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Working towards online compliance in local government

In 1999, the British Government launched a major initiative to bring public services online. The programme was ambitious in scope and demanded all public-facing services should be online by the end of 2005. It was backed by a pledge to provide £1/2 billion ($US 2.7 billion) to help fund the move. In central England, Bridgnorth District Council was one of the smallest local authorities in the country, but took its online commitments seriously. It has worked with Pilot Software to begin deploying web performance management tools to ensure performance of online initiatives against plan.

As the network of central, regional and local public authorities across the UK have embraced the drive to put services online, the need to measure compliance has increased and the opportunities to deploy business performance management and analytics tools have increased. The programme, now known as IEG (Implementation of Electronic Governance) aims to deliver £1.2 billion in efficiency savings by 2007/8.

Bridgnorth District Council (www.bridgnorth-dc.gov.uk) began a process of reorganisation in early 2005 including moving IT support activity into a new Customer Service team. Kevin Sleeman, IEG and web development manager at Bridgnorth Council, explained, “The aim was to put the “Customer First” resulting in us being more accountable as a service business to external end users.”

Public policy was moving in a similar direction as it became accepted that a ‘post things on line and people will come’ approach wasn’t able to leverage the savings possible from electronic commerce and interaction. Sleeman explains that the expectations from being online have changed over time. “At first, the focus was on making materials available online, but the reality is that there isn’t that much value and cost saving in that alone.” An application form that people download, print off and fill in on the website is more convenient but doesn’t lead to much reduction in administration – or cost. “It certainly wasn’t enough of a benefit to justify the investment involved, so the focus for us continues to be to put the whole process online, so forms are completed and processed electronically, for example.”

Bridgnorth District Council sought a baseline measurement against which to assess how customers used the council’s online services over time. The government’s benchmark against which the council was expected to measure online uptake was based on IFABC standards, the respected international set of guidelines for visitor measurement. This meant measuring the number of unique users and page impressions for all of the Council’s websites. “We explored simple logging solutions but realised quickly that we needed something far more flexible,” said Sleeman. Eventually it adopted HitList, part of Pilot Software’s suite of web performance management tools.

The system was rolled out in early 2005 and now ensures the council can meet compliance demands. Bridgnorth District Council must meet two stages of compliance. Rule R25 requires that internet service standards are published by December 2005, while R26 demands that all local authorities monitor performance of websites by March 2006.

The new system is also helping the Council understand how to adapt online services to meet the unique needs of its users. It operates across a relatively low density population area with just 52,000 residents in 245 square miles. Sleeman’s team are currently working to understand how people interact with specific areas of the site, such as jobs and local Council Tax guides. Planning is another popular section. “The most popular area is often about planning applications and rulings. We have many vocal residents and they watch developments in this area closely.”

Bridgnorth District Council has made significant steps forward on the delivery of its IEG Programme. Its Best Value Performance Indicator (BVPI) rating has increased to over seventy percent and was estimated to achieve a target of ninety percent in April 2005. Its website has continued to improve and was rated number one in the SiteMorse league table for technical correctness in July 2004 and consistently in the top twenty of all local authority web sites. It has continued to work on disability accessibility and in September 2004 was one of only four websites in the country that achieved the government’s target of AA compliance with the Website Accessibility Initiative from the W3C. The site has also achieved during the last financial year an average uptime of over ninety-nine and a half percent, with number of visitors per month continuing to increase.

The council continues to unlock the potential of its content management system and is looking to use the performance management tools to evaluate the success of particular initiatives. This includes a number of collaborative projects, such as email alerting for job vacancies and the ability for residents who live close to the border of the district to be told of planning applications that happen in other authorities. “Although these applications are outside of the District, they have an impact on people living in the district and it is this redefinition of our priorities to include Customer First that we believe is going to make a difference to the residents of our District,” adds Sleeman. “Over the coming months we intend to develop more services to offer to our customers to help stimulate their participation in the life and workings of the Council, while also working to deliver the efficiency savings we need to achieve.”