Andy Thomas, Corporate Projects Manager, Bath & North East Somerset Council, outlines how his authority has worked with its partners to develop an innovative on-line tool for the Local Strategic Partnership to "e-enable" collaborative working.
Bath & North East Somerset Council is committed to working in partnership to make our area a better place to live work and visit. With this comes a series of challenges, not least of which is finding the time for busy people to attend meetings and to work collaboratively on joint projects. Increasingly, of course, this has been addressed through email and websites. However, these have limitations, including the lack of secure, shared space for discussion forums and other on-line “tools” for partnership working.
Bath & North East Somerset’s Local Strategic Partnership is made up of local partners including the Council, Police, PCT, Somer Housing Group and business, voluntary and community sector organisations. The LSP had developed a content-rich website and conducted much of its work outside of meetings through email. However, the publication of its Community Strategy has meant more emphasis on tracking and managing shared projects, often involving a wide range of groups and agencies with varying access to ICT.
The Council’s Corporate Projects Team, which supports the LSP, worked with the Council’s business improvement partners HBS and with potential users to evaluate how a web-based collaboration system could address the project management and information-sharing needs of the LSP and its partners. This has resulted in the LSP’s “beintouch” on-line communities, funded and supported by Bath & North East Somerset Council, which allows login access to registered users to a personalised home-page. This shows the groups of which the user is a member (useful for people who are members of several partnerships), a personalised task list, and access to collaboration tools such as databases, calendars, questionnaires, image libraries and discussions.
The site went live in June 2005 and now has more than 250 registered users. Groups are managed by trained group managers operating within policy guidelines. The first group to launch was the LSP’s own community, which contains on-line project plans for the Community Strategy, an archive of LSP documents, and a shared on-line calendar. This site, as with all groups in the system, can provide tailored levels of access ranging from fully public to access by managers only, as well as allowing individual users to register their preferences for how they are informed about new site content, whether by immediate email, weekly bulletin or on-line only. This means that documents can be amended or new content uploaded by group members with permissions, leaving a full audit trail. One clear advantage of this for partnership members is that they no longer need to keep their own documents for these groups as all partnership content is held on the system, and all emails threaded through the discussion forum.
As well as the LSP’s own site, however, other partnership groups have become involved in the on-line communities, taking advantage of the flexibility of the system, the speed with which groups can be established and the fact that the communities are clearly sponsored by the LSP and are designed to promote collaborative working to help deliver the Community Strategy in our area. For example, the voluntary and community sector have a specific on-line community designed to co-ordinate their training requirements. This means that Voluntary and Community groups in Bath & North East Somerset can post any training courses they are running and view training courses being offered by other organisations locally. This will help to avoid timetable clashes and unnecessary duplication. Bath & North East Somerset’s Voluntary Sector Forum also has its own on-line community.
There is also a successful group managed by researchers and data analysts, which provides a shared space for the sharing and re-use of information which might previously have stayed with partners’ own areas, This type of collaboration will be essential as the Council works with partners to move forward its Local Area Agreement.
Other groups involved in community planning and engagement have been established on a local basis, including the South Bath Community Development Group and the “Brighter Futures” Community, which contains information about the area’s Market and Coastal Towns Initiative. The area’s association of local councils also manages its own on-line community.
The main advantage of the approach, which is powered by iNovem’s Team Initiative software, has been low-cost and flexibility in helping meet the needs of a wide range of communities, so that groups can adapt it to their own needs. This means that new groups can be established quickly, with interactive content available straightaway. There is also wide range of functionality, which allows groups to use the tools that meet their needs the best. For example, Bath & North East Somerset’s Housing Strategy, which is being developed through the Local Strategic Partnership and the linked Housing Key Partnership, is being put in place through a series of sub-groups which are to be supported by on-line communities.
Since the system went live have been some “tweaks” to the functionality, including improvements to the database system. However, the main change has been a cultural one: people involved in collaborative projects can see the value in the system. The LSP and partnerships have been able to e-enable some of their processes, freeing-up time for delivery. Information-sharing and working on joint projects has been made more streamlined- again, all essential ingredients for Local Area Agreements. Although formal training has been provided- for example, an e-learning package for e-moderation - partners have been learning from each other about how best to use the “tool” the communities provide to help make Bath & North East Somerset “a better place to live, work and visit”.
The software being used by the Bath & North East Somerset’s Local Strategic Partnership is provided by UK based company, iNovem.
iNovem is a leading provider of online community and consultation software to the UK public sector. iNovem was actively involved in the National e-Democracy project and worked closely with Wolverhampton City Council to improve community engagement and partnership working through citizen e-panels, community plan consultations and collaborative extranets for local strategic partners.
For more information see: www.inovem.com/solutions/local