Six councils have made it through to the final stage for the prestigious Local Government IT Excellence Awards. This year’s awards have been separated into three categories – service transformation, shared services and mobile and flexible working – and Intellect received a large number of projects of extremely high standard. The winners will be announced at the Socitm 08 Conference.
The awards, the result of collaboration between Intellect, Socitm and SOLACE, are now in their 13th year and seek to highlight and reward Local Authorities that have used IT systems or processes to improve the efficiency and delivery of services within local communities. This year’s awards are supported by Datapoint, the global communications experts for enterprise and call centre communications.
Martin Hill-Wilson, Head of Strategy at Datapoint, commented: “Datapoint is delighted to be supporting this year’s Local Government IT Excellence Awards. The Awards provide an excellent opportunity to recognise local authorities that have used IT effectively and innovatively to deliver services. The finalists all deserve recognition in this area and we wish them all the very best of luck.”
The contenders in each category:
Service Transformation City of York Council – easy@york Programme easy@york was conceived to ensure all the council’s services are easily accessible by whatever channel the customer chooses and are also available on-line for 24 hour access. In the first financial year, the programme resulted in costs savings of £247,000 while 96.9% of calls answered within 20 seconds and 99% of our customers are ‘satisfied’ with the service they receive.
Stockport Council/ Kooth.com - Early Intervention and Rapid Referral Service Kooth.com solves a significant problem for vulnerable young people and local authorities. The web-based counselling service provides young people with a free, confidential, safe, always accessible and, above all, anonymous and non-threatening way of asking for help when they first need it. It enables local authorities to intervene early with regard to difficult emotional and mental health problems being encountered by vulnerable young people.
Shared Services: Hampshire County Council - Hampshire Regional Recruitment Portal The Hampshire Regional Recruitment Portal is a project where 12 of the 15 local authorities in Hampshire joined in a true partnership to deliver a single technology solution for attracting candidates and managing the recruitment process across the authorities.
Northern Ireland Civil Service - ICT Shared Services The Northern Ireland Civil Service set up IT Assist, its ICT Shared Service Centre, in May 2007. IT Assist provides “common” ICT services to some 11,000 users across seven Northern Ireland departments and will cover 18,300 users across all eleven departments and their agencies by April 2009.
Mobile and Flexible Working: Wakefield Metropolitan District Council - Worksmart and e-Services Wakefield’s organisational change programme ‘WorkSmart’ is delivering real benefits for citizens, employees and the council. The integrated programme is rationalising the property portfolio, improving productivity and providing a modern, fit-for-purpose workspace. This is underpinned by a flexible technology infrastructure that is enabling staff to deliver high quality services to our citizens in the most appropriate way from office, home or mobile.
Mid Sussex District Council - Hand Held Incident Reporting This project involved the deployment of 30 GPS mobile phones to field based staff enabling them to report incidents with no paperwork. The image is recorded on the phone along with some simple textual information and an automatically generated GPS location.
With over 1900 members from 550 different organisations including 98% of all UK local authorities, Socitm provides a widely respected forum for the promotion, use and development of ICT best practice. It also plays a leading role in the implementation of local e-government in the UK.
The Society is a significant provider of advice and guidance on ICT and e-government to local authorities. Socitm offers a growing range of services including publications, conferences, events, training, research and consultancy.
For more information see: www.socitm.gov.uk
SOLACE creates and supports excellence so backing the Local Government IT awards is the natural thing to do. As the only society representing top strategic managers across the UK we have grown from a small exclusive organisation into an inclusive professional body. We now offer opportunities and support to graduates, middle managers (with SOLACENet) as well as to senior managers and chief executives.
The publishing arm of the SOLACE family, The SOLACE Foundation Imprint, produces a series of trenchant publications by a range of ‘voices’ which tackle the wicked issues of today.
Datapoint is a Systems Integrator specialising in Enterprise and Call Centre communications and related infrastructure and applications. This is underpinned with a services portfolio including education, consultancy, design and systems integration, service delivery, training and support.
Datapoint understands the issues and solutions for delivering a citizen focused agenda. Its role is to provide the expertise to help local government evolve towards the type of integrated customer service provision envisaged by the various stakeholders’ strategy and associated aims for delivering valued local services based on citizen priorities and expectations.
Datapoint’s cumulative experience in business transformations is available in the form of best practice forums, audits, strategic roadmaps, vendor evaluations and RFP templates. This approach enables it to deliver relevant technology solutions which provide optimisation over time through partnership and skills transfer.
Please visit www.datapoint.com for a detailed explanation of Datapoint’s services along with insight into its perspective on the key operational and technical issues making Enterprise and Call Centre communications work.
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