Newham's high-profile decision to partner with Microsoft, announced in August 2004, followed an extensive evaluation at the Borough and an independent assessment by Capgemini which looked at costs, business benefits and risk profiles of a Microsoft solution and concluded it was the best value option.
Newham Councils Head of ICT, Richard Steel said: "When we announced our Strategic Partnership with Microsoft, my decision was heavily scrutinised and caused a hostile reaction from members of the open source camp, but I am more convinced I made the right choice today than ever before. The partnership, combined with Microsofts platform capabilities, is helping us to transform the way we operate and interact with citizens, and is allowing us to deliver some highly innovative and successful e-government projects. It is also helping us to become a more efficient, productive, and citizen-centric organisation."
The OAS is the UK local government implementation of Microsofts global initiative called the Solutions Sharing Network (SSN). The SSN programme was established by Microsoft to promote increased communication, deeper information exchange, and collaboration between government organizations, academic institutions and other public sector agencies. SSN enables these organisations to share their unique IT solutions, architectures, best practices, research and application source code owned by them to increase efficiencies and reduce long-term development costs. Newham was the obvious site to host a community for local authorities in the UK due to its status as an e-government innovator, and because of its responsibility of helping to coordinate and share best practices from the Local Authority Software Consortium (LASC) and the ODPMs National Projects.
Newhams CRM solution is being transformed with the introduction of the Microsoft .NET enterprise platform. The integration capabilities of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004, combined with ongoing process re-engineering at the Borough is being harnessed to fundamentally improve the standard of service the Borough is able to offer its citizens. The integrated solution will ultimately join up nearly all the councils services, including council tax, housing allocation, corporate and commercial debt, environment, social services and education, as well as some central government services, and will make them easily accessible to the Boroughs customer service representatives via a single access point. This means, for example, that citizens will be able to fulfil a range transactions with multiple council departments via a single call, and changes in citizens circumstances need only be recorded once.
Richard Steel commented on how the integration of services using the Microsoft platform is impacting the Borough; "The changes are contributing to improvements in morale amongst our customer services personnel as they are working with better, more efficient systems. Citizens are also happier with the standard of service they are receiving, which means less complaints for our staff to deal with. From our most recent customer surveys, customer satisfaction has reached record levels of over 90%. The centralised flow of information also makes it easier to monitor council transactions, allowing us to make better, more informed decisions affecting the council and its constituencies."
Angela Henderson, Head of Local Government, Microsoft, said: "It is outstanding to see the progress that has been made at Newham. The Borough has gone from strength to strength and has won critical acclaim for its progress and its persistent pursuit of excellence in delivering against an innovative e-government vision. We look forward to continuing our work with Newham and all levels of Government to deliver real value and best practice."
Quelle: Publictechnology, 08.04.2005
