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Bracknell Forest Borough Council
Overview
Bracknell Forest Borough Council is a local authority in the UK located in central Berkshire, approximately 30 miles from central London. It is a unitary authority that controls services including strategic planning, highways, education, social services, libraries and museums.
Challenge
Bracknell Forest Borough Council wanted to be the first local government that provided a secure Web portal for its 110,000 citizens to access public services. This would be a distinction that would put it at the forefront of the UK’s Modernizing Government initiative, which requires that local authorities bring all their Citizens online by 2005. The trouble was that developing such a system to handle the five million annual contacts was beyond their internal capabilities.
Solution
The Council sought out partners Novell and Metastorm, two companies that had implemented business process management (BPM) programs for other municipalities. The Bracknell Forest system was tailored so that citizens can electronically get information about services including refuse collection, repair of street lights and paying local taxes by using a personal, secure account. They also can offer online comments about development projects underway in the local area.
The beauty of BPM in this system is that citizen requests are automatically routed to appropriate locations, a transparent feature that is a core element of the Metastorm BPM™ application. For government staff, less time is spent on answering requests by telephone or mail and appropriate action is taken in much less time.
Results
The Council is indeed the first such local government to offer a secure Web portal to its citizens. And they are using it: in the first two weeks after the site went live, 400 people logged on to access the planning applications tracking system of the tax payment system. Moreover, 40 percent of individuals access the site outside of normal office hours, so their productivity during work is higher.
“There is no longer the need for citizens to stand in queues at the payment office or spend time on the telephone asking for clarification,” says Gordon Mitchell, chief executive of the Council.
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