Damovo In Local Government
Information and Communications Technology is pervasive. It enables the delivery of information and services, and allows work to pass smoothly and effectively between the providers of those services. It also allows people to work in different ways - such as from home or on the move – and ultimately provides the ‘glue’ between departments and partners.
The change in Local Government
Local Government is at a potential tipping point. Policy and practice are converging, not only giving local authorities the opportunity for fundamental change, but making it something that they absolutely have to do. Local authorities now face the challenge of significantly modernising local services.
The key to success is to lead that change rather than follow it. In fact, this is absolutely vital for effective transformation. Key elements of the process are focused around its biggest challenges:
- Delivering citizen-centric and business-centric services
- Operating a shared service culture to bring efficiencies through standardisation, simplification and sharing
- Enabling effective change through intelligent use of ICT
Issues which need to be addressed
- Business process improvement – 75% of budgets are locked into maintaining legacy processes and must be released
- Demands for a 3% per annum cash efficiency drive between 2008 and 2011
- The need to fit council services around the citizen, not the authority
- Meeting increased citizen expectations
- Reducing avoidable contact costs by 50%
- Reducing the council’s carbon footprint and meeting environmental targets
The ICT challenges
- Maintaining the ICT services that support current business processes
- Reducing the ‘real’ cost of ICT year on year
- Developing ICT infrastructures and services to meet new demands
- Using technology to deliver and support self-service interactions for citizens 24/7
- Maintaining network security and supporting ICT users who work remotely
- Enabling smart working practices and protecting lone workers.
- Making ICT greener and achieving larger carbon reductions through ICT-enabled business processes – for example working from home.
Engaging with communities & citizens
Full engagement with the community, to understand citizens’ wants and needs, is at the heart of all Local Government activities. It must aim to constantly understand more about its communities, making Local Government performance more visible and giving more power to local people. This is the key to engaging with citizens and keeping them informed.
People are no longer being treated as generic citizens. A new approach, using ‘customer group’ segmentation and profiling, allows local authorities to analyse citizen need more efficiently - and then to deliver services which are tailored to individual groups. ICT infrastructures and services must manage and share this sensitive information within the context of privacy, data protection, freedom of information and security, whilst also providing strong information governance.
Damovo understands the need for effective and efficient engagement, providing ICT solutions and services which enable the sharing and management of information, whilst taking these vital issues into account.
Making it all happen
To make change happen, local authorities need to identify appropriate skills and resources, working in partnership with other organisations and managing the necessary culture change. But this requires more than just hardware and software. It needs a skilled and experienced partner to help guide the entire process. A partner like Damovo.
Reshaping service delivery
Modern Local Government services need to be tailored to local needs. This involves reshaping service delivery by:
- Increasing choice
- Joining up service provision
- Achieving effectiveness and efficiency
Damovo can help local authorities use ICT to inform and support the people who are making collective choices, and to find the right balance between service quality and cost. We can help exploit the opportunities to personalise services, giving people a choice in how services are delivered. We can also monitor customer satisfaction and service quality.
The services we offer
Through the analysis and integration of people, processes and multimedia technologies, local authorities can:
- Enhance citizen interactions and satisfaction
- Demonstrate accountability
- Increase staff retention
- Improve citizen’s perception of Local Government performance
Damovo provides the ICT infrastructure and associated services which can initiate and support these improvements.
Damovo’s ICT blueprint for citizen-centric Local Government
Damovo has a long-term commitment to ICT in Local Government, with a proven track record and a clear understanding of the challenges and the solutions. Our intelligent ICT applications and services enable the introduction of new business capabilities with minimum cost and disruption, and the smallest of risks.
Our approach is ‘evolution’ not revolution, allowing local authorities to maximise current ICT investment whilst migrating at a suitable and practical pace. All solutions are vendor-independent and are dovetailed into customers’ needs, ensuring that we deliver the right solution for each customer every time.
Driving down the cost of transactions
We see the basic metric for service delivery as a ‘cost per transaction’, a simplified way of demonstrating the improvements and efficiencies possible via the proper use of ICT. Service delivery to citizens falls into three areas – self-service, phone or counter-assisted service and direct service (e.g. home visits). Self-service has the lowest ‘cost per transaction’ and direct service the highest. Therefore the ideal is to make as many transactions as possible self-service, whilst also making the direct service as efficient as possible, using effective ICT provision to deliver communication services.
Damovo can help to reduce the cost per transaction by analysing the cost of service delivery and then providing solutions which integrate all services across an intelligent application layer.
The need for smarter direct service solutions
Direct services present a problem for all local authorities, as there is always a risk of potential physical abuse when employees are meeting the general public away from the office or entering a citizen’s home. Damovo provides a location-based solution which uses a simple GPS-enabled mobile phone and a web-based management platform, allowing the status and location of an employee to be tracked. It also allows the employee to trigger a panic alarm detailing their exact location should they find themselves under threat.
The new Corporate Manslaughter Act 2007 makes senior management directly responsible for the wellbeing and welfare of its employees regardless of their working location. This makes Damovo’s location-based services solution the ideal way to mitigate the ‘lack of duty of care’ problem which has always existed with direct service contact.
The green question
There are a number of factors to take into account when considering how ‘green’ an organisation’s ICT equipment is. Is it manufactured and maintained in an environmentally friendly manner? How intelligent and efficient is it? Is it recyclable at the end of its life? And how will it be disposed of when it is replaced?
Damovo promotes recycling and the use of environmentally friendly manufacturing. We also encourage a green approach to ICT equipment and service provision. This involves advocating low power-consumption equipment and making sure that non-essential equipment is turned off whenever possible – for example IP telephones which may not be needed outside of core business hours can be made to automatically power off for the required period of time.