Crawley Borough Council has implemented a joint content
and document management system to meet a government deadline for
enabling online planning applications.
The council needed a new IT system to comply with the Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister's Pendleton criteria for online
development control and planning policy information on local
authority websites.
Crawley's IT department was on target to launch the application
in time for the government's original deadline in September 2005.
When the ODPM pushed the deadline back to December, the IT
department then embarked on managing the planning department's
demands to increase system functionality.
The council's internet technology developer, Malcolm Telfer,
said, "As soon as that stick [the September deadline] went away we
started thinking we could add more features. We had to battle with
the user department over the changes."
The new system, from supplier Stellent, replaces a legacy
application from Tagish, and combines both content and document
management. Crawley had to integrate it with the systems at a
scanning house it had used to scan new documentation. The IT
department wrote new business processes to integrate the document
management half of the system with those at the scanning house.
Telfer said, "The software we wrote is taking all those status
documents and checking them in automatically to the document
management system, which is Stellent. All of these status documents
get checked in and we wrote search and display elements for the
public website."
The scanning house handles every document larger than A4. Images
are stored using either scanners or cameras.
The IT department used the Prince 2 methodology to integrate
with the business processes of the scanning house. It also adopted
the principles of the Dynamic Systems Development Method.
Telfer said, "DSDM puts in the bits Prince 2 leaves out for
software management, such as prototypes within fixed
timeframes."
Crawley spent £55,000 implementing the Stellent system in its
planning department. Of this, £37,000 was taken up by internal
costs, and £18,000 was spent on the software licence.
The IT department originally used the system's content
management functionality to display the minutes of Crawley
Council's meetings online before it started on work with the
planning department.
Crawley is planning to use more of the content management
system's functionality.
Telfer said, "We are looking at putting planning enforcement
online. At the moment, people phone in with illegal uses of
property. Putting enforcement online is a very simple process
because we can comply with the Pendleton criteria almost out of the
box."