A number of government mandates have come the way of local councils in recent years: the Freedom of Information Act, the requirement to make local services available online, and the e-government interoperability framework, which requires unstructured information to be tagged according to an agreed standard. And like other service providers, councils now have to comply with the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act to make web sites accessible to disabled people.

With 350 employees, and responsibility for 78,000 residents, Runnymede Borough Council in Surrey decided on a two-stage process to meet the requirements. In 2001, it implemented Vignette’s integrated document management (IDM) system, which enabled it to introduce automated workflow processes and to categorise information more clearly.

A large proportion of the paper documentation that is now received by the council, such as correspondence about benefits and council tax, is scanned in and dropped straight into the workflow process, allowing staff to view and deal with the documents electronically. Staff working on a particular case can see all the information on that case grouped together, held in a virtual folder.

The second stage, now under way, is implementation of Vignette Access Portal (VAP), which includes a content management module that will be integrated with the IDM. The council wanted not just to meet government requirements to put services online, but to change the way staff worked, says Nigel Watson, Runnymede’s head of IT.

‘We were a very traditional authority in terms of working in silos, and we were looking to break out of that, to bring the information together and to match it up, and to provide a joined-up service to the public,’ he says.

The introduction of VAP has allowed the council to consolidate several internet and intranet sites into one. It can now provide users, through the web site, the same information to which staff have access.

The availability of services online has seen a large increase in the numbers using those services, rather than a transfer from the old channels to the new one.

‘We do not get the full benefit a commercial organisation might,’ says Watson. On the other hand, he says: ‘Clearly the democratic process is working.’