Buckinghamshire county and district councils are
developing an innovative communications network to deliver
joined-up online public services using government
funds.
Eighteen months ago, Buckinghamshire County Council formed the
Bucksconnect partnership with Aylesbury Vale, Chiltern, Wycombe and
South Buckinghamshire district councils. The councils' aim was to
meet the needs of their communities by delivering joined-up online
services.
Using £2m of government funding, the Buckinghamshire councils
pooled resources and developed the Bucksconnect network. They
implemented the IT infrastructure needed to start delivery of the
e-government programme in an 18-month timeframe.
"Buckinghamshire is run along the traditional council
infrastructure lines of county, district and parish councils,
rather than a single unitary authority," said Ken Boxhall,
Buckinghamshire County Council's head of IT services.
"This means the public can receive a fragmented service and are
left wondering who to contact if a street lamp is not working, or
if there is a hole in the road. Previously, there had been no
single point of contact, so people had been calling the wrong
councils and departments.
"Through Bucksconnect the community is able to access information
from one source via the internet, without the need to know what
council area they live in. By ensuring people get to the right
resource first time, we will save time and money by reducing wasted
management time.Most importantly, the delivery of information will
be driven by the community's needs."
Before this stage was reached, the first project for the
partnership was to build a county-wide broadband network. In 2001
Buckinghamshire County Council had contracted network services
provider Telindus to design, build and manage a high-speed, IP
backbone to service all local government agencies, libraries,
district councils and schools.
The four main points of presence for the network were located close
to each of the district councils' offices. It therefore made sense
to extend this network to provide county-wide interconnection for
Bucksconnect.
"Telindus had made the original network future-proof, so we just
needed to add to the existing infrastructure, which was extremely
cost-effective," said Paul Dore, networks team leader at
Buckinghamshire County Council.
"It was important to provide an infrastructure that would support
the delivery of Bucksconnect and any additional e-government
projects that may happen in the future. For example, connecting
parish councils, partner organisations such as charities,
outsourced housing and suppliers and other council offices such as
tourist and leisure facilities."
The primary benefit of the new network is that using a single
infrastructure has reduced overall costs and improved efficiency
for the five authorities.
For example, South Buckinghamshire District Council used to have
its own internet service, but now it gets internet services through
the shared network.
The cost of the BT private circuit, which is used to connect South
Bucks to the core network, will pay for itself in terms of the
future sharing of applications.
One example of a future shared application is geographic
information system data mapping. Instead of having five systems for
mapping data, the councils share just one.
The councils are now linked by high-speed broadband technology that
will allow huge amounts of data to move quickly between them. Their
electronic data systems will also be linked, making it possible to
access information about each other's services more
efficiently.
The second major Bucksconnect project was the establishment of web
portal Bucksonline, which provides a single point of contact for
the public.
Bucksonline, currently at the pilot stage, includes an A-Z list of
local government contacts and "Bucksmaps". This service enables
users to view information on community facilities such as doctors,
schools and railway services by entering their postcode.
Aylesbury Vale and Wycombe district councils are also including
information on recent planning applications, links to local plan
details and contacts for planning and building control as part of a
trial.
Bucksconnect has also been trialling an out-of-hours telephone
service called Bucksanswerpoint. The public can call this single
number with enquiries about adult learning, council tax, electoral
registration, environmental health, housing, benefits, libraries,
refuse and recycling and trading standards across all the different
councils.
www.bucksonline.gov.uk
Bucksconnect technology
The network is based on a core 200mbps backbone with load
balancing enabled on all routed links via private circuits. The
councils are linked and their data protected via firewalls from
Check Point.
Rules were added to each firewall so that only specific
resources can be accessed on each of the authorities' networks. In
some cases, encryption of data was necessary to satisfy data
protection requirements, and the firewalls perform this task using
IPsec or 3DES encryption.
Smaller satellite council sites are either connected directly to
the appropriate council network, or to the Buckinghamshire Council
network core, depending on the cost implications.
Such connections are typically via an SHDSL connection at
2.3mbps, through a 2mbps BT Megastream connection or a BT LES 10
connection at 10mbps.
E-gov deadline
Despite concerns that many local authorities will not meet the
government's target of delivering all main services online by 2005,
the latest Economist Intelligence Unit E-Readiness report suggested
that the UK is forging ahead of other countries with its
e-agenda.
The report ranks countries worldwide on their e-business
environment and how amenable they are to internet-based
opportunities. It places the UK in second place behind Denmark.
This status has largely been driven by the UK government's 2005
deadline. With this aim, local authorities across the UK have been
struggling to deliver seamless, online public services for a number
of years, and the county and district councils of Buckinghamshire
were no exception, until now.