IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

NHS Lincolnshire and Lincolnshire County Council have teamed up to create a strategy designed to keep mainly elderly people living healthily in their homes for longer.

More than £2 million has been directed from the county's Health and Wellbeing Fund to help roll out health monitoring equipment and security systems to ensure this group of people are kept safe.

Today's speech was notable for two omissions: the transformative potential of e-services and any mention of local government. Rather, Cameron painted a big picture of his determination to press for reform. He said that he would not fall in to the same trap as Tony Blair, who last year voiced regrets at wasting the opportunity for reform.

The project, which was won competitively, aims to boost efficiency and productivity for the local authority and create significant cost savings.

The council’s development of electronic services for local citizens has placed significant pressure on existing data storage systems. Regulatory requirements such as the Freedom of Information Act also make more efficient storage management vitally important. By consolidating and rationalising multiple storage functions, LDL will be able to manage data storage centrally and more effectively.

More than 30 delegates from 15 countries are arriving in the city on Wednesday (19 January) for the annual Telecities conference.

The city’s social workers will now be spending less time on paperwork and form-filling, using voice and handwriting recognition to do the job. It will give them more time face to face with vulnerable children, young people and adults.

Liverpool City Council plans to pilot an online children's services system next month to share information and cut down the time health and social workers spend on each case, a spokesperson told Government Computing News on 11 August 2003.

Liverpool says it will be the first city council in the UK to have its services available on digital TV, according to reports on 18 July 2003.

Ken Livingston made the comments in a review of the capital's online capabilities, Connecting the capital: information and communications technology in London, published on 29 January 2004. He said there is currently too much central control over placing local services online.

The average local authority has e-enabled 79 per cent of its services, and most will meet the deadline to have all services online by the end of the year, the government says.

With the numerical target expected to be met, the challenge now is to focus on what comes next, says the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's (ODPM) Two Years On report, published last week.

A mere 22 per cent of local authorities fully comply with e-government targets that come into force on 31 December, according to a new research report from APR Smartlogik.

The survey suggests it is unlikely that all local authorities will meet the targets set by the Implementing Electronic Government (IEG) strategy. IEG aims to deliver key local government services online, including schools admission, vote registration and planning applications.

Local authorities will fail to meet the 31 December e-government deadline unless they make use of the skills information professionals can offer, industry experts warn.

Though most councils described their eprogrammes as “modest” rather than ambitious, they believe that by the end of 2005 they will have put in place the systems needed for multi-channel access to eservices, according to a UK-wide survey conducted late in 2004 by the Society of IT Management (SOCITM).

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) has funded 94 local e-government partnerships across England with a total of £74m over the last two and a half years.

Whereas in 2000 General Ledger systems in 43% of authorities were run on mainframes, in 50% on Unix, and in only 7% on Windows, today the equivalent figures are 9%, 52% and 29% respectively. For applications more recently automated, the trend to Windows is even more noticeable – 84% of licensing systems run under Windows with the remainder under Unix operating systems.