Leeds City Council has overshot its August deadline for
implementing a major digital pen and paper (DP&P)
programme.
The deadline has been extended to December after the project hit
difficulties, and the council decided to add barcode reading
facilities to the system.
When it is completed, Leeds City Council estimates the £366,000
Destiny DP&P system will save it £1.2m over two-and-a-half
years.
Leeds won the 2005 Local Government IT Excellence Award for its
Social Services Home Care pilot project based around DP&P
technology. The system automates note taking processes for home
care workers.
In the pilot programme, 100 social services staff were issued
with digital pens. Leeds City Council now plans to roll out the
system to 700 care workers by October, and 1,500 by December.
Users take handwritten notes on Anoto digital paper which are
then sent to the council systems via a secure mobile phone link.
The notes are converted into text and sent to the social services
department’s central IT system, enabling it to hold the most
up-to-date information on a Siebel-based case management
system.
Doug Sutherland, head of innovation at Leeds City Council, said
his team learned many lessons from the first phase of the
roll-out.
“One of the challenges we identified early on was that there
were occasional problems with character recognition. We discovered
another low-tech challenge when pen users occasionally picked up
each other’s pens, resulting in problems sending data. We resolved
this one with the use of coloured sticky tape,” he said.
Leeds City Council will shortly introduce DP&P for the East
Riding of Yorkshire Fisheries Protection Team. “We will then see
officers boarding vessels to check catches armed with digital pen
and paper,” said Sutherland.
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