LA ISD Station 5: Goal 4

Interview all departments for needs, constraints and pain points to identify service requirements & priorities.
Identify any matching service offerings within ISD or plan to develop one for the top priority.

Absolutely! Very important to know your A players, your B players, and your C players.

Adding ease of access to our services with help with customer interaction and effectiveness. We, IRSD, are currently working with a newly appointed LACo FD Chief and she has been vocal about transparency, mostly surrounding billing, and be able to understand the billing from a customer view.

All of this is great!

However, what I'm what I'm not seeing here is the integration of AI. Imaging every department integrating IA as tool to service the communities of Los Angeles.

For example, Department of Consumer Affairs might have a website that the public could go to ask questions. That are related to rent control, or to ask about a contractor to find out if there has been any complaint filed against them, ask for help with finding an apartment.

The one-stop portal sounds great, but it shouldn't be anything like Cherwell, which even in the simplified customer-facing portal requires the customer to figure out exactly which path they need to go down in order to submit a request. *I* have gotten lost in that process trying to figure out how to enter requests for other teams in ITS - it's a tremendously unfriendly way to request services or report issues. Ideally we'd have something designed not around drilling down into some antiquated phone menu, but around searches (even if not stuck with natural language approaches like chatbots, since once those get you started down the wrong track it's easy to get stuck). It would be good to backstop the request process with a way to fall back to human assistance.

A challenge with human assistance is making sure the assistants have the tools to be helpful. I don't know how many times Customer Assistance staff have mis-routed requests for help on applications I've never heard of to our team because even they haven't been given documentation on which team in ISD supports many long-running systems. At the very least, I think every new application or site which ISD brings online needs to be registered with Customer Assistance, including information identifying both the business owner (e.g. Auditor's ETG; point of contact Jen Porter) and technical owner (e.g. Internet Applications Section).

Sounds interesting, but not Cherwell please.

Years ago, we had a team called BRM. From what I remember, they acted as liaisons between ISD and the various departments in the county. I wonder if it or some variation of it should be brought back.

This would be very beneficial.

Yes!

Surveys.

ISD lacks a dedicated marketing and user-experience function to effectively communicate its value to departments. Presentations, dashboards, and customer-facing materials are functional but not modern or user-centric, limiting service adoption and perception. Creating a dedicated team with branding, design, and storytelling skills is needed to modernize communications and promote ISD services effectively.

Thank you for including the one-stop, integrated digital portal approach!