Teamsolve help Luton Borough Council achieve ambitious 5% efficiency targets
Luton Borough Council is at the forefront of the Government's "transformation" agenda. Targeted by Government to achieve 3% year on year efficiency, Luton have set their sights on significantly increasing that efficiency target through establishing and maintaining a leading bespoke web solution.
Behind Luton’s innovative IT agenda was the drive to improve citizens' access to information through increased service availability and delivery, whilst providing a single source of accurate data. Adding to this was the need to increase efficiencies - and it soon became clear there had to be a shift from a 9am – 5pm traditional service environment to an e-enabled 24x7 citizen centric operation.
Ian Brown, Head of IM Business Solutions at Luton Borough Council explains, “Many local authorities have embarked on a CRM programme to better communicate with customers. At Luton, we’ve taken it a step further with a true 360 degree service that not only enables citizens to log enquiries through our website, but enables them to track progress. Internally, the system speeds service delivery and reduces administrative efforts through predefined workflow processes built into the system, ensuring citizen requests are dealt with efficiently and effectively”.
Why Teamsolve?
“We selected Teamsolve out of six possible suppliers. We needed a specialist with breadth and depth of Oracle skills across functional, development and support disciplines. Over the last 12 months our relationship with Teamsolve has developed and they are now a significant, integral partner in the project. We see them as a conduit between us and Oracle’s huge organisation; listening to our requirements, analysing them and advising and applying the relevant technologies and principles. Their Certified Advantage Partner status with Oracle gives us peace of mind that they understand Oracle’s propositions and new technologies, and more importantly, they understand how bring them together to meet our requirements and make them applicable to our organisation”.
Skilled Development Team
Luton’s ambitious strategy involves the development of a number of online services to enable citizens to request, enquire and track service requests such as book and pay. With over 100 services online, they will embark on a citizen awareness campaign early 2008 to encourage citizens to use the new service.
Says Ian, “During the initial stages of the project we employed offshore development consultants to assist our own developers. Not only was this a major leap culturally, but we fast became aware of the need to engage a partner who understood our business drivers and who could attend on-site meetings to discuss project strategies. With Teamsolve, we feel that we get the best of both worlds; skilled cost effective development capability together with access to a flexible repository of functional and technical skills for us to call upon.
“Teamsolve’s structured approach to delivering solutions helped us to develop a robust platform that conforms to standards. Working in partnership with their project managers and experienced and knowledgeable development staff, we developed a system that can be supported and customised effectively in the future in line with changing business requirements”.
High Availability with Reduced Costs
“During the initial scope of the project, we were advised that we may need three full-time DBAs to support the system. Not only did this feel unachievable within a local government environment, it was going to be difficult to justify efficiency and guarantee 100% use of the resource. Teamsolve support has given us a robust, flexible service with the option to change the flow in-line with peaks and troughs of activity, projects or staff shortages such as holidays. We find Teamsolve’s DBAs responsive, flexible and have come to view them as a key extension to our own internal DBA resources”.
“We view our relationship with Teamsolve as a true partnership”, says Ian. “They are significant extension to our own IT resources. Their understanding of our business, together with expertise across functional and development and technical disciplines has helped us to surpass our 100 service target and continue to better serve our citizens”.
