Council puts public trust first

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets says the prime objective of its £4m infrastructure project is to win public confidence.

Egovernment champion Eric Bohl says citizens won't have confidence in the system unless there is effective IT to deliver fully-automated services behind the flashy website and call centre.

The council is using Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) software in a scheme that started in August 2001. It has installed and built a call centre and an interactive website. An extranet links the council to external contractors.

The systems went live at the end of February and around 30 per cent of council services are now available electronically.

But first impressions are vital when launching new online services, according to Bohl.

"We're only putting transactional services on the website when the whole process is completely automated, because the risk of turning people off is too high. If people use the technology and don't get a fast response, they'll lose trust and won't use the service again," he said.

An automated service dealing with removal of bulky items of rubbish such as sofas and refrigerators is one of the council's showcase initiatives. It used to take five different pieces of paper to progress from an initial customer call to the van driving away with the sofa. Using the new infrastructure the details from the call are sent automatically via the extranet to the contractors' systems. The only paper is the driver's pick-up sheet.

"Part of the difficulty is that such a huge organisation has to manage a lot of transactions, so there's a lot of paper - and every time a piece of paper is generated there's a risk of delay," said Bohl.

Now the infrastructure is in place, additional services can be added relatively easily, he adds.

"We were a long way behind other authorities when we started, but now we're expecting to hit the government targets for online services a year early," Bohl said.

The next service to be added at Tower Hamlets will be for streetlight maintenance.

Administrative savings in just one of the council's five directorates will pay back the investment in five years, says Bohl.