Geographic Information Systems have provided society with the means to get a handle on location. Why is this important? Ian Rudd finds out

Location is fundamental to social, political and economic activity. For most of us, location means a building unless you are currently up a tree protesting against the next supermarket development! It could be a person's home, place of work or the clinic near their office at which they register to get some treatment. Most human activity can be associated or linked in some way to a building or property and those are normally associated with an address.

A local authority needs to plan for the provision of services, impact on the environment through housing and transportation, provision for human resource activity such as education and training, and the monitoring of economic activity. The aim is to create a model of reality that reflects all the parameters affecting the council's area.

Key to all this is the creation of a centralised land and property database in the form of BS7666 gazetteers. Correct addresses are the unique identifiers that, for example, enable benefit claims to be checked against Electoral Registration. If the link is missing because one system cannot access another, the model of reality becomes flawed, information remains in its silo and there are no joined-up benefits. In the absence of accurate, shared information, Councils can fail to maximise their revenues, fail to make the right planning decisions and much much more.

It's a people thing

If the march towards a national addressing standard has been fraught with problems, imagine what will happen with the next big thing: 'People'. The Government's decision to introduce a National Identity Cards scheme opens up enormous possibilities but the path ahead looks distinctly rocky.

At present there are 65m National Insurance numbers in circulation but only 48m eligible citizens. Many of us hold NHS medical cards and passports, and there are 40.8m licensed drivers in the DVLA database. These are big numbers indeed and difficult to make sense of amid the crossfire from civil liberties groups and those who fear escalating costs and another government IT infrastructure failure.

That apart, there is merit in attempting to gain tighter control on data about people and that these data should be collected at a local level. But it is a challenging prospect; just look at the amount of change involved:

• Postcode Address File: 100,000 changes each month
• ADDRESS-POINT: 50,000 addresses positioned each month
• Electoral Roll: One million people move each month
• Business Rates: 60,000 businesses change each month

It is possible to argue the numbers but the message is clear, data about people and places will degrade very quickly unless considerable efforts are made to maintain it. So there is a huge challenge ahead.

Look North

Let's take a look at what is going on north of the border for a clearer view of where this might all lead. The Scots in their inimitable way have a clearer vision of where they are going.

Customer First is a Scottish Executive-sponsored programme developed in partnership with local authorities and managed, with the support of CoSLA (Convention of Scottish Local Authorities) and SOLACE, (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers) under the direction of the Improvement Service.

It underpins the Scottish Executive's commitment to provide financial support for, and work in partnership with, all of Scotland's 32 Councils in order to:

• Deliver more convenient and responsive public services
• Encourage the take up of online access to services
• Ensure that at least 75% of core service requests can be dealt with at the first point of contact.

To achieve this, there is recognition that there needs to be a common approach. First and foremost, the customer must be put at the centre of the information processing cycle with the concept of a 'citizen's account'. A single set of electronic records for each customer is developed which provides a transaction history that can be used for the benefit of the customer and as a means of secure data sharing.

Customer First recognises the need for some common local infrastructure requirements coupled with a nationally- driven technical infrastructure to underpin the service improvements that are being driven by the local service providers, namely the local authorities.

All partners will work together to bring about an agreed model of electronic service delivery, recognising that the first point of contact for public services is likely to be the local authority. The requirement for a corporate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) infrastructure has been accepted as a pre-requisite for the contact centre approach. There are already draft schemas for both BS8766 for the implementation of the citizen's account and for BS7666 for implementing a compliant corporate address gazetteer. A 'first cut' of this gazetteer containing the definitive customer address is a component part of the CRM infrastructure and provides a critical part of the data set that forms the citizen's account both locally and nationally.

Along with their citizen's account, customers will have a single entitlement card and be able to access a public services network to ensure that essential changes to their personal details are handled correctly and efficiently. Customer First- a £34.55m two-year programme - will start to link local property gazetteers and begin work on a national data sharing infrastructure.

The Real Picture

Linking people together with where they live makes sense. A people gazetteer linked with a property gazetteer as a single integrated delivery system provides a real picture of service demand and usage. Local Authorities need to understand what assistance they might be required to give and what levels of demand might be expected. School numbers for example are always difficult to predict and are collated from several different sources. It is very difficult for Councils to predict demand unless they have a real picture of what is going on.

The diagram [on the right] tracks an extreme case where a single parent lives at home with her 18 year old daughter who already has two children of her own and another on the way. The level of interaction with citizen based services is high with many different agencies involved. If all of these could plug in to the central gazetteers of both buildings and people and made visible to each other the real picture would become available to all.

Buildings and property are better mapped than ever before, their age, address and location are known and referenced. At present it is possible to know who might pay a Council Tax bill for a particular property and it might be possible to cross refer that to the electoral roll for example, but it might not be so easy to figure out (except every Census) how many people live at a particular address, how many are of school age and what demands they may have of the Local Authority. Modern GIS combined with spatially enabled databases makes it possible to build the richer picture enabling much closer interaction with citizens, better and fairer service delivery and entitlements.

Developing the "Richer Picture" model of reality for a local authority is key to the planning and forecasting process. Linking in the citizen database (BS8766) to the address gazetteer (BS7666) to create one integrated solution is a fundamental way of achieving the major benefits of efficiencies and cost savings.

Ian Rudd is a business development consultant for Aligned Assets