Hard problems for municipality

Question

I am a programmer for a fairly large town. Lately, I have been spending all my time developing web-based CRUD applications, mostly to replace Microsoft Access or dBase systems. Given that this is a sizable organization, I'm convinced that there must be significant problems out there waiting to be identified and solved, but I'm having trouble thinking of any. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm looking for something that will take some real ingenuity to solve, not something whose solution is immediately obvious and then takes a while just to code.

Answer 1

WARNING: Looking for a problem to solve with cleverness and ingenuity usually leads to the creation of overly complex and costly solutions.

If you're looking for a complex project, find an interesting open source project and extend it. Don't go looking to make your job more complex, you'll regret it.

Answer 2

Write an application that balances the budget and lowers my taxes.

Answer 3

Solving their budget issues, that is a hard one that will take a lot of ingenuity to address.

Answer 4

Best advice here is my Mom's: Don't go borrowing trouble.

Answer 5

If you want to find something meaningful then you need to start doing "analysis." And that means you're going to have to learn the business from the overarching goals down through the nitty gritty implementation (computerized or not). If you do such an analysis of the information flows, etc., things will fairly leap out at you. Note that it's a huge amount of work and requires talking to a lot of people (and taking their time), but it's the only systematic way. Otherwise just keep your eyes and ears open.

Answer 6

No two municipalities I've come across operate in the same manner, so it is nearly impossible to tell you what caveats you will encounter. People running the operation and how they do their respective jobs and how their customer base behaves will more or less dictate how you do yours.

Answer 7

Instead of trying to find other problems I would concentrate on your job at hand. Make it work really well, with clear benefit to the users and municipality.

Chances are, someone who knows about the real problems will notice, and a new system might be commissioned.

Unfortunately unless you're currently employed in an analyst type role, you probably won't be asked for any input on this. So you may want to consider a role change, if you want to be involved in finding problems like these.

Answer 8

Depending on your role in the project probably, but on of the biggest problem will not be programming, but rather retrieving latent knowledge from current users. Given the fact, that the databases already exist and contain data, you have all sorts of troubles on your hand - field descriptions not matching content. Format mismatch between similar fields in various databases, etc.

Also, you'll be changing systems with which people did work and got accustomed to it. Do something that will be different from old systems in terms of UI and you have a good number of angry people.

Answer 9

Hmmm... develop a realestate appraisal application and/or a personal property app, make it web-based using a SQL backend. Let your appraisers use tablet notebooks in the field to enter all the data, including floorplan sketches and the inclusion of pictures. Have all the data replicate wirelessly (or when docked) so they can spend more time in the field getting their jobs done. Enable connectivity between your city hall, police and fire stations so the latter two have read-only access to look up information on various devices. You'd be amazed at how important it is for the fire department to know that Bob Smith has a small textile manufacturing company working out of their garage(chemicals and fire dont mix well) or for the police to pull up a housing plan on their in-car computer. Then, once you have all that, be sure to include all the necessary reporting for Tax and Property bills. All that should take you about 2 years, less if you are more than one person :)