Rugby Borough Council (RBC) is a relatively small council, employing 400 staff and serving a population of nearly 88,000 people in Warwickshire. Having established a contact centre solution as the first stage of its e-government programme, RBC's second objective has been to initiate a 'step change' in its service delivery to the local citizen.
RBC intends to improve access to its services and ease of use, through an improved choice of channels, '24/7' availability and an ability for citizens and interest groups to develop personalised micro portals. The stage of this project has been the implementation of a web content management system (CMS). Although RBC already had a website in place, it was not capable of supporting the council's ambitious plans.
The site had been identified by SOCITM Better Connected research as falling into the 'Promotional' Category and it was dependent on a small IT department (14 staff) to maintain it. Keeping the information up to date and accurate was becoming a major issue and importantly, the site was not scalable or capable of supporting e-Government standards.
Andy Singleton, Principal Software Support Technician at RBC was responsible for establishing requirements for the new content management system. The most critical factor in selecting a way forward was in selecting a business and implementation partner that understood the local government market. Implementation needed to happen within a short time scale. This meant RBC needed a solutions supplier that could work effectively to achieve this objective.
We looked for a 'partner' in development that understood the local government market rather than a pure customer-supplier relationship.
Andy Singleton - Principal Software Support Technician - Rugby Borough Council
The technical systems requirements were:
- High system usability as this would enable content updating responsibility to be devolved from the IT department to the users who were not IT specialists.
- Compliance with e-gov standards (e-Gif), DDA.
- Scalability - as the system needed to support the usage growth anticipated when full citizen adoption was achieved.
Rugby reviewed a number of content management solutions providers in a free tender solution and selected Jadu as their partner due to their experience in the government market and expertise in enterprise web content management.
We believed that Jadu provided a good match to what we were trying to achieve - the other options were over complicated and Jadu clearly understood us.
Nick O'Reilly - Head of EGovernment and IT - Rugby Borough Council
Functionality of the system selected included a content-rich A-Z that automatically linked to further 'rich content', links to over 100 local and central government organisations, online recruitment and jobs board, an FAQ database, site search and numerous download capabilities. This functionality will enable users to more easily search for information, customise a portal of topics of interest to them, easily access online forms and job vacancies, and easily keep up to date with developments and news.
Migration from the old to new system has been extremely efficient. Jadu used generic data from the LAWS Project therefore ensuring that the RBC site used Local Government Service List Standards (LGSL) for its A-Z. The CMS 'joins-up' information, documents and FAQs by using the LGCL (Local Government Category List) to categorise and index all content in the system - a requirement in the Priority Outcomes.
"Jadu did a couple of months work in a few weeks" says Andy Singleton. "The major challenge in implementation came from the need to change roles and culture with the council as users established new ways of working, but this has been overcome through the training of 29 content editors and 9 web masters."
RBC intends to seek further feedback from local citizens to drive further development from a content and functionality point of view. Key development areas include the provision of online consultation capabilities, a planning module to enable citizens to register an interest online, hosting of partner microsites in areas such as business, tourism and crime and disorder, and the implementation of a Jadu intranet to facilitate more effective communication between council employees.