Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire Moorlands District Council are members of the acclaimed Staffordshire Connects partnership, which has scooped two national awards in less than 12 months.
The recipients included Cllr Andrew Wragg, the city council’s member representative on the partnership. He was accompanied by the council’s officer champion, David Neil, plus its assistant director of customer services, Julie Seddon; and its e-Government manager Paul Atkins.
David is the council’s assistant director of information services.
And two days later, partnership chair and county councillor Jack Barber followed suit at a full meeting of the Moorlands authority when he presented identical trophies to council chairman Maureen Motum.
The awards recognised the collective achievements of Staffordshire’s 10 local authorities in harnessing technology to provide public services in convenient new ways.
The partnership’s crowning glory to date has been local government’s largest implementation of a single Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. It gives service advisors the information they need to deal with around 80 per cent of customer enquiries straight away, and to “log and track” the remainder. CRM will also enable partners to accept service requests for each other in the near future. Already, plans are being drawn for Stoke-on-Trent to use the system to deliver Staffordshire Moorlands services outside office hours.
CRM is complemented by a unique Joined-up Directory which allows more than 12,000 employees across the partnership to contact each other at the click of a mouse. Council staff use the directory to take ownership of enquiries or point the customer in the right direction. Other partnership innovations include a shared e-Payments system that allows customers to pay for council services 24/7 from the comfort of their own home.
All partnership solutions are used in the three award-winning one-stop shops run by Staffordshire Moorlands and the County Council.
The partnership’s Beacon bid was judged against eight criteria, and was rated either “Very Good”, “Excellent” or “Outstanding” on each count.
And the honour came just six months after Staffordshire Connects beat off the challenge of 160 other hopefuls to win the partnership working category in the annual awards of the Association for Public Service Excellence.
With all major e-Government systems now in place, the partnership is switching its attention from technology to the enablement of shared service delivery which will save public money and make services even more convenient. For example, the partnership has begun a project to improve access to street-scene services and help partners work in a more joined-up way behind the scenes. The project will start with a feasibility study of plans to establish joint working to improve street-scene services.
Quelle/Source: eGov monitor, 08.08.2006
