Enabling technologies for public employee retirement systems: LACERA's "one contact, one answer, 100% accuracy" vision.

• Author: Hill, Robert R.
• Position: Los Angeles County Employee Retirement Association

The Los Angeles County Employee Retirement Association (LACERA) utilized multiple technologies to manage, transfer, and archive information to meet business goals and achieve superior customer service standards.

Editor's note: Each year the Government Finance Officers Association bestows its prestigious Award for Excellence to recognize outstanding contributions in the field of government finance. The awards stress practical, documented work that offers leadership to the profession and promotes improved public finance. This article describes the 1998 winning entry in the Technology subcategory of the Pensions and Benefits category.

The Los Angeles County Employee Retirement Association (LACERA) started with the idea that public-sector performance can be just as efficient and high quality as the best private-sector companies. This idea was shared throughout the organization during staff meetings, in employee newspaper articles, and whenever and wherever staff was assembled. The idea slowly gained acceptance and momentum. The idea was established as a formal vision, a vision that public-sector customers deserve service with "One Contact, One Answer, 100% Accuracy."

This vision is used as the yardstick for everything LACERA does. It is the soul of the values that are defined by LACERA employees. It is basis for the technologies that will be implemented. It is incorporated into personnel evaluations and in hiring practices. The vision finally evolves into a battle cry that drives and focuses the entire organization towards that common goal: "One Contact, One Answer, 100% Accuracy."

To achieve the standards of "One Contact, One Answer, 100% Accuracy," the entire organization was mobilized in a concerted effort, championed by the CEO. This article describes the impact of this vision as it relates to the implementation of new technology in a large public retirement system.

Improvement of Customer Service

Improving service to members has been an issue of vital concern to LACERA's Board of Retirement for many years. Despite many incremental improvement initiatives, LACERA had not achieved the level of customer service that customers expected and deserved. The opportunities to improve customer service stemmed from the following challenges:

1) Complicated Programs. LACERA programs were too complicated for employees to quickly memorize all benefit provisions and master multiple transaction procedures. Staff maintained large quantities of policy memos and legal opinions that were used to administer the benefits program. No complete comprehensive collection of memos and opinions was maintained. Different employees had different sets of memos depending on their length of service and functional assignment. Many work processes were not documented. As a consequence, procedures were taught informally and inconsistently.

2) Complicated System. The mainframe system was a complex character-based system with a 70 plus screen-based hierarchy that made it difficult for staff to process work consistently, since multiple screens would have to be completed in the correct sequence for the process to work, yet no links were resident in the system. Furthermore, most screens and input fields were code driven, rather than text driven, making it difficult for staff to remember what code to use for each function.

3) Aging Staff. The lack of a comprehensive policy manual and well-documented business processes was an especially urgent problem for LACERA because much of the existing knowledge base resided with long-time employees and trustees. based on an employee attrition analysis, LACERA calculated that 73 of 202 employees (36 percent) would be retiring within five years. Consequently, it was essential that an accessible comprehensive policy and procedures manual be completed prior to the retirement of these knowledgeable staff.

In addition, feedback from LACERA members, and from a training needs audit report indicated that member service required improvement in the areas of accuracy, consistency, and follow-through. The training needs audit report examined the business processes used to respond to member inquiries and confirmed that they were:

* ill-defined, difficult, and time-consuming;

* fragmented and numerous, causing employees to focus on the completion of disparate tasks rather than the resolution of the member's inquiry;

* requiring multiple hand-offs between various functional units;

* deficient in tracking of individual tasks (no one had responsibility for ensuring a problem was resolved to the member's satisfaction), and deficient in ensuring that customer service benchmarks were obtained; and

* inadequate for tracking employee productivity and developing employee production standards making monitoring difficult, time consuming, and inaccurate.

The training needs audit report also found that employees often lacked the information, knowledge, and tools needed to resolve issues. According to the report's findings, employees' efforts to resolve member issues were further complicated by a lack of adequately documented procedures.

Information Technology Goals

Armed with its goal to rectify organizational deficiencies and its vision to radically improve member service, LACERA aligned its information technology goals with the goals of the organization. As a result, LACERA staff decided that just implementing "cutting edge" technologies or implementing an "everyone is doing it" technology was not sufficient. Instead LACERA staff focused only on those technologies that would "enable" the organization to meet its...