Hampshire County Council invests £30m a year in IT, which serves a broad range of internal departments, 30,000 employees and a number of partner agencies.

Information is crucial for the effective provision of many council services. A contact centre that can respond to the public’s many and various requests, and the impact of the Freedom of Information Act, are just two of the imperatives driving the authority to improve the way its staff and the wider public can access information.

Jos Creese, the council’s chief information officer, says that information is a critical part of the authority’s activity.

“The quality of information affects our ability to provide the best possible services to the public, especially our care for vulnerable people,” he says. “It is also information that allows managers to function as effectively as possible in managing service performance and efficiency.”

Creese is quick to dispel any notion that the public sector is a technological poor relation of its private sector counterparts. He insists that the skills and requirements for his organisation ­ annual budget of £1.3bn ­ are every bit as demanding as a business driven by a profit incentive.

“Pressures on IT to support improved information management require us to have a high level of skills in our information management technology areas ­ particularly around an IBM tool set ­ as well as strong business analysis and business process management skills,” he says.

Creese says the complexity of information integration is probably greater in the public sector than the private sector.

“Typically a large private sector organisation will support a relatively small number of business streams, often around individual clients,” he says.

“With a large unitary authority or a county council you are supporting many hundred different business streams across many very disparate areas, and yet that information still has to be shared in a meaningful way. As such, standard marketplace information and document management systems do not necessarily do the job, and greater flexibility is needed in how they are used and integrated with other systems.”

Hampshire has taken what Creese describes as a broad view of how to improve information management across the organisation, an approach that has led it to invest in what he enigmatically describes as corporate technologies.

The IT team is also investigating how to simplify the information interface and establish straightforward links between data sets and information systems.

“The issue for most organisations is that information has traditionally been locked into databases associated with individual systems and functions,” says Creese.

“It is a high priority for us to decouple this in such a way that information can be aggregated and shared across different systems to improve the way we operate ­ especially frontline service delivery and our contact centre strategy.”