The City of Tulsa missed a mid-January launch date for a new, Web-based 311 system because of bugs in the software.
The system worked fine during a back office soft launch, but it kept crashing during early public.
Customer Care Center Director Michael Radoff said the vendor spent days looking for the problem, which could have been as small as a single comma in thousands of lines of code. The relaunch is going to be done slowly.
"We're going to bring things back online, but we're going to do it in a way that we're going to see it in production operating properly in production," Radoff said. "We're not going to tell the public it's in production. We're not going to make it public-facing in production, but we're going to be out there and see it operating in the production environment so that the migration process doesn't create a problem for us."
Several big cities have already been using the same system, including Boston, Minneapolis and San Antonio. The new system has a smartphone app.
"You click on the service order, you fill in two or three different fields, you could take a picture of whatever the issue is — a picture of the graffiti, a picture of the pothole or whatever it is — that gets included in that particular service order when you send it in," Radoff said. "You submit the service order. That comes right to the department that actually deals with it."
The $2.5 million system upgrade is meant to decrease the amount of time between a 311 call and a response from the city, as well as decrease the number of calls the center currently receives.
