Web initiative kicks off overhaul of document management
systems
Stockport Council has spent £100,000 rationalising its website
as the first project in a series of IT initiatives to improve its
electronic content and document management systems.
The IT department spent 12 weeks rationalising the website’s
content in preparation for larger projects to rationalise content
on the council intranet and publish content through digital
interactive television.
The council said, “The priority was to enhance the council’s
website not only to provide services directly to citizens, but to
support the contact centre and face-to-face contact.”
Before the rationalisation of the website, both the public and
contact centre staff had reported difficulties navigating the site,
which had grown to more than 7,000 pages of information.
Stockport Council said it began the site rationalisation process
by giving service heads responsibility for their own site content
to help ensure that the project was supported throughout the
council.
Each front-line service had to nominate a representative, who
was tasked with ensuring that their service’s content fitted within
the website’s new framework. Pages that the service
representatives failed to convert to the framework were
scrapped.
To ensure that the website would be rationalised within the
12-week deadline, the service representatives were told that any
late content would be excluded.
The council said, “There were problems with the [old] website.
One problem was ownership. The site was seen by many people working
in front-line services as something that the ICT service did for
them, or in some cases to them.”
The rationalisation was one of the first IT projects undertaken
by the council using the Prince 2 project management methodology.
There were weekly project team meetings at which all council
services were represented, including human resources, internal
audit and the marketing and communications unit.
HR was included because the project may have involved changes to
employee working practices or responsibilities, and the marketing
and communications unit was there to help encourage staff support
for the project. The internal auditor was appointed to be a
“critical friend asking challenging questions and performing
reality checks throughout the project”.
The service representatives subsequently formed their own Web
Content Group to manage the day-to-day work of migrating the web
pages.
The council said, “As the project progressed, some services made
better progress than others. Towards the end of the project, the
leaders helped out those services that were lagging behind.”
The content management system used for the site was
Mediasurface’s council site pack. Alongside this, Stockport used a
knowledge management module from the same supplier to improve the
site’s search function.