LEICESTERSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Leicestershire County Council

Leicestershire County Council

Introduction

Leicestershire County Council (originally through the Leicestershire Rural Partnership) was one of our first clients. Since 2002 the connection has glimpsed the development of several community-oriented websites for the persons of Leicestershire.

The first was Leicestershire Villages, a set of 369 self-managed websites for all of the villages in Leicestershire. Then pursued Leicestershire Parish Councils, North West Leicestershire Neighbourhood Watch, sites for Leicestershire volunteer bureaus and The Jitty for juvenile persons in the county.

All of the sites make use of the 'Leicestershire community Portals' system. This was evolved by Cuttlefish for the Council with the exact aim of producing the building of self-managed community sites much quicker and easier.

 

Discussion

Registered users of the sites are adept to mail to observe planks, edit webpages, conceive image and multimedia galleries and organise on-line groups, all by a web-based interface. Cuttlefish has been engaged in assisting to train hundreds of these users through workshops and presentations.

Recent enhancements to the sites encompass interaction with the Council's XML-based webservices, for example the Infolinx community database. These enhancements can be glimpsed in the Find My Nearest elongation to Leicestershire Villages in which complicated XML functionality is effectively concealed behind a simple-to-use interface.

The Transformation Government Strategy presents at high grade a general evaluation of the present position of Modern Government and its use of technology. It groups some sensible objectives to the consignment of citizen- and business- middle, distributed services. However, numerous of the recommendations of the report appear to request especially to cantered, rather than localized, government.

 

Detailed Response

 

Shared Services

The article comprises a determined dream for the future of public services which is long overdue. It is sensed that localized government is currently before cantered government in specific localities, for example the expanded commitment of government with people and enterprise to realise and then identify the transformational alterations that service providers require meeting. In supplement localized government is currently dynamically consigning distributed services, but two -tier localized government is often a barricade to the provision of distributed services. Over the last number of years, expertise has assisted put in location the transformational infrastructure to help enterprise change under the e -government start, and very good advancement has been made in Leicestershire in this respect. However, the transformational government events should now boost the focus on contemplating the enterprise objectives and obligations for transformation (at all grades - cantered and local), and in relative to this, the data content and its management. Shared services or effectiveness will not be accomplished except the data - as well as the expertise - are adept to integrate. Also, long period's advantages for the clientele will not be accomplished except sustainable administration answers are discovered for long period administration of the information.

In specific, the set about to administration of data should be granted very careful consideration. Shared Services by delineation entails distributing of information. The heritage and mind-set to distributing data at the front line - and in localized government usually - is very powerfully leveraged by ...