run it, I do a lot of endurance running. So that's when I can clear my head.

But I recall the first sort of like 60 days on the job, where you know, what was the press, or employees, or city council members, and what it was asking, OK, so what are you going to do to fix the problems?

Like there was intense pressure, and I'll go to community meetings and people were just mad, or there'll be a few people who are key.

I mean, it was intense, but I purposely did not rush to solutions.

But when it became clear to me that the customer's expectations have changed, and we were in a different world.

I realized, OK, we're in the digital economy.

We are in an environment where, if you need to get it right, push a button on a smartphone, and your board rabbis there. And by the way, you saw him on a map coming towards you.

When a customer files that permit application, they want to know when is going to be complete?

The status at any given point in time.

We had no choice to go digital. You want to kind of existence or threat, you know, like, we just have to do it.

So, I'm pleased we got to resources on the mayor and the city council, but it was a bold vision.

And I remember when we on the division, some people say, this is so crazy, it may actually work. That's fantastic. And learn is so you're in that process now. Now, you may not have the skill set necessary within the department to move to digital. How did you go about, you know, assembling the team around you to help you on this digital journey?

Suddenly, we didn't have everything in place on day one, but we give ourselves to use for a digital transformation, we published milestones, we made it public.

And we put up a clock counting down to the end of 2020. So the pressure was surreal.

But as we became transparent and put on the plan, people felt a bit of excitement and also wanted to be part of this story, the journey.

I also was fortunate enough where I was able to recruit and bring a couple of people, what worked with me before my CIO, Incredible leader. My Deputy Director incredible perform my team building official, that I've now, what did before, but he knows the industry.

I was able to take the existing team, supplement it with people that are what the before recruited for the talent gaps we had.

Went through procurement to find vendors to help is, and that is how the team can give us, over the year and a half, nearly two year period.

Very good, and, and now you have the team Division has been established, um, did you have pushback? Did you have pushback internally and externally on this? Naysayers? How has the atmosphere around the the beginnings of this digital transformation?

At the beginning, there was no push back.

It was more, sort of like, Well, let's see, if this thing will work because people have tried different things. You know, I was like, Well, let's sit back.

The pushback came mixed dream about six months or eight months in the process where people realize that some accomplishments had been done. We revamp the website.

We amid dashboard public and the heat was getting like most strongest all the speed, because we're demanding that.

People meet the expectations that they've committed to, and they show the return on the training that we've provided.

No. So, what does a real sense of accountability?

And that is when the pushback, happiness, you see that in the passive, aggressive way.

Event Email Graphic Virtual Conferences (1)You see that for some of the issues that a union leaders brought by the also puts it in an opportunity to resell division, recalibrate, understand areas where we could have done things differently, and to make them more inclusive.

So, as we fell back on our successes, talked about our lessons learned, were able to our console, the pushback, but it was not easy, I think That's why I'm probably going a little gray. You can see my head. That's fantastic. You know, you have such a great story of excellence and innovation, and there's so many components of it that are remarkable from you running. And then disconnected from work, and having this insight about something back, and add the job, if you will, from the way that you approach operational excellence and then build on that operational excellence with innovation capabilities. That, that's just a remarkable story. Let me get back here with, with the questions from our, from our audience and the next one here is around the culture. What did you this comes from Frank Harper, and he asks, What did you find to be the most effective approaches?

To changing the DCRI culture you talked about making some you took some steps that just shift to transform the culture. What have you found to be most useful in doing that cultural transformation?

There are few pieces to the puzzle and it's a puzzle that also shifts. And you have to be malleable. Training, training that is targeted.

And demanding a return on veteran in investment if you are not comfortable with the escalating customer inquiry. Even if you don't know the subject matter, experts will provide the tools on the tone.

The point where you have to tell the customer that this is the only thing I can do for you at this moment.

Or follow up with it. So that there is a way of managing the customers. So we provide that training to every single employee top to the bottom. It just doesn't matter but we want to create a culture of how we handle our customers, the difficult ones, the muscle of the core ones.

There has to be a protocol so training, communication and overcommunicate in. I hold weekly briefing sessions for all staff.

At some point I held daily briefings during the pandemic for staff to keep them informed on things that were happening outside the agency that would impact there and also an opportunity for them to connect directly with me. No, middleman and just be more human.

The third piece we'll see is dollars. You have to make investments in people.

So, we shift their resources for some of our IT projects to people, Investments, you get you get a set budget and you have to make it work, but we commit it to spend the money on people. We committed to bring him in.

Experts from outside consultants to help our employees are flourish.

Overall, we probably spent about 300,000 over the two year period on call to change initiatives and also, and this could be subtle, taking a strong position externally.

In areas where the NFC was right and areas where it's, what's wrong, phoning up to it and setting that example for staff.

That is OK to be vulnerable but you gotta have a brand and when you're executing your plan, what a long time, you are more likely to be so sexual, those are the elements that I think were helpful when it comes to change initiatives.

Fantastic, fantastic, Their comments of vulnerability with a plan is such a strong statement. You also mention earnest this career counseling sessions, which are quite intriguing because it feels from the outside just listening to the concept that you're really trying to create this, this culture of entrepreneurship, of accountability, of ownership. And, in a way, you're like, Let's review our career plans, everybody, Is that, really, how it played out for you, is that we are aiming for this career counseling sessions that you're having with the employees.

Yes, I wanted the individuals to be successful.

Because, I had long time ago, accepted, that you are not going to be able to keep all employees, some woolies, because they found a better job, and you have to congratulate them that if are something better.

Some will leave, because of the wear and tear. Some will leave, because they don't know what you're trying to do.

But as an organization, for the time that people are with us, if we can get the best out of them, and make them the best that they can be in the long term, it helps this city, it helps the individual.

And for a POW with this, it also helps. So it was sort of like counter-intuitive, when somebody says it, I'll give you free career counseling sessions.

You look around in a circle, OK, you found it by being, you know, like, no, but at least that cultural fit, And we are addressed that also to the quantity, and we're trying to build an environmental trust, An environment of empowerment, an environment of continuous improvement. Dole's drove the decision, and I think it was money well spent.

Screenshot (4)Bring in, external people aim people who are not edited the resume in three years, or sometimes even six years, but they had acquired new skills as part of digital transformation. They knew how to use CRM systems that are modern.

They know how to use Excel spreadsheets, to do pivot tables, they know how to apply critical thinking to make decisions.

They knew how to de-escalate customer situations, then you have to do issue diagnosis, but these are skills that you can use in life.

And I felt it was important for employees to see.

You don't have to agree with what we are doing. It was a digital transformation.

But you have to recognize that there's something in it for you.

Artist. What a pleasure, what a privilege for all of our 2000 plus registered participants to listen directly from a leader of your caliber on the steps, the challenges, and the successes of a well executed digital transformation. So congratulations to you and the team for showing that government works. And for showing the successes that you have achieved here through this incredible collaborative effort, so thank you for taking the time to share that wisdom with all of us today.

My pleasure. And just say Thank you And your team and all the participants and those who ask questions. Thank you for the opportunity to share our successes challenges. If you need to get in touch with me after this, you can tweet me at ... or you can Tweet me at .... Thank you.

And I look forward to catching up with you and be well, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen that was Ernest ..., the director of the District Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs on the journey of digital transformation and the department. So at the top of the hour, we will have the last session for us today, which is leading agile transformation in that continuously changing environment. So we're going to have a ..., the global head of consumer data acquisition for Nielsen with us. And she's going to lead us through their journey of digital transformation. So we started the day on real estate. We moved into financials. We moved into government and we're gonna finish strong with a decent Sinha and Nielsen, and I'll see you back at the top of the hour.

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About the Author

more - 2021-03-05T175110.960Ernest Chrappah,
Director, Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs,
DC Government.

My mission is to improve cities by striving with things perceived as impossible, applying innovation to solve complex problems, building high performing teams, and using a liberal dosage of data and tech driven strategies to improve services for consumers and businesses. 

 

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