This will allow citizens to access all council committee documents - agendas, reports, and minutes - through the website (www.edinburgh.gov.uk/cpol). This will mean citizens are more easily connected to the democratic process and are able to discover how and why decisions that affect them were made. Free internet access is available at all libraries and some community centres within the city boundaries. This project is one in a series of initiatives by the City of Edinburgh Council in partnership with BT in its 'Smart City' vision. Datum Consulting's KnowledgeWorker product is the document management system that lies behind the project. Councillors and Council staff have been able to access the system for a trial period on their intranet.
Andrew Unsworth, the Council's Head of e-Government explains, "Our 'Smart City Vision' is about improving the Council's business processes, modernising transactions with customers and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our services. Based on these criteria, we chose Datum Consulting and their KnowledgeWorker product to help us to put all our council papers online."
He continues, "Datum offered us the most flexible and versatile product, which we believe will meet our needs on an ongoing basis. At present KnowledgeWorker has been integrated into our legacy systems and this still involves some manual document scanning. The next stage of the project is to utilise the version control function within KnowledgeWorker to process the documents electronically from draft to publication. Through implementing this document management system from Datum, we anticipate reducing the amount of committee papers we distribute by about 50%."
Datum Consulting's KnowledgeWorker product provides a central library for the creation and storage of information in any file format; an intuitive search engine to find information; project collaboration to share information; and a workflow engine to automate business processes and move information intelligently around an organisation. Critically, to the user, this system is largely transparent and aids collaborative working, actually reducing the need to attach version after version of documents and the need to continuously send to multiple email recipients.
Quelle: Managing Information, 05.05.2004
