Case Study: CDC website

Cotswold Council wanted their internet site to move from a ‘brochure or content’ rating to a ‘fully transactional’ status as defined by SOCITM (The Society of Information Technology Management). They needed to achieve this with a limited in-house technical capability and a diverse and distributed non technical staff responsible for fifty different council service areas.

• NQcontent V2 Enterprise
• Operating System: Windows 2000
• Application Server: ColdFusion MX
• Database Server: Microsoft SQL 2000
  

Cotswold District is one of the largest and most beautiful areas in England, with a distinctive community, economy and environment. The council is located in the historic town of Cirencester.

NQcontent has redesigned and provided a fully NQcontent managed site with a clean, simple and effective new design. The new site is to be launched Summer 2004 and will provide the “Fully transactional” status required to ensure that it becomes the site by which others are judged. It will also include NQcontent’s innovative implementation of the Local Government Category Listing (LGCL). LGCL is the recommended government way to categorise information so that it is both easily accessible, searchable and tagged for easy interoperability with other government systems.

The success of an online government service may be measured by the efficiency with which it is delivered e.g. please tell me by council tax fee or when will the dustbins be emptied. A decrease in the number of interactions but an increase in the accuracy of information can be a measure of efficiency. Councils also typically offer a very broad range of services and need to ensure they are meeting best practise in these services.

In order to meet these goals, CDC needed to ensure that there online information was timely, accurate, based on standards and delivered to the correct recipients. 

However, CDC needed to achieve this with a limited in-house technical capability and a diverse and distributed non technical staff responsible for fifty different council service areas. Therefore CD sought self sufficiency of web management and ongoing web development through training and skills transfer.

In a (some say) bold move, the UK prime minister declared in 2000 that “by the end of 2005 all government services will be available online”. Now, four years later, the race is on for all government local authorities to deliver their councils services online and each year, every councils’ progress towards this aim is put under heavy scrutiny by the government.

During early 2004, many councils realised that they were still a long way off the 2005 goal and Cotswold District Council (CDC) was no exception , it had slipped down in the  ranking of 500 UK councils. However, by spring 2004 CDC had decided to do something about it.

CDC instigated a Prince2 quality project to procure the best CMS to deliver online government. In eGovernment terminology, they wanted their internet site to move from a ‘brochure or content’ rating to a ‘fully transactional’ status as defined by SOCITM (The Society of Information Technology Management).

• Non-technical people across departments can independently create and produce online content, while maintaining the uniform look and feel of Cotswold Council's Web presence.
• System automatically configures itself according the user type i.e. press officer, tourism officer for simple content entry and approval.
• All content is correctly metadata tagged for e-GMS compliance and easy interoperability with other governmemt systems.
• All content is automatically made accessible and in text only version for level III WAI Accessibility.
• The public can access the content they need using the inteligent searching capability 
• Personalised and relevant content is atomatically provided based on the type of site visitor

Now that Cotswold Council have a broader knowledge of the capabilities of NQcontent, they will be using its a capabilities to automatically capture information for BVPI 157 and are planning to extend the system to provide eCommerce facilities, integrate with GIS for planning applications, use for forms and integrate NQcontent as part of their CRM Database programme.

CDC selected NQcontent from twenty alternative content management solutions because it offered simplicity of use for the non technical staff, a development environment that could extend the platform to deliver for example; analysis of service usage through NQcontent’s database management, dynamic generation of content for different site visitors and a comprehensive categorization and search capability based on eGIF and LGCL.