Hampshire County Council has started using a five-year
service oriented architecture (SOA) deal it recently signed with
IBM to deliver services in partnership with other public sector
agencies.
The council has two large-scale IT-enabled partnership
arrangements in place already - a tie-up with the county's NHS
trusts and an initiative between Hampshire's social services
departments and the local police force to tackle youth
offending.
"If you look at the way that local government is going,
Whitehall is talking very much about setting objectives for a local
area, rather than setting objectives for individual organisations,"
Hampshire County Council's principal IT consultant, Andrew Holdup,
said. "IT can make that happen."
The deal struck with IBM gives Hampshire access to the
supplier's Websphere, Tivoli and Lotus suites of applications.
The council said it decided to sign a partnering deal with IBM
rather than buy the applications individually, because it needed
the flexibility to bring in new applications quickly if central
government asked it to deliver new services.
"We need to be in a position where a new initiative with a set
of partners does not mean that we have to stop for a year to sort
out the technology," said Holdup.
The council has already started using Websphere to integrate its
call centre applications with the systems used by different
back-office departments, such as finance, human resources and
payroll.
Two departments are due to be integrated with the contact centre
system, a newly purchased customer relationship management
application from Lagan, by the end of 2007.
Hampshire's other major business transformation project to kick
off this year is the deployment of a document management system to
replace a proprietary system that the council felt failed to meet
its business needs.
The council's environment department, which includes highways
and planning, will be the first to go live with the new system
during 2007.
Social care departments will get a records management system
this year so that they can start using electronic social care
records.
Other parts of Hampshire Council are also due to go live with
document management over the next three years.
Holdup said, "We are seeing a massive increase in demand for
services that is not followed by an increased willingness to pay
council tax.
"We know SOA is necessary to save money, but the money will only
be saved once people at different public sector agencies start
talking to each other."
Lincolnshire cuts back-office expenses:
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