Smart projects: Hammersmith and Fulham completes
five-year data matching project
The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham is ready for the
future introduction of smartcards for accessing public services,
after spending five years matching customer information held on
seven different databases.
The council has spent £900,000 matching data held across 450,000
records to enable its new customer database to retrieve information
from legacy systems. The IT department created its own
data-matching standard to maximise the proportion of records that
were automatically matched.
A council spokesman said, "Once extracts from all the
back-office systems had been signed off and agreed, the project
moved on to defining the match rules that would enable customer
information to be matched across all systems. Given the complexity,
it was a time-consuming process to find a standard that met our
matching quality requirements."
More than 100,000 of the 450,000 records were automatically
matched once a standard was agreed.
The records covered most of Hammersmith and Fulham's front-line
services. When the work was completed, every customer record
covering council tax, council tax benefits, electoral services,
housing benefits, housing rents, libraries, local land and property
gazetteer and social services was accessible through the new
database.
Council officers used a data matching and integration
application called Multivue from software supplier Visionware.
Microsoft's Biztalk integration software was also used to transform
the council's data.
The new database, known as the Client Index, is set up to notify
all seven legacy databases when a customer's information
changes.
Client Index checks the records held on the underlying databases
for changes every night. In the future, the council plans to adapt
Client Index to perform hourly checks.
The council said, "The database will enable us to build an
accurate customer profile of their key demographics and enable us
to identify which services they were receiving from the
council.
"It also means that the customer only has to notify the council
once, rather than separately contacting the various
departments."
Client Index is designed to look for changes to key customer
details. These include changes of address, registration of death,
change of name, change of date of birth or age, change of a key
reference number, such as a national insurance number, and the
conclusion of using any service.
The IT department has developed a Microsoft .net application to
track changes to the back-office databases. The application, called
Cinema, enables the IT department to spot whether changes have been
rejected by the systems.
Client Index is currently identifying 1,000 changes of customer
details during every overnight run. By changing records on all the
underlying databases at the same time, the council believes that
costs have been cut.
Hammersmith and Fulham plans to integrate Client Index with its
customer relationship management application, Lagan Frontline,
later this year.