The Scottish Executive has disclosed plans to set up a central procurement facility to help local authorities in Scotland with their service transformation programmes.
The work will be one of the key priorities over the coming year to take forward its Customer First strategy, it said on 5 July. Customer First, the report says, will aim to establish a procurement function that can "deliver economies of scale in procuring goods and services" to its partners.
This will provide a model for a joint procurement service on behalf of local authorities, it said.
The Customer First framework, launched by the Executive last October, expects to generate – over the longer-term – recurring annual savings of around £56 million. The focus is on councils using an agreed single model of e-service delivery within a national secure data-sharing infrastructure.
Recognising that most citizens still prefer to contact their council by telephone, local authorities will be given guidance on developing e-enabled contact centres, so they can provide a single access point for their most-requested services.
Details of the plans emerged in the Executive's third annual report on Scottish local authorities' progress towards its electronic service delivery targets.
Figures from the report, captured at the end of 2004, show that across Scotland, headline on the finding that information is available online for 87 per cent of local authority services.
However it appears that only in around a third or less of these is a full online transaction possible. Among the notable exceptions is council tax payments, reported to be 62 per cent fully e-enabled.
The report, which includes 27 case study examples of councils' online services, can be downloaded from the link here (PDF: 1.62MB).
Quelle: eGov monitor, 07.07.2005
