Customer Service Toolkit in Nebraska

Background

Customer Service Toolkit (CST) is a software package developed at ITC in Fort Collins. Its purpose is to provide the field office with the tools to create plans and contracts using commercial-off-the-shelf software such as Excel, Word. CST was not designed to replace FOCS, but the computers running FOCS will probably be phased out during the next year as the new office servers are installed. Even with it’s limitations, CST will soon become the only viable alternative for the field office.

The standard CST package does not include GIS capability for mapping. For this additional functionality we have to purchase ArcView software from ESRI, and at this time, only we only have a limited number of copies available. It is very expensive software, but the hope is that in the future we may be able to negotiate an agency-wide price at a much lower price. The seven new copies we have purchased in Nebraska are being installed at offices that have the most geospatial data available. I will be providing GIS/ArcView training for these offices in February and March.

Nebraska is currently testing CST at 4 field offices in Nebraska:

Lincoln
Grand Island
Beatrice
Hebron

For more information about CST, visit the web page at http://www.itc.nrcs.usda.gov/toolkit.

Implementation

A committee consisting of field office and state office staff is working on a plan for implementing CST in the rest of the state. A new release of the software is expected in April, and a lot of work needs to be done to prepare for this implementation. Standards and specifications must be decided, training materials developed and a training team created. Once these elements are in place, we will start moving offices from FOCS to CST, on an NRD by NRD basis. We will probably begin in the NRDs of the pilot sites and then work from there. The current goal is thiry offices by the end of the fiscal year.