South Gloucestershire Council's customer and benefit services were nominated as one of the 89 finalists in the National e-Government Awards 2006. The finalists were selected from a record 345 nominations, which were submitted by senior professionals working across the public sector. The Council has been nominated for an award in the Local e-Government Excellence: Efficiency category.
The awards highlight services in the UK that best improve citizen and business transactions with councils, central government departments, and other public sector organisations.
The annual e-Government National Awards have become the UK's highest level commendation for the best e-Government services - services, which, through innovative online delivery or IT implementation, have positively transformed the lives of citizens, local communities, business, and stakeholder groups.
Other organisations and services among the finalists include Birmingham City Council, the Department for Education and Skills, the Highways Agency, the Environment Agency, the NHS, and Shelter.
The winners will be announced and presented with their e-Government National Awards on 17 January 2007, at a black-tie dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London.
IBS OPENSystems signed an agreement with Northampton Borough Council, under which it will provide a housing management solution. One of Northampton Borough Council's main challenges is to improve the way it manages the 12,500 properties it rents out across the town.
The IBS OPENSystems solution is to enable the Council to handle customer queries more efficiently and reduce property turnaround times between old and new tenants. The Council will also use the solution to develop on-line services that give citizens secure access to their accounts.
BT chose Civica to provide software licensing services as part of its £10 million technology transformation programme for the City of Edinburgh Council. Civica is already delivering Workflow and Electronic Document Management (EDM) solutions through its group company, formerly called Comino, for the Council's Revenues and Benefits processing, in an initiative that is on target to achieve £2 million in savings.
The two-year technology transformation programme - called Service Redesign - is an innovative programme, which will bring all of the Council's IT systems onto a centrally managed platform.
Civica will deliver volume licensing agreements such as Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement in a deal worth £1.5 million. The Company will deliver licensing advice and support departmental compliance to help Edinburgh and BT Global Services alike reduce the cost of software ownership. Civica has already delivered software for two of BT's other major local government infrastructure projects.
An intelligent computer programme that teaches itself how to diagnose repairs was being pioneered by a housing association. The Specifi software was written for South Staffordshire Housing Association, by its in-house IT team, to improve diagnosis and management of household repairs. It can then more easily communicate with workers on the ground to give them a clearer view of what they can expect when they visit a property, minimising the need for a repeat trip.
Tyrone Field, Head of IT at the Association, said: "We took a fresh look at how we diagnose a problem and decided we should write our own software rather than try and use an existing system which was not exactly what we wanted.
"Many existing systems lead to very specific diagnoses which often do not take into account all the facts. Our new system looks at it in a different way. It is like walking into a doctor's surgery. You ask what the symptoms are before deciding on the diagnosis. This means our workers visiting homes for a repair are much better prepared for what to expect."
