Affiliations: Department Chair, Department of Public Administration,
The University of Texas at San Antonio. E-mail: chris.reddick@utsa.edu
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of Citizen Relationship Management
(CRM) technology adoption on local governments in the United States. The
purpose of the paper is to determine whether this technology has influenced
organizational change. From the literature six factors appear to be important
in the adoption of CRM, and these factors are examined through a survey of
Chief Administrative Officers (CAO) in cities and counties that have adopted
CRM systems. The results of the survey show that CRM had a strong impact on
creating a more efficient, effective, and transparent governments. What was
especially noteworthy from the survey results was that CAOs believed that CRM
greatly improved communication with citizens. The challenges of CRM for local
government were lack of funding and the difficulty of departments to relinquish
control of their customer support systems. More basic technology is viewed as
being the most effective in CRM systems. There is lack of integration of
different service channels for most local governments such as the Website and
phone. The implications of this survey are that CRM is having a broad impact on
organizational change, but there is much more research that needs to be done on
this understudied area of public administration.