The Public Accountability Challenge

In today’s era of government transparency, public organizations are being asked more and more how they are ensuring accountability to the people they serve. Agencies want to create and foster a culture of principled decision making, promote an elevated level of transparency and oversight, and enforce high ethical standards.

When it comes to information technology, local and city governments have a common requirement: They need tools to help them do more with less. In many cases, aging, poorly-integrated systems have made it difficult to find or share information, create reports, or complete audits. For organizations and staff charged with ensuring public accountability, it's a challenge that can directly affect their citizens' attitude about their government.

The Solution: Column Case Management

To help, Column Technologies offers Column Case Management’s Public Accountability module, a collaborative, web-based solution for local and city governments. Easy to implement and easy to maintain, its powerful content and records management, collaboration, and workflow automation features increase efficiency and help deliver high quality service.

The Public Accountability module can help process complaints against employees and organizations, manage the responses, and continually assess local government’s performance. You can also let constituents create, check, update and close cases. If a complaint becomes a legal case, you can easily transfer the information to other applications, such as the Case Management – Public Safety module.

No matter how your local or city government works, you can tailor Column Case Management to your exact needs, deploy on any scale, and then quickly and easily make changes.

Datasheet: Case Management - Public Accountability (PDF: 100 KB).

Case Management Benefits

From our inception, Column Technologies has helped public and private organizations transform how they conduct business. Today, Column Case Management's enterprise features and interoperability with your other technology allows your staff to:

• Enhance record, document, and evidence management

  Column Case Management's Public Accountability module replaces paper-based case folders with secure, case-specific virtual workspaces. Here, users can coordinate their work and manage unstructured content such as Microsoft Office and PDF documents, HTML files, e-mail messages, images, forms—even audio and video files.

• Improve security and audit procedures

  Rigorous access and audit controls—including user, role, and group-level security, data encryption, and complete audit trails—promote information sharing while fulfilling your organization’s responsibility to protect privacy and personally identifiable information.

• Increase data quality

  Powerful data quality management tools use business rules and real-time logic to validate, cleanse, and integrate data. The result? Accurate, timely, and complete information that supports good decision making without compromising speed and efficiency.

• Improve information access from search and data visualization options

  When you need to find information, you can securely search all sources, including documents, web pages, attachments, forms, and activity logs. You also have access to Thinkmap, a powerful data visualization technology that can help you uncover relationships among people, locations, property, vehicles, organizations, and other data elements.

• Increase efficiency with electronic forms and customizable workflows

  Built on the BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS)—a workflow engine used by some 7,000 organizations worldwide and over 80% of the Fortune 500—Column Case Management can effectively automate manual, time-intensive activities.

  With ARS, workflow rules can send notifications or information, create or escalate assignments, request approvals, and update data—even automatically create and send correspondence based on case information. You can also build trackable electronic forms that reduce errors and rework and then link them to cases.

• Access to up-to-the minute data with a customizable, web-based reports console

  Powerful reporting and dashboard consoles provide real-time performance metrics and fully integrate with a wide variety of business intelligence solutions. Each module includes a large number of standard reports and dashboards as well as the ability to create custom reports and ad-hoc queries. If rolled-up data demands an explanation, you can easily drill down for more detail.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Solutions

Column's software-as-a-service (SaaS) option for the Public Accountability module helps city governments, local governments, and public organizations limit installation, maintenance, and staffing costs and eliminate time-consuming upgrades and backups. With SaaS-enabled Public Accountability Case Management, your solution resides on our servers, and your users access it through secure Internet connections.

To learn how the Column Case Management Solution can improve performance while reducing costs and risk, you can contact a Column office, have Column contact you, or chat with a Column representative.