The project will benefit members of the Leicester-Shire e-Government partnership which includes Leicestershire County Council, Leicester City Council and the seven district councils. The primary aims of the Gateway initiative are to provide the public with one-stop access to location-based information, a ‘joined-up’ A to Z services index and in the future, the ability to communicate or make web-based ‘transactions’ with local authorities and other public agencies such as voluntary sector services.
ICT Project Manager for Leicestershire County Council, Angela Taylor, comments on the initiative, “Our vision is that e-government in Leicester and across the county will provide the opportunity for our citizens to access appropriate jointly-delivered services and information where and when they want it, in the form they prefer. The Leicestershire Gateway project will assist Leicestershire County Council and its partners to share and reduce overall costs, by offering the public a “one-stop”, self-service access to information about services provided by any of the county’s local authorities, no matter who provides it.”
Using the Cintra Gateway, a member of the public simply puts in his or her postcode or place name to identify their location, and the gateway will provide a series of relevant web links from the nearest or most applicable partner site. Alternatively, the user can also click on a location via an on-screen map.
Taylor continues, “We chose the Cintra solution because it could meet all our requirements within a single solution. Within two weeks they have delivered a pilot project based on Charnwood Borough Council. Cintra’s Gateway solution met the GIS (Geographic Information System) functional requirements and this, along with its SearchLight meta-tagging technology that complies with the IPSV 2.0 standard, met all our requirements. This was critical to fulfilling not only our portal specification, but also our e-government obligations such as providing regular Local Direct Gov links. We were further impressed by “live” demonstrations of the Gateway and the success of a similar solution that Cintra had installed for Oxfordshire County Council.”
The project is also set to save all the councils significant amounts of person-hours on manually updating individual websites according to IPSV 2.0 standards and also because of its self-service elements. For example, it is expected to lower the number of telephone enquiries or face-to-face contact required to respond to information requests.
Taylor explains, “Previously each partner had to update its own thesaurus and taxonomy database manually for each web-site. This can be a painfully slow labour-intensive process that can be both inaccurate and inconsistent. Using Cintra’s “SearchLight”, the underlying technology behind Gateway, this procedure is completely automated, the software classifies new content to the IPSV standard as soon as it is created. This also fulfils local authority obligations to provide Local Direct Gov links on an on-going basis.
Taylor concludes, “This has been a project where everybody wins - the public has a far more efficient resource for accessing information, and all the local government parties can share the benefits of lower costs, meeting e-government and t-government targets by sharing information across all web-sites and in the future by introducing the facilities to enable transactions over the web”.
Quelle/Source: Publictechnology, 14.06.2006
