Service Oriented Organizational Structure For Municipalities
Urban Local bodies (ULBs) extend services in a city setup where the administrative hierarchy is defined within each department of local authority. The roles and responsibilities within each department are thus assigned to the staff working there in. These departments often own either a core service or an enabling service and extend these by following a standard procedure set in isolation. There is a role based organization structure for enabling various activities performed collectively by all departments and the municipal staff for resolution of service issue, fulfillment of service, mapped to the current hierarchy within the organization. These roles under proposed framework become common for all service provider departments to bring in the replicabilty feature to the model visualised.
Urban local body is the primary authority as it governs the place of existence (land) of the elements constituting group of entities for usage of land in a prescribed way. Furthermore, these urban local bodies facilitate the provision of services like road, water, power, telecom etc. either directly or through another provider department owned by the state Government. In addition, the governance is also mandated by other departments like the office of Inspector General of Stamps & Registries along with Town planning department which monitors all land transactions and usage of constituents of building activity as per the prescribed use of land in an area of jurisdiction.
CURRENT SERVICE DELIVERY INITIATIVES
The Infrastructure and the service provision for the citizens is the focus of all service delivery initiatives. The ground work for these is already in place as, in almost all cities that are likely to be covered under the schemes like AMRUT and Smart Cities Mission. Some of these cities have implemented projects like GIS mapping of infrastructure with satellite image processing, user data base creation with geospatial tagging and automation of service delivery process with various e-governance projects. In addition to these, service delivery processes have undergone automation as part of several IT initiatives since inception of National e-Governance Plan in 2004; as a result information for many services, in static form has been made available with few services going online as well.
However, all these initiatives which are run in various departments have now an opportunity to be brought on one single interface platform for meaningful information exchange leading to better service delivery considering the following enablers which is the availability of service catalogue, availability of common channel for service requests and ability of validating information. These three parameters have the potential to enable optimal use of physical infrastructure assets there by evolving a common information data base (CIDB) of assets with details of items with spatial locations. The Urban Service Delivery essentially consists of extending the end user requested service through a set of activities falling under four broad stages: initiative, validate, implement and operate.
In first stage, the end user initiates the process by applying for a service and reporting an issue or requesting a service to be planned as per city expanse. In the second, stage of validation, the provider department carries out validation checks and process the request for attending to the issue. Under implementation state, the request service is put to work once validation is over and user pays the requisite fees if needed or funded from department budgets. Once the implementation is complete the service is extended to the end user or in case of a breakdown the service is restored.
IT AND SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEM
The use of information technology (IT) enables service delivery mechanism to generate a repository of all the services delivered and issues reported, starting with user information as in which area the citizen is logged into, along with the information of action taken as well. During the course of service issue resolution if any infrastructure element is altered, same too is logged in asset management data base. A close look at key urban service lifecycle reveals the fact that the information validation is a key step in overall process and the information exchange is of utmost importance. It is the data elements that come into play for such validation checks. In current times these elements are existing in individual silos and have a potential to transform the service delivery dramatically and even form part of a common information data base (CIDB) accessible to all provider departments.
MUNICIPAL ADMINISTRATIVE SETUP
In urban areas, the service administrative of any city is invested with the Municipal Corporation. The organizational setup of a typical municipal corporation comprises a political wing and an executive wing. The political wing consists of elected candidates from different wards in the city and is headed by the mayor. The executive wing comprises of various administrative wings, which is headed by a Municipal Commissioner, who manages and monitors the day-to-day functioning of the corporation. Municipal Corporation undertakes various obligatory and discretionary functions as per the provisions of the State Corporation Act.
The corporation is responsible for providing basic services to citizens which are mandatory as per the said act. Corporations also provides other services like running city bus services, primary and secondary education, and health services in the city. Construction, operation and maintenance of urban infrastructure are the prime responsibilities of municipal corporation.
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