Newport City Council has recently implemented a range of Web 2.0 and other technologies from Jadu, a leading provider of web content management systems, to dramatically improve access and delivery of its citizen facing services.
The Council’s corporate plan and key national initiatives, such as the Wales Programme for Improvement, the Beecham Review and Making the Connections, provided the driving force behind the Council’s service transformation initiatives. Newport City Council’s improvement programme aims to achieve integration of telephone, face to face and web channels, using a common technology to deliver an improved ‘experience’ for the citizen and improved efficiency for the Council.
Newport City Council selected Jadu as its partner for developing its transactional Web services and the Jadu XForms Professional suite (including Jadu’s direct marketing module). This offered the best all round environment for development, from customer interface through to design and integration tools. Jadu also utilise a range of Web 2.0 concepts, specifically designed to enhance citizen engagement and delivery of web based content and services. This will enable service delivery and communications improvement by re-engineering the existing business processes.
‘We were seeking a solution that conformed to best practice web standards with a simple customer interface that enabled efficiency improvements both for the Council and our customers’ says Tracy Mckim, IT Infrastructure Manager for the Council.
Jadu worked with Newport City Council to deliver a personalised customer facing portal for all services https://services.newport.gov.uk. This provides the main point of contact for citizens seeking information, or wishing to make an online payment. The Council have also utilised the Jadu A to Z system to provide information on services categorised by the Local Government Services List (LGSL) and integrated with Google maps.
Newport City Council’s initiatives are providing significant benefits for the citizen including - improved choice of access method; improved availability of council services (24x7) and online payment facilities. Citizens are also able to personalise their interactions with the Council through features such as enhanced search provision, an ability to save and return to applications and citizen membership. The integration of online forms with back office systems will enable the Council to improve efficiencies.
‘We are really pleased with the take-up of the online forms so far, following a soft launch of the forms and our Council services A to Z. The next stage is to implement with other services in the Council and to increase the number of forms available’ says Tracy Mckim.
“We are very excited about the opportunity to implement transformational government at Newport City Council.” says Suraj Kika, CEO of Jadu. “Jadu’s XForms Professional suite is designed to enable customer engagement with Council services and ensures that Councils can deliver significant and measurable efficiency savings”
Newport City Council has worked on three main areas of systems integration to deliver the new services environment. This has involved integration of the Jadu XForms suite with the customer contact centre (which utilises an Oracle LG45 CRM system); the Council’s gazeteer management system and the CAPITA payments and revenue system, which enables the processing of the transactional forms.
‘Work on integration of the forms with the Council’s payment engine is almost complete. This will provide facilities for customers to make online payments. Future work will also look at GIS integration and how we can further integrate the Jadu XForms suite to increase customer access to online services’ says Tracy Mckim.
