This week we had the fifth webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety Lowers Customer Service Costs with Oracle WebCenter", where customers Giovani Dacumos and Minh Ong from the Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety (LADBS), and Sheetal Paranjpye and Rajiv Desai from Oracle Partner 3Di, shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering LADBS' externally facing website and providing a superior self-service experience for their customers.

We asked the speakers to provide some dialogue for Q&A.  

Giovani Dacumos, Director of Systems and Minh Ong, LADBS

Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?
A: Yes. We did have issues integrating a secure sign on between the portal and other legacy applications. We used portlets and iframes to overcome those.  This is a new technology for us and we are also learning as we go so there were a lot of challenges in developing and implementing our vision.

Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?
A: The biggest benefit for our ends users is ease-of-use. We've given them a system that provided a new and improved source of information, as well as a very organized flow of transaction processing. It has made our online service very user friendly.

Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?
A: There was no internal resistance during the implementation, only challenges. As mentioned earlier, this is a new technology for us. We've come across issues that needed assistance from Oracle. Working with 3Di and Oracle has helped us tremendously to find solutions to our implementation issues.

Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? 
A: With the current performance and architecture we have, we are able to support approx 300-400 concurrent users.  We would need more hardware to support additional user load.

Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?
A: LADBS has a wide spectrum of customers, from simple users like homeowners to large construction firms. Anything new that we offer could be a little bit challenging for some, but overall, the customers liked it. They saw a huge improvement on the usability.

Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within LADBS?
A: The old site was using old technology and it was hard for us to keep on building into it as we got more business requirements. It made our application seem a bit complicated.  It was confusing for our new customers to use and we've improved on this with the new site. It's now easier for them to complete their transactions and, at the same time, allowed us to provide more useful information.