Three Rivers District Council (TRDC) Case Study
Background
As the deadline for meetingthe Prime Minister’s target of 100% e-enablement of local authority servicesgets closer, a recent paper issued by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister(ODPM) sets out revised targets and outcomes that local government need toachieve by December 2005.
There are now 14 priority service areas, eachwith three levels of target outcomes, that local authorities are being measuredagainst to ensure that the public is getting value for money and improvedservices. These range from providing citizens with access to communityinformation, through to managing waste collections or enabling parents to applyfor school places via a website.
To meet these objectives on time, localauthorities are being encouraged to build upon the experience of other councilswho have already met priority outcomes through the innovative use of technology.
One example is Three Rivers District Council, whose Pathfinder projectin partnership with Parity has delivered a flexible solution that offers a broadrange of electronic services to their citizens from its website.
Withforesight and the experience of implementing one of the first local authorityCustomer Service Centres in the UK, Three Rivers recognised that technology wasnot the only area that needed investment to maximise the uptake ofelectronically enabled services. They knew that the change would need to becarefully managed, business processes would need to be adapted and their staffwould need to be trained in supporting the solution.
says Phil King, support services manager at ThreeRivers.
Solution/Approach
As with otherlocal authorities, Three Rivers faced a choice in how to meet the governmenttargets for electronic service delivery. One approach was to upgrade eachdepartmental back office system to utilise its own web based interface as itbecame available. Another was to offer a unified web site with an integrationlayer to handle the interfaces with the various back officesystems.
Parity and Three Rivers chose the latter option as it promotes aconsistent look and feel to enhance council ‘branding’ as well as enablingcloser integration with content management systems, contact centres and CRMsystems.
More generally, for other councils there is also moreflexibility with this approach as implementation can be staged and upgradedgradually, and systems can be scaled up easily. Last but not least, this optioncan also help to foster a more joined-up culture within those councils that havea more traditional departmental-based culture.
With Three Rivers, Paritydesigned and implemented an architecture using Microsoft’s BizTalk server at itsheart, with XML-based messaging such as that recommended through theGovernment’s e-GIF standard, to enable citizens to communicate transparentlywith the Council’s ‘back office’ departmentalsystems.
Benefits
The approach that Parity and ThreeRivers have implemented has greatly improved citizen access to services.
comments King.
He continues
Through the success of the venture, Parity and ThreeRivers have also been able to advise other authorities on how this approach canbe applied to their IT strategies to help them meet their priorityoutcomes.
Brenda Chambers, Parity Solutions Sales Director commented,
