Integrated user interfaces for mapping and customer service tools
Reigate & Banstead Borough Council serves over 126,000 residents, providing high quality, value for money public services and undertaking projects and initiatives to improve the quality of life in the Borough. The Council is now in the second year of a major organisational change programme that has as a vision, the Council being ‘driven by the customer’. The Council will expand the range of services provided by it’s Customer Services function over the next two years until at least 80% of all enquiries are resolved at the first point of contact. Part of this programme is the development of fully integrated transactional services. Its purpose: to deliver more efficient and cost effective services through joined-up technology and business process re-engineering. The plan has been carried out under the Government’s eGov directive — a plan with estimated total annual efficiency gains in local government of at least £6.45bn by 2007.
Solution
Dusted have been a new media supplier for Reigate & Banstead Borough Council for nearly two years and in that time, we have designed and developed the user interfaces for several of the Council’s key web services, including their staff intranet, the planning application search (PlanIT), the Where I Live regional look-up system, the geographic information system (GIS) and most recently, their customer services web portal, (Synergy). This initiative saw Dusted working alongside the Council’s in-house developers and technology supplier, Novell to deliver a solution to fully exploit the capabilities of the Council’s ongoing investment in a service-orientated ICT architecture. All the work we have undertaken has complied with industry best practice and standards in developing and maintaining the web sites, including the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS) and the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) standard and W3C standards for accessibility and compliance (WAI).
Return
The PlanIT planning application search receives over 3,000 visits a month and is the most visited page on the Council’s website after the home page. The design was based on a set of components that were completely reused by the Council to deliver LicenceIT – a searchable database of licence applications. As a direct result of the new PlanIT system, the Council saw their ranking leap 350 places in the Pendleton Planning Survey 2004 league tables from 372nd to 22nd. This was a survey carried out by Pendleton Associates on behalf of The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The report goes on to describe the Council as one of the most improved local authorities in England – gaining 14 points over their 2003 score of just 3 (17 out of a possible total of 21).