South Holland District Council - Authentication & Integration Design

Self Service, Automation & Efficiency

Following the successful introduction of a Customer Service centre in the Council, e-Government, the first round of reported Efficiency Gains (Gershon), and the start of the introduction of corporate document management and workflow, South Holland focussed its attention on how to drive further efficiencies through more corporate and integrated use of IT systems and through exploitation of opportunities for web-based self-service. 

It was clear that full integration of most systems could deliver substantial operational efficiencies, but could potentially incur prohibitively large implementation costs.  However, it was less clear which particular integrations would be most useful in delivering tangible benefits and improvements.

The impact of Authentication

The Council recognised that one particular way of increasing efficiency of the Council was to enable much greater self-service through the Council’s website.  However, concerns about security and confidentiality have meant that this opportunity cannot be exploited to its full potential until the approach to citizen and officer authentication has been defined. 

The ODPM’s Government Connect project offered the Council the potential to authenticate citizens and businesses more economically than could be achieved with a stand-alone system.  It also offered the opportunity for authentication of officers using systems and fit within the national drive for more joined up working between government organisations.  However, it was not clear how it might be implemented in conjunction with South Holland’s current systems.

Effective use of Resources

Modena Consulting worked with the Council’s officers, and suppliers to establish the full range of potential requirements for integrations between systems, including Priority Outcomes.  This was completed in a visual way by working through sets of user scenarios that built up composite pictures of which systems and data were needed to complete each business activity efficiently.  The resulting composite pictures (some 40 in all) highlighted the most commonly needed interfaces, and related them to the particular business activities taking place.

The analysis revealed the following:

• Interactions between systems to support the process and highlighted the functionality required of each system 

• Where several Council systems were able to deliver the same functionality the analysis prompted the Council to explore which systems were becoming unnecessary.

• service volumes were used to prioritise which interfaces (if implemented) would deliver the most benefit

• Discussions were held with suppliers to establish the commercial viability of implementing each of the most important interfaces

a set of implementation priorities and a design for systems interoperation was prepared  

Decisions on priorities for capital expenditure on integration of systems could then be made with much more clarity on the expected business benefits and likely costs/complexity.  South Holland expects that this, in turn, will result in projects that actually deliver service improvements more reliably and earlier, and also more fully exploit the operational cost savings of delivering services using the web.