This document was revised on 23 September 2009. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

Customer relationship management (CRM) commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products have matured significantly for governments, both in terms of availability of industry-specific forms and workflows, and in terms of implementation methodologies. However, local governments should consider that CRM is a significant investment, both in terms of technology and in terms of business change required to streamline and consolidate service delivery. CRM project teams (both in the private and in public sector) are typically concerned with product functionality and technology capabilities; however, Gartner recommends that they evaluate vendors along four additional criteria that impact the long-term outcomes of CRM initiatives: total cost of ownership, project implementation and after-sale service, financial viability, and long-term credibility of vision and strategies. In particular, local governments, should include in their evaluation:

• In-depth fit-gap analysis for contact center capabilities, such as scripting and knowledge management; case management capabilities, such as routing; eligibility assessment, reporting and analytics interfacing with GIS; and government domain-specific applications.
• The vendor's product road map and financial viability. CRM investments in local government usually require 12- to 24-month implementations and 7- to 10-year life cycles after go-live if vendors undergo mergers and acquisitions, drop products from their portfolio or modify alliances with key partners. Otherwise, ongoing maintenance and upgrades could be seriously disrupted.
• The vendor's size and geographical reach to ensure continuity of implementation and after-sale services. Local governments must note that some vendors offer very rich architectures in terms of government-specific templates and configurability to respond to very specific business requirements, but that implies the need to rely on their support services more extensively to master the entire architecture.

Beyond vendor evaluation, careful project governance and management are critical to achieve the intended results. For example, one or two months of work should be dedicated initially to document citizen service scenarios in a detailed way. This will lay the foundation for configuring citizen requests and case entities and identifying opportunities for service redesign.

Local governments worldwide deliver a wide variety of services to citizens; some local councils in the U.K. have estimated up to 700 different services. In the past 10 years, many local government executives and elected officials have focused on improving responsiveness to citizen service requests, personalizing service delivery and offering multiple access channels. Gartner has recently spoken with local authorities in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy and Belgium that have implemented CRM software to support those programs.

In 2007, Gartner published a study that analyzed the CRM COTS product offering of BMC-Remedy, Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Hansen, Motorola and Lagan. This study aims to update the research conducted in 2007 by extending coverage to additional vendors outside of the United States. This year's research includes the following vendors: Coheris, Infor-Hansen, Lagan, Motorola, Microsoft, Northgate, Oracle and SAP:

• The detailed analysis of the Oracle offering clarifies that Siebel is now its primary product offering for CRM in local government; thus, PeopleSoft and Oracle CRM have not been considered in this research.
• Hansen is now part of Infor.
• In the previous version of the research, we indicated that BMC was an opportunistic player. At this stage, BMC is still reviewing the road map for the local government CRM solution; thus, it cannot be considered as an alternative to the other offerings analyzed here.

This MarketScope aims to help local government CIOs and enterprise architects, as well as customer service executives, to compare these eight vendors when considering implementing, replacing or upgrading a CRM system.

This MarketScope examines the market for CRM COTS products targeted at local governments worldwide.

Local governments consist of cities, counties, districts and other local authorities, as well as partnerships of those authorities below the central/federal or state/provincial government level.

These governments buy primarily the customer services components of these products (see Note 1).

In many circumstances, CRM is being used to support single, nonemergency call centers, such as 311 in North America (see Note 2).

This study includes vendors that offer a COTS CRM product. As of June 2009, the product must have been purchased by:

• 10 or more local governments
• Five or more local governments, but with at least two jurisdictions with more than 1 million residents

Two or more of those implementation must be enterprisewide: i.e., CRM systems that support citizen service across multiple departments in the same jurisdiction, such as 311 in the U.S.

This study does not include:

• CRM solutions developed on a custom basis, by external service providers, or by government agencies' internal IT departments
• Open-source or community source CRM software
• Application vendors that offer customer service/complaint management tools exclusively as a complementary module to their domain-specific COTS application software, such as permit and licensing public works or billing
• Best-of-breed CRM vendors that focus on specific functional capabilities, such as scripting, knowledge management or analytics

Overall Market Rating: Positive

The first phase of local government CRM investments focused on the automation of call centers and walk-in service centers to intake and route requests for a minority of services, such as waste collection, road works, code enforcement, and booking of parks and recreational facilities. However there is evidence that investments are continuing to extend the usage of CRM systems into more value-added solutions:

• Call centers and walk-in centers are being integrated with online portals, by publishing on the local government website information from the CRM knowledgebase to help citizens walk through self-service transactions. Access to customer service is also being extended to mobile phones; for example, in August 2009, Pittsburgh was the first U.S. city to adopt an iPhone application that allows residents to snap photos of nuisances, such as potholes and graffiti, and send them to the city's 311 system.
• CRM functionalities are being extended to provide capabilities that support middle-office case management processes, such as eligibility screening for social care.
• More comprehensive and real-time integration with back-office systems is being pursued, such as geographic information systems (GISs), public works asset management and work orders, permitting and licensing screening and approval, ERP council tax assessment and collection, and social housing.
• Analytical capabilities, traditionally used to support customer service performance management and planning, are seen as a source of precious information to personalize services.
• Contact centers are being consolidated across multiple jurisdictions to establish a shared contact center.

It must be noted that levels of maturity are not the same across all geographies. In fact, U.K., U.S. and Canadian local governments were early adopters of CRM solutions; in the U.K., they were driven by the local government e-government modernization programs launched in the late 1990s, and in North America by the implementation of 311 nonemergency call center programs. In continental Europe, Spain and the Netherlands started to invest approximately seven to eight years ago. Adoption is more patchy in Germany, France and Italy, where it is primarily adopted by cities with more than 500,000 residents or regional governments.

As a result of these trends, CRM software vendors are evolving their product offering by:

1. Providing more-flexible workflow configuration tools that can respond to complex case management requirements
2. Enriching reporting capabilities by offering out-of-the-box dashboards
3. Building prepackaged interfaces with the other systems commonly used by local governments — for example, GISs

Local government investments have, however, been slowed down by risk aversion toward complex business change that is often required to complete service delivery transformation programs, and, in the past 12 months, by budget shortages.

Company background. Founded in 1994, Coheris specialized in CRM and soon became a primary provider of call center software for large companies in Europe, such as Kraft, L'Oreal, Nestle, Total and Sony. In 2008, the company recorded more than €32 million in revenue (approximately $47 million) and employed 330 staff. The government market accounts for approximately 8% of Coheris' revenue.

Solution background. Coheris product developments were first focused on customer care/service, integrating functions from complaint management to sales processing. It then acquired HARRYSoftware, extending its expertise to analytical CRM and business performance management (see www.harrysoftware.com/jahia/jsp/index.jsp).

Customer base. Coheris CRM is currently installed in seven local governments in France: one installation is for less than 20 seats, three installations for 20 to 100 seats and three installations of more than 100 seats. Examples of customers include the city of Paris, the city of Issy-les-Moulineaux and the Communauté Urbaine du Grand Lyon. In the broader government sector, Coheris has also some customers in Italy and Germany.

Product characteristics. The current product version, Coheris CRM 4.5, provides a good coverage of key functionalities required by a local government, such as call center agent scripting, knowledge management, e-mail integration, complaint management, workforce management and monitoring, field/mobile service, marketing and campaign management, and a set of data-mining and dashboard capabilities. Coheris does not provide out-of-the-box capabilities for computer-telephony integration (CTI) and interactive voice response (IVR), self-service portals, and unified communications, but interfaces with global providers of those solutions, such as Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Aastra Matra. The configuration/designer tool is easily accessible directly from the call center operator screen, and collaborative workflow tasks can be configured by business users, not only IT experts. The user interface enables the call center operator to view citizen information based on meaningful segmentations for government agencies, such as students or the elderly, and can provide easily accessible links to relationships with other citizens, such as wife/husband and employer, if allowed by privacy laws. Phonetic search enables the possibility to look for names that are hard to spell, or to find duplicate names. The call center agent interface also has a navigation that enables the operator to move across sessions; for example if he or she is reviewing contact details for a closed call and needs to suspend because there is another incoming call, once the call is completed he or she can go back directly to the previous task. This feature is useful for call center agents that are not forced to complete all steps of a workflow if they urgently need to move across service requests. The business intelligence capabilities are rich in terms of number of variables that can be used to define ad hoc queries and dashboards, but the out-of-the-box dashboards are limited for government; in fact, most of the prebuilt reports in the latest version of the software have tables and variables labeled for private-sector companies. The software is available in French, and the vendor is completing the translation of the latest version into English and Spanish.

Services capabilities. Coheris provides consulting services to support configuration in the implementation phases; however, the vendor strategy is to increasingly rely on partnerships with system integrators, such as Sopra Group and Steria.

Technical requirements. Coheris is a Java-based application that runs on IBM WebSphere, Oracle Application Server and WebLogic, and JBoss. The latest version supports Ajax. The software runs on the most common database servers and operating systems and is accessible for clients running Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Users that should consider this product. Midsize to large French regional and local governments should consider Coheris, because the vendor has acquired experience with its existing customers about government call center agents usage patterns and service request workflows. Local governments in other countries should monitor Coheris' road map, in particular because of the careful work the vendor is doing on improving its user interface, configurability and reporting capabilities, but should consider other CRM products as their primary choices because of lack of familiarity with business processes and limited partnerships with global system integrators that can support implementation and after-sale service outside of France.

Rating: Caution

Company background. Infor has revenue of more than $2.2 billion and a workforce of 8,300 employees. The company's revenue base spans the Americas (50%); Europe, the Middle East and Africa (42%); and Asia/Pacific (8%); as well as a diverse set of verticals (financial services, manufacturing, retail, government). Infor's acquisition of Hansen Information Technologies in 2007 jump-started the company's focus on U.S. and Canadian local government with a significant customer footprint.

Solution background. Infor offerings for local governments include Hansen Community Development and Regulation (CDR), Asset Management, CIS Billing, Customer Service Module (CSM), and Transit and Rail Management. These products address local government domain-specific business requirements, such as permitting and licensing, billing and public works. Hansen's Customer Service Module (CSM) became part of Hansen product set since release of version 7 to help streamline citizen requests and complaints. The CSM module can be bought as a stand-alone module from the rest of the suite.

Customer base. The vast majority of Infor local government customers are in North America, but the vendor has some references in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Approximately 270 local government customers are using the Hansen 8 suite Customer Service Module; some of them use it to automate their enterprisewide contact center/311, including the cities of Las Vegas, Louisville, Kentucky, and Boston.

Product characteristics. Hansen version 8.1 CSM offers capabilities to record customer service requests, inquiries and complaint calls; it enables checking for duplicate calls, scheduling inspections, displaying associated assets, directly adding work orders or code enforcement cases, and tracking any actions performed to resolve an issue. The most recent additions to the system are CTI/IVR integration and agent scripting, which became available with version 8.09. Existing customers have integrated CSM with other vendors' systems and SAP BusinessObjects' Crystal reporting tools. The solution currently does not offer integration of call center with Web self-service and e-mail. Web self-service is provided through a separate Hansen module, DynamicPORTAL, which enables submitting and tracking the status of service requests online. Asset locations (address, range, block and intersection) are the key entities around which service request intake and routing workflows are modeled; these characteristics enable more-effective routing and dispatching requests to field workers and inspectors, as well as help in checking for duplicate calls. The latest version is fully Web-based, thus has a more user-friendly user interface (UI); nonetheless, a customer that Gartner spoke with complained about the redundancy of some navigation tabs in the UI. The forms and workflows are tightly integrated with the rest of the Hansen suite for handling service requests related to public works, permitting and licensing, utility billing, and land management. For example, the call center agent can automatically generate work orders linked to one or multiple service requests and can dispatch orders to field workers. Once a work order has been closed, the software can automatically end the workflow by closing the service requests linked to the order and notifying the citizens that submitted the complaints. This tight integration ensures data integrity and process consistency between call center agents and back-office directorates that deliver services; however, it can limit the solution usability in cities that need an enterprisewide CRM system that interfaces with other vendors' COTS and is capable of handling people-centric workflows, such as assessment of eligibility for personal health and human services.

Services capabilities. The broad local government expertise of Hansen professionals ensures quality support in the design and implementation phase to configure workflows and cluster types of service requests into meaningful tabs and drop-down lists. Gartner spoke to some customers, who indicated that the acquisition of Hansen by Infor did not cause any major disruption in the service capabilities; account representatives and the help desk are easy to access for after-sale support.

Technical requirements. Infor has built the Hansen 8.1 architecture to allow for customizable database and legacy integration through the use of Web services architecture and customizable user interface and workflow features. Infor recommends an infrastructure running Windows Server 2000+, client operating systems running Internet Explorer 6 or later, and SQL Server 2000/2005 or Oracle 10 database servers. As of the 8.2 release (July 2009), Hansen now supports Windows Server 2008, Oracle 11.1 and SQL Server 2008.

Users that should consider this product. Cities and counties should consider the customer service module as a value-adding complement to other functional capabilities that the Hansen suite 8 provides. Users that have not installed other Hansen modules or do not plan to do so should consider other CRM software.

Rating: Positive

Company background. Founded in 1994, Lagan specializes in delivering solutions for government-to-citizen interactions. In the fiscal year ending 31 March 2008, Lagan generated £15 million in revenue (approximately $30 million), which represents an average annual revenue growth of 60% since 2000. Lagan employs approximately 200 professionals.

Solution background. Lagan's Enterprise Case Management (ECM) software solution has its foundation in customer relationship management and 311 nonemergency call center automation, but it's being currently used also for emergency preparedness and human/social services case management. In 2009, Lagan launched Lagan311.com, a software as a service solution for small to midsize local governments in the U.S. Lagan311.com core module is the knowledgebase/e-services.

Customer base. More than 130 local governments worldwide use Lagan's software; the majority are in the U.K., where Lagan is the primary provider of customer relationship management COTS for local councils. However, in the past four years, it successfully expanded into North America by winning business with more than 30 North American customers, including some large jurisdictions such as San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver and Boston. In 2008, Lagan won 18 new local government customers worldwide. The West Sussex Accessible Service Partnership, a group of U.K. local governments and other public-sector agencies, has deployed Lagan CRM as a shared service.

Product characteristics. In 2009, Lagan released version 8 of its ECM product. The Lagan ECM architecture is built on three layers of integrated components: (1) the Government to People Platform (G2PP), which includes basic capabilities, such as knowledge management, channel management, eForms, search, security and identity management, business intelligence and audit; (2) the Business Process Suite, which entails a range of reusable business processes, such as intake and routing of service requests and complaints, booking, payment, service referrals and scheduling, provider management and case worker management; (3) the Application Library, which builds on the two underlying layers to provide domain-specific applications for adult care services, CRM 311, and housing services for the U.K. market. This architecture reflects Lagan's road map to increase its ability to handle more-complex middle-office workflows, such as service eligibility screening and assessment, rather than just front-end service intake. Business process management (BPM) capabilities are made available via partnerships with Singularity and Active Endpoints. Early adopters of this feature have found some unexpected gaps in the interfaces between Lagan and Singularity; the more recently established partnership with Active Endpoints that provides a more comprehensive Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) engine aims to address this issue. The reporting capabilities are based on Microsoft SQL, but many customers have also integrated the product with Business Objects and other business intelligence (BI) tools. Lagan has developed new adapters to address GIS integration capabilities that create some challenges in earlier versions and is implementing them in Boston, Buffalo, Baldwin County, Alabama, and Pinal County, Arizona. Compared to Lagan ECM, Lagan311.com offers a more limited ability to configure workflows, user interface and drop-down lists in order to reduce costs to the minimum. Compared to Oracle-Siebel — the only other product that gets a Strong Positive rating in this report — Lagan provides an architecture that is easier to configure and can leverage all components, which should be considered important by users that do not plan to extend the architecture to functionalities beyond government front-end service management and case management.

Services capabilities. Lagan provides both on-site and remote support for product configuration and interfacing with other systems. It also partners with a variety of system integrators, such as Serco, Vertex, Steria and Capita in Europe and BearingPoint (now Deloitte), ACS, Unisys and Ciber in North America. Some of the customers that Gartner spoke with indicated that the fast growth of Lagan has sometimes stretched its service resources very thin and forced the company to fill the gaps with junior professionals who are not fully knowledgeable about the product; however, they also stated that remediation was prompt. Further investments in service capabilities have been made in the past two years — for example, by establishing offshore development resources in the Philippine capital of Manila.

Technical requirements. Lagan ECM is based on a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition architecture and as such can run on any operating system (such as Solaris, AIX, Linux, OS/390) that supports the specific release's required version of Java Development Kit (JDK) and application server, which supports the relevant Java 2 Platform Standard Edition standards (e.g., servlets, Java ServerPages). The new version is a full thin client capable of running on a browser session. However, each major release of Lagan ECM undergoes quality assurance testing against a subset of environments and is therefore formally certified against these combinations only; for application server: Tomcat/Microsoft Windows 2003 Server; for database server: Oracle 10g/Microsoft Windows 2003 Server.

Users that should consider this product. Local governments of all sizes that want a CRM system that enables rapid configuration and implementation, that is easy to use, and that offers all the necessary basic functionalities and reusable business processes should include Lagan ECM on their shortlists. Potential customers must be prepared to complement Lagan personnel to carry out parts of project management and configuration and change management work, in order to take early ownership of the application; otherwise, they should consider buying support from external service providers that partner with Lagan.

Rating: Strong Positive

Company background. Microsoft is one of the leading global software vendors. In the fiscal year ended in June 2009, the company recorded a revenue of $58 billion, invested approximately $9 billion in research and development, and employed approximately 90,000. Microsoft has a global footprint for all its lines of business: client software (the Windows client operating system portfolio), server and tools (Windows server and SQL Server are the major products), online services (including, for example, online advertising, MSN, Bing), Microsoft Business Division (including Office and Dynamics business solutions), entertainment and devices (including gaming, music and mobile offerings).

Solution background. The Microsoft Dynamics business solutions division is composed of a portfolio of software packages that originated from acquisitions of smaller players in the ERP and CRM space, such as Great Plains, Axapta and Navision, that Microsoft completed in the past 10 years. The CRM solution is part of that product portfolio, but was developed through internal research and development efforts. In the past two years, it has become one of the two pillars (the other being Microsoft SharePoint) of the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (CSP), a solution framework aimed to support local governments that need to digitize citizen service delivery.

Customer base. Microsoft's CRM customer base includes a number of federal, state and local governments worldwide. Some of these customers use only some capabilities of the product, such as task management, to automate internal processes. Approximately 300 local and regional governments worldwide are using the product for enterprisewide front-end automation, including some large cities, such as the municipality of Milan, and a number of medium and small jurisdictions, such as the London Borough of Bromley, the city of Fontana, California, and the towns of Aalter and Waterloo in Belgium. The largest implementation is a hosted CSP solution for 112 municipalities in Biscay County, in the Basque region of Spain.

Product characteristics. CRM 4.0 includes some key upgrades, such as AutoComplete, which enables users to avoid typing the same information over and over; faster searching; support for bulk execution and closure of campaigns; ability to customize user navigation by role; and dynamic data connections with Office Excel to import data and refresh it live from CRM. The new release is also built on a multitenant architecture, so that organizations can run multiple distinct instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM on a single server. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 supports clustering for solution components, including Microsoft Exchange Server, CRM Web Services and load balancing. The e-mail router has received several performance and scalability enhancements, including parallel processing of in-boxes and better support for enterprise deployment scenarios. With support for SQL Server mirroring, an additional copy of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM database is maintained, so that in case of database failure, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system can switch databases automatically and with minimal disruption. Users can choose to use an Outlook client or access the system through a browser-based client or a mobile device. The product does not provide out-of-the-box CTI/IVR call center integration; in fact one of the customers that Gartner spoke with had to involve a specialized local player to deploy CTI/IVR capabilities. Other customers indicated that they had to develop customization for push e-mail and Short Message Service. Potential customers must be aware that, compared to other products, such as Lagan and Siebel, which offer a number of preconfigured domain-specific templates for local governments, Microsoft CRM provides a basic framework that is adaptable to a wide variety of business processes, but requires support from partners that have developed templates for workflow triggers and forms for local governments.

Services capabilities. Microsoft provides consulting support for product configuration and interfacing with other systems, but mainly relies on global and local partners for the bulk of implementation and system integration. Microsoft also provides CRM as a hosted solution, and recently launched the On Demand solution for complete software as a service (SaaS) provisioning; however, most of the current implementations are on-premises.

Technical requirements. The preferred architecture includes Windows 2008 server, SQL Server and IIS application server.

Users that should consider this product. This product is for local and regional governments that need to quickly automate front-end processes at an affordable price. IT departments that have already installed Microsoft Office, Outlook and SharePoint will be able to take advantage of Dynamics CRM interfaces with those packages; they will also be able to leverage familiarity with Microsoft configuration and deployment tools, as well as the Microsoft licenses that they already purchased to reduce the initial cost of acquiring the software. However, they should consider that they will need to engage with Microsoft partners to configure and customize workflows for some of the service scenarios and build interfaces, which will increase the total cost of ownership.

Rating: Promising

Company background. Motorola is a global provider of communication equipment and IT solutions. In 2008, it had $30 billion in revenue and employed 66,000. Motorola has wide-ranging experience in working with government agencies — in particular with law enforcement, emergency services and transportation for mobile communication solutions.

Solution background. Motorola acquired a CRM product in the late 1990s, which was the basis to develop PremierOne Customer Service Request (CSR) as a government-specific CRM to handle 311 requirements. The first major customer and contributor to developing the product was the city of Chicago in 1998, which is still the largest implementation.

Customer base. Motorola provides its CRM-311 system to 22 cities in the U.S. and Canada. Fourteen customers have more than 100 users in the jurisdictionwide 311 call center. Customer wins in 2007 and 2008 included Washington, D.C., and Windsor, Ontario, Canada, which was an existing customer but purchased the new version. Motorola was for the first half of this decade the dominant provider of CRM technology for 311 among midsize-to-large U.S. cities, but delays in releasing the latest version, which became available in 2008, have significantly slowed down its market penetration in the past three years. Currently, only one customer is fully live with the latest version, and five more customers have started or are starting the upgrade.

Product characteristics. PremierOne CSR 4.1.1, released in summer 2009, is composed of five application modules: Customer Service Request (CSR), CSR Contact Center, CSR Citizen Portal, CSR Mobile Web and CSR Application Hub. CSR is the backbone of the platform and provides geospatial, knowledgebase, reporting capabilities and an enterprisewide workflow management engine. It is intended to help middle-office workers and managers automatically route service requests to the proper departments, sort out duplicates, coordinate work among government response teams, automate work processes, dispatch crews, track progress and create correspondence. Contact Center is a computer-telephony integration (CTI)-enabled, multichannel application that supports citizen requests via phone, e-mail, and chat; it is intended for 311 operators. CSR Citizen Portal provides self-service capabilities, and CSR Mobile Web provides online and offline synchronous/asynchronous communications to field workers to wirelessly retrieve assigned customer service request data in order to begin work on these requests in the field. Contact Center and CSR have slightly different interfaces and require navigation across different sessions, which could negatively impact user friendliness if call center agents were assigned tasks beyond the front-end request intake that is required to use CSR. This new version of the product was launched almost one year later than planned, but current customers of the new version indicate that the new architecture has resulted in significant improvements in terms of reporting and application configuration and interfacing. Cognos reporting tools are embedded in the product, and the user interface is very intuitive for non-IT staff to build dashboards. Customers indicate that the old application deployment bench was somewhat clumsy, while the new CSR Application Hub enables them to build interfaces and workflow triggers, and to design documents in a user-friendly Web environment. CSR offers out-of-the-box integration with GIS, and location is the basic information entity for handling citizen requests; analytical tools also rely on geographic information — for example, to identify duplicate calls.

Service capabilities. The Motorola Public Service Solutions team can draw upon 500 Motorola professionals to provide implementation and system integration services for local government customers. Motorola Services offers a hosted application option for its customers. Customers that Gartner spoke with indicated that the vast base of technical and government business experts was very helpful in the implementation phase to configure the system and provide deep support after go-live. For example, an early adopter of the new version got unfettered access to 30 technicians for the first eight weeks after go-live. The lack of partnerships with system integrators could represent an important limitation for those jurisdictions that want to integrate Motorola with ERP, GIS or domain-specific applications that are being implemented or managed by external IT service providers, and do not have the money to invest in additional support from Motorola.

Technical requirements. PremierOne CSR 4.01 is built on Microsoft .NET 3.5 technology; therefore, the preferred architecture includes Windows Server operating system, Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle 10g database, and Microsoft IIS application server.

Users that should consider this product. North American midsize-to-large local governments should consider Motorola. However, potential customers must be aware that the new product version has been implemented by only one customer (as of September 2009), so they must consider the project as leading-edge from a product point of view, even if with an established vendor.

Rating: Positive

Company background. Northgate Information Solutions provides software, outsourcing and IT services to the local government, education and public safety markets; it also provides human resource software and services to the public and private sector. The primary geographical focus is the U.K.; only in the human resource market does Northgate have a significant installed base outside of its country. In fiscal year 2008, the vendor had a revenue of £650 million (approximately $1.3 billion) and employed 7,500.

Solution background. Northgate launched Front Office, a CRM product specifically developed for local government contact center automation, in 2001. The latest release of Northgate CRM suite, version 3.3, includes four components: Front Office, Selfserve, Workbench and Compass.

Customer base. Currently, 70 U.K. local councils of all types (districts, counties, boroughs, etc.) and sizes are using Northgate Front Office. More than 90% of those customers are using the latest version, 3.3. Front Office is by far the most widely used module, while Selfserve has not yet achieved a very deep market penetration. Some customers are using the solution in a shared-service environment; for example, the Warwickshire Online Partnership implemented a single instance of Front Office shared by all partner authorities that only requires HTTP access to the central server. Northgate plans to develop its CRM business internationally, in particular in North America and Australia.

Product characteristics. Front Office is the main module for the automation of contact center operations; the latest version has been consolidated on the Microsoft .NET platform and enables easier navigation across citizen service requests and tasks with no need to complete compulsory process steps. Service request intake and routing and history of contacts have been modeled around "entities" that each user can set up to be citizens, organizations, properties, events or locations. Selfserve is the tool that manages public-facing Internet forms and transactions. Workbench is the Web-based development tool that enables users to configure tabs, workflow tasks, roles and forms. As opposed to thick clients, such as Visual Studio, this new version has an easier-to-use interface that enables business analysts to configure the system with little intervention from IT staff. Compass is the "entity" database. Northgate partners with RightNow to provide knowledge management capabilities and Singularity for case management. Northgate plans to launch version 3.4 in 2010 with further functionalities to be added — in particular to Selfserve. Some of the customers that Gartner spoke with highlighted that during the demonstration it was not fully clear what the total price of the software license included; for example, some capabilities, such as dashboards and extraction of back-office data to populate the scripts turned out to be extra costs. The strong geographical focus on the U.K. market has enabled Northgate to establish very close relationships with its customers. For example, Northgate set up a user group; during the meetings, customers prepare a wish list of product enhancements, and then negotiate with Northgate managers to develop a shortlist of five to 10 developments for the next release.

Services capabilities. Northgate collaborates with system integrators, such as Steria, but usually prefers to take direct care of implementation and after-sales services. The Front Office implementation team is currently four strong, backed up by three technical resources who manage system installations and data loads. Implementation consultants focus on training and development of CRM processes. Northgate also provides managed hosted services for some of its CRM customers. Northgate-managed service provision capability recently won a bid to outsource and manage the entire customer service operation for Wycombe District Council in the U.K.

Technical requirements. Front Office has been developed on the .NET platform, but Northgate provides an optional Java-based integration engine to facilitate integration with legacy that some customers might require. The preferred architecture includes Microsoft Windows operating system, SQL Server and Microsoft application server; in case of integration with Java environments, the Tomcat application server can be used.

Users that should consider this product. Local governments of all sizes in the U.K. should consider Northgate when acquiring or replacing their CRM system. Compared to Lagan, which should be considered Northgate's primary alternative in the U.K., Northgate is less expensive, but Lagan is more active in developing functional capabilities to respond to domain-specific application requirements — for example, in social care. Northgate has a different strategic approach, in the arena of social care and housing. The recent acquisition of the Swift product line from Anite provides capabilities to fulfill eligibility assessments — and other care pathways — together with a rich Citizen Access Portal for self-service. Users should expect Northgate to build richer and richer integration application programming interfaces of Front Office with the rest of its product portfolio, rather than build specific modules within the Front Office architecture.

Rating: Positive

Company background. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Oracle is one of the largest global software vendors, with revenue of $23.2 billion and approximately 86,000 employees worldwide for the fiscal year ending in May 2009.

Solution background. Oracle's public-sector business unit offers database technology, middleware, ERP and other applications, industry-specific solutions, such as Oracle Enterprise Taxation Management, and CRM solutions based on Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards Enterprise One product lines. Moving forward, Oracle plans to ensure ongoing support and engagement with existing PeopleSoft and Oracle CRM local government customers, but this analysis indicates that Siebel (8.1.1) Public Sector will be the primary product actively marketed to local governments; in fact, investments in developing new functionalities and, in particular for domain-specific programs, such as human services and permitting and licensing, will be focused on the Siebel product.

Customer base. Siebel CRM technology has been primarily implemented, or is being implemented, by large cities in North America and Western Europe, such as New York, Sacramento, California, and Indianapolis. However, some small-to-midsize jurisdictions, such as the city of Leeds, London Borough of Tower Hamlets and Braintree District Council in the U.K., and the Halton Region in Ontario, Canada, are also using the software.

Product characteristics. Siebel 8.1.1 provides a complete set of basic capabilities for contact center management, citizen registration and identity management, multichannel management, outreach, service request intake and routing, case management, field service, and business intelligence. On top of those components, Oracle is developing a set of preconfigured workflows and forms for some domain-specific areas; the two most advanced are social/human services and tax and revenue, while the latest additions, on which the vendor is currently working, are justice and public safety, and public works. The latest version of the product includes key upgrades, such as a new service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based self-service suite with prebuilt integrations to Adobe forms. Oracle also enhanced the Siebel self-service case management solution, providing deeper functionality for benefits/entitlement calculations, by making a number of data model changes to support screening and eligibility determination for government services. Additionally, over the past 12 months, Oracle acquired two companies, Primavera and Haley. Primavera, a portfolio management company, supports Siebel public works offerings, enabling government agencies to track and coordinate large capital projects. Haley, a natural-based language rule engine, was acquired to support Oracle's Social Services offerings, providing eligibility and entitlement calculations. The local governments that Gartner spoke with indicated that they are fully satisfied with the depth and breadth of functional capabilities of the product and the ability to integrate with external systems, such as GIS and public works asset management; however, they also pointed out that the richness of the architecture can also be a disadvantage, because Siebel requires a very high level of skills (both in number of people and in level of experience) to master all modules and capabilities and use them to their utmost potential.

Services capabilities. Oracle consulting provides support for configuring the system; however, the primary responsibility for system implementation and integration usually lies with large system integrators, such as Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini, CSC, EDS and IBM.

Technical requirements. Siebel CRM runs on most common operating systems, databases and application servers. Gartner estimates that implementation of a complete Siebel suite can take two or more years, depending on the complexity of processes, need to integrate with legacy and number of departments or jurisdiction that participate. It should also be noted that a basic call center/logging component can be implemented in approximately eight weeks.

Users that should consider this product. Local governments with more than 100 users in their contact centers and solid IT capabilities to support configuration and interfacing with other systems are best equipped to leverage the rich functional capabilities of Siebel. Cities that lack a solid Siebel skill base, or the capability to invest to acquire knowledge about the rich, but complex, architecture of this product, risk experiencing a steady growth of their implementation costs and paying license fees for modules they will not be able to fully use or integrate with other systems.

Rating: Strong Positive

Company background. SAP is one of the largest global software application vendors. In 2008, it generated €11.5 billion of revenue and employed 51,500 people. The Public Services Solution Management industry business unit (IBU), which serves public-sector, defense, healthcare, and higher education and research clients, accounted for a little less than 7% of revenue.

Solution background. SAP has proved to be a viable provider of horizontal back-office applications, such as accounting and human capital management and procurement, to governments around the world, and more recently has increased investments to develop CRM and industry-specific solutions, such as SAP Grants Management, SAP Social Services and Social Security, and Tax and Revenue Management. In 2009, SAP established an IBU for Constituent Services, which is entirely dedicated to defining the industry strategy and product road map for the SAP CRM solution with public-sector-specific extensions.

Customer base. SAP CRM has approximately 242 customers in the public sector, 45 of which are in local governments from across the globe, such as the city of Edmonton (Canada), Surrey County Council and Transport for London (U.K.), Gauteng Provincial Government (South Africa), the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (India), and the city of San Diego (U.S.). SAP CRM has so far primarily been bought by government jurisdictions that had already bought SAP for financials and human capital management or bought at the same time as part of a suite. SAP indicates that approximately 10% to 20% of local government CRM customers do not use other SAP ERP products.

Product characteristics. SAP Constituent Relationship Management solution is based on SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP NetWeaver. The solution encompasses: (1) a set of foundation components, such as interactive forms, identity management, business intelligence, search, audit and portal; (2) an enterprise service repository, which archives and orchestrates reusable business services for outreach management, such as customer registration and campaign management, customer information, such as customer and case indexes, operations management, such as case and service management, analysis, such as performance management and reporting, and administration, such as billing and case audits; and (3) a front-end multichannel layer that includes CTI/IVR call center integration, self-service via Web portal, chat and e-mail. The latest key version upgrades include a Web-based, role-oriented interface that is configurable by users to personalize navigation, an all-IP based software contact center solution including queuing and routing capabilities, support for people-object-location-event model for case management, and richer capabilities for all users to access information in the knowledgebase through a direct link between a citizen question and the required information. The SAP CRM customers that Gartner spoke with indicated that the workflow capabilities enable them to handle some end-to-end service requests, such as closing the loop for citizens that send an e-mail and need to be called back by an agent, but few have yet used the system to handle more-complex eligibility assessment tasks for adult social care, or social housing requests. An early example is Birmingham, England, which has a deployment program that began in 2008. The program is expecting to support service transformation in adult care services, child care services, housing services, and community and environment services. The Birmingham program is expected to go live in different phases between 2009 and 2010. Customers also indicated that once workflows and forms are designed, contact center users must complete them end-to-end and cannot navigate easily among different citizen requests.

Services capabilities. SAP offers implementation, configuration and training services, but works also with system integrators, both global such as IBM and local such as Capita in the U.K.

Technical requirements. SAP products run on the most-common operating systems, databases and application servers. Potential users should be aware that SAP CRM implementation might take two or more years, especially for jurisdictions with 100 or more users and spanning multiple service departments/directorates to be consolidated in a single call center.

Users that should consider this product. Midsize-to-large regional and local governments with the need to automate work of 30 or more contact center agents can consider SAP CRM; however, users of SAP ERP modules will benefit the most if they have a strategy to build new applications on top of NetWeaver to replace legacy best-of-breed solutions to reduce the number of suppliers and lower maintenance costs.

Rating: Promising