We’re putting the final flourishes to what will be a great day of collaboration and networking on October 4th. Our Conference: ‘DRIVE CHANGE – New approaches to digital in local government’ will have speakers from leading councils as well as GDS and other Central Government departments.
Collaboration and sharing is key to this approach and we are keen to share capacity, capabilities, learning and software with partners. For anyone still to book their tickets they are available here.
Meanwhile our own programme of digital transformation continues apace…
Digital Transactional Services
Since we last reported we have created and verified test Council Tax accounts, developed a number of council tax features and improved address matching for My Account.
We have also built a stable infrastructure and front-end to ensure the system conforms to information governance, can verify the citizen and ensure the system can cope with volume.
Release of My Account
We are still developing a lot of the complex features and have decided to split the My Account release into two: an early Beta release and a later release of the more complex Council Tax function.
Information Governance
We’re updating the current Information Management Policy and associated Guidance, producing a Frequently Asked Questions document and other easy to understand guidance documents as well as updating all the privacy notices on the web forms and our organisational privacy notice.
A programme of online and face to face training is planned and we have prepared an overarching end user agreement which will detail what users can and can’t do within the system.
As well as keeping our existing data safe and secure now, one of the purposes to doing all of this is to allow us to be more proactive in securing additional data that will allow us to do our job better.
Mobile Working
Remote.stockport.gov.uk has gone live in the past few weeks. This service is primarily for users that are using non-council devices to connect to our network, but also for people within the council who are using non Microsoft devices and third parties such as software suppliers who need to access our applications in order to carry out work.
Information Advice and Guidance
Our goal now is to make the beta site more independent and less reliant on the current site. New features added have included News, Subscribe to email alerts and an image carousel on the Homepage to showcase campaigns and important announcements.
We have added a great deal more content from the current site including Roads, Travel, Conservation & Heritage, Planning, Building Regulations, Housing, Sports, Walking, Cycling & Rights of Way and Stockport Market.
Business as Usual (BAU)
Although the focus is on Digital by Design development we still have a ‘BAU Software Development’ team. We’re continuing to support and enhance existing in-house software and we’re building new software where appropriate.
Comms
We are developing ideas for a Comms campaign to move people over to our digital services. This campaign will run when the beta website becomes our main website and the My Account portal is available.
Our objectives are to build awareness of our online offer, the range of services available and to bring more people onto the website in order to reduce contacts via our other channels. This will dovetail with the programme of Assisted Digital which is being prepared separately.
We have developed three creative themes for our Comms campaign and over the next few weeks we will be testing these with members of the public in different locations and from a cross-section of our target groups.
Business Intelligence & Analytics
We have nearly finished automating a set of outputs that will be required when the Council gets inspected by Ofsted. We are continuing to develop a Children’s Social Care schema and we have been identifying opportunities to integrate with partner systems.
Case & Contact Management
We have a new software trial of the Verint case management system. Following their service redesign we are also moving our local Advice Centres and Debt Advice onto a new case management system and we are working with them to develop an integrated booking system. Working with Public Health, where the triaging of Healthy Lifestyle services is soon to return in-house, we are configuring case management for these referrals and also developing a transactional online form.