2009 Local Government IT Excellence Awards – winners announced

15 October 2009

The winners and runners up of the 14th Local Government IT Excellence Awards were announced at this year’s Socitm Annual Conference, held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre in Scotland 11-13 October. The awards, the result of collaboration between Intellect, Socitm and SOLACE, 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 were separated into three categories – service transformation, customer access and sustainable ICT – and Intellect received a large number of projects of extremely high standard.

The awards were hosted by Sam Hughes, the Local Government Channel producer, and presented by Charles Ward, Chief Operating Officer of Intellect and Chair of the awards judging panel, during the Socitm 2009 Gala dinner on the evening of 12 October.

Commenting on this year’s awards Charles said: “The entries to this year’s awards have continued the trend of improving the standards in public service delivery. The winners have once again demonstrated local authorities’ ability to implement projects, through the innovative and effective use of technology, that deliver excellence in public services.”

The winners in each category are:

The service transformation category was won by Cheshire West and Chester Council for their Revenues and Benefits Systems Convergence project. The council is a new unitary council, established in April 2009.  The challenge was to deliver a single technical and operational platform for the new Revenues and Benefits service, and was successfully achieved by the four constituent District and County councils working in close partnership with Capita and Civica.  This was delivered on time and on budget to coincide with the launch of the new council.  This project has already delivered efficiency improvements with a much improved single service to the citizen and will be the foundation for transforming further citizen services in future.

The sustainable ICT category was won by Hampshire County Council for the Green IT Action Plan. The Action Plan was formulated to provide a framework to improve the performance not only of the councils IT provision, but crucially the sustainability of the whole organisation. The overall aim of the action plan is to ensure ICT is contributing positively to the sustainability of the organisation by reducing energy consumption, improving reuse and recycling of ICT equipment and consumables, utilise ICT to improve sustainability of buildings and working practices, develop ICT’s contribution to sustainable communities and use ICT to communicate and share best practice in sustainability.

The customer access category, the final category in this year’s awards, was won by the London Borough of Hackney for their Citizen Index project. The project transforms the relationship between the people of Hackney and their local authority. It delivers bespoke technology to unify a collection of specialised systems working independently, and a new way of working for staff.  It is a long term programme that will be rolled out across the business, enabling service users to interact with the council 24/7, with all their needs being met in one contact. It will result in customer satisfaction increasing, people feeling more positively towards the council and enabling the council to service then more efficiently.

The highly commended local authorities are:
Flintshire County Council received a “highly commended” award for their Green, Agile and Efficient project. Virtualisation has allowed the Council to build a flexible, scalable, resilient and sustainable infrastructure meeting the objectives of the organisation, and expectations of our customers in terms of energy efficiency, carbon reduction and also efficiency gains. They have built a fully virtualised, twin-centre ICT infrastructure. The infrastructure uses the minimum possible hardware resources to provide the right level of support to the Council's business systems at any given time. The automatic shutdown of unused resources, combined with innovative data centre cooling methods and efficient hardware, has also reduced energy costs and carbon emissions.

The Council has virtualised all the major components in its IT infrastructure to a small set of highly utilised hardware resources, across two fully mirrored data centres. The project gives the Council a compact, flexible, scalable and resilient platform for running its 350 business systems - with very low environmental impact.

Crawley Borough Council also received a "highly commended" award for it their Streamlined Customer Transactions through Integration and Tracking project. This local government project delivers service improvement and cost efficiency for street cleaning. It removes all the usual town hall “red tape”.  Using a combination of e-forms, a CRM system, GIS maps, SMS text messaging, e-mail and a series of web calls, information from the customer is passed to the team that will sort out the problem with no paperwork or administrative overhead. Moreover, progress can be tracked on line and citizens are informed of outcomes on completion of work.   

About Intellect

Intellect is the UK trade association for the IT, telecoms and electronics industries.  Its members account for over 80% of these markets and include blue-chip multinationals as well as early stage technology companies.  These industries together generate around 10% of UK GDP and 15% of UK trade.

More information about Intellect can be found at: www.intellectuk.org

About Socitm

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

About SOLACE

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.

For more information see: www.solace.org.uk

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