Swindon is one the fastest growing unitary councils in the UK. The council works in partnership with the private, public and voluntary sectors within the local community to serve the people of Swindon.

PROBLEM

With the advent of the e-Government initiative, Local Authorities are having to reassess the way they operate, breaking down the various departmental barriers that have arisen over time. Barriers exist not just within authorities but also between authorities and external organisations that represent a part of the delivery process of providing services to the citizen.

In many organisations different departments have often implemented a mixture of tools and technology. Different vendors have different strengths and capabilities driven by the history of the company, the markets they serve, and the demands of their users. It is a common adage that one should use the 'right tool for the job'. True integration enables organisations to use the right tool for the job while eliminating complicated updating procedures of the same data throughout the enterprise.

Swindon Borough Council was a prime example of a Local Authority where each department was running different, independent software. To comply with the e-Government standards Swindon were looking for a software solution that would amass the council's disparate systems into a single property database.

SOLUTION

Swindon Borough Council focused on synchronising key Council Systems to their corporate LLPG. The intention being to deliver up-to-date, accurate information to these systems so that the functions they perform use an accurate address, defined to the British BS7666 Standard. Initially Swindon focused on CRM (customer relationship management), environmental health, land charges, Education and Planning (with Council Tax to come next).

To achieve the sharing of property based information among business applications, Aligned Assets provided software solutions for use in industrial strength database environments such as Oracle and MS SQL Server. These software products work seamlessly together and interweave the disparate systems to enable a single property based database.

Swindon Borough Council are now well placed to provide regular, daily updates to core departmental systems such as Education, Planning or Council Tax.

One of the major challenges faced by local authorities is to distribute and deliver LLPG data to the recipients and systems in a timely and accurate fashion. Utilising the power of iExchange, Swindon were able to overcome such an obstacle. iExchange was designed with scalability and flexibility in mind, offering Swindon the chance to realise the full potential of its corporate data, whilst removing some of the departmental barriers which were inhibiting the full implementation of e-Government.

"Having successfully used Aligned Assets' solutions at several other local Authorities, it was the natural choice for a tool to overcome the complexities I encountered at Swindon, explains Kristin Woodland, Highway Information Manager for Swindon Borough Council.

"Swindon are one of the fastest growing Unitary Authorities with up to 15 daily changes. With the very cheerful and understanding support and assistance of Aligned Assets and their overall gazetteer products we have completed the creation of both our street and property gazetteers in record time.

Since the full implementation of our gazetteers we are now integrating them into our corporate information strategy, linking a new major system every month. The investment in getting them produced is really paying dividends and showing the benefits of e-Government."