IT: putting the United in United Kingdom

All over the UK, public sector organisations are using technology to modernise their operations, cut costs and boost efficiency.

Below is a thumbnail survey by vnunet.com's sister publication Computing of the best from the country's regions, offering a glimpse of what's going on out there.

LONDON

Islington Borough Council
The £400,000 'Islington Local' broadband project uses lasers and Ethernet cabling to deliver super-fast internet access, video-on-demand and access to council services via digital TV.

The aim of the project is to provide internet access to a wider section of the community and, in the initial three-month pilot, 87 per cent of people used the service. If the council can secure additional funding it will roll the service out across the whole area.

London Grid for Learning
This project is a collaboration between 33 local education authorities to provide broadband access to schools across the capital.

Launched in July, it provides internet access as well as a range of electronic teaching materials such as videos and advanced graphics. Schools connected to the network see cost savings of up to 90 per cent in internet connection charges, and can opt for bandwidth ranging from 2Mbps to 100Mbps, according to their needs.

Ten million metres of fibre optic cable have been laid to create the core rings of the network, and another four million metres will be needed to complete the project.

Brent Borough Council
The council's PathFinder project was intended to develop a customer relationship management (CRM) system tailored to meet public sector needs. Council staff worked with Deloitte & Touche to customise the Onyx CRM application.

Public sector organisations tend to deal with a whole range of issues rather than a single product or service, and Brent offers no fewer than 108. The finished product is available to all other public sector bodies and costs £31,000 for seven seats and installation.

THE NORTH

Cumbria and Lancashire Education Online (Cleo)
Using £3.5m in grants from the Department for Education and Skills, the Cleo Regional Broadband Consortium has built its own wireless and DSL infrastructure to provide local schools with 10Mbps connections, for a fraction of the price it would cost from a commercial supplier.

Cleo is now aiming to sell off excess bandwidth to local businesses. It has a contract to supply the region's libraries, is tendering for the council's wide area network, and has its first private customer in a small business in Penrith.

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council
Tameside is the most e-enabled local authority in the country. It is committed to delivering all 767 of its services electronically by 2003 - two years ahead of the government target - and about 80 per cent are already available.

The key to Tameside's success has been business re-engineering: scrapping individual departments in favour of service units.

York NHS Trust:
York's IP telephony project will make clinical software available on Compaq iPaq hand-helds over the hospital's wireless local area network, so that doctors can access test results, clinical letters such as referrals, and ultimately electronic patient records from the bedside.

The second phase of the project, which should be completed by the end of the year, is to implement voice over IP software so that the hand-helds also work as telephones. The devices will be used by all 200 staff.

Cheshire Police
The force's multimillion pound Covert Operation IT project, due to go live in 2003, will help boost efficiency and streamline the processing of intelligence information, keeping track of informers and authorisation of undercover operations.

THE SOUTH

Southampton City Council
The £1m PathFinder project was to develop a Public Key Infrastructure authentication system to give residents a certified digital identity stored on a smartcard. It will authorise access to online council services.

To demonstrate the concept, the pilot application allows council tenants to report and track repairs over the internet.

The first five kiosks went live in April, but the aim is for the service to be accessible from citizens' home PCs.

Future developments will focus on additional applications including electronic voting and online payments.

The Planning Inspectorate
The Planning Portal pools information and services from 430 local authorities, up to 15 government departments and agencies, and more than 1,000 planning agents to provide a single point of contact to meet the needs of citizens, businesses, local planning authorities and planning professionals.

The site offers the full range of services needed to make planning applications online, including buying a map, paying for the application, and accessing the development plans fundamental to planning policy.

Suffolk County Council
The iSuffolk PathFinder project is the UK's first satellite-delivered e-government service using the Sky Interactive digital TV platform and the UK Online portal run by the Office of the e-Envoy.

Initially the site provides static information, but transactional services such as council tax payment are scheduled for the autumn. The advantage of satellite TV delivery is that it has 100 per cent coverage in rural areas.

South East of England Regional Development Agency (Seeda)
A five-point plan drawn up by Seeda for the regeneration of Hastings puts broadband connectivity on a par with transportation links. The £400m scheme was approved by the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions in March and will go ahead over the next 10 years.

THE MIDLANDS

NHS Shared Services
University Hospital Birmingham will be the first trial site for a £325m project to replace the NHS's 28 payroll and 39 human resources systems with a single national system.

The project will provide staff with a single electronic record that will follow them as they move about the country. Design and implementation should be completed by spring next year with full national rollout by May 2005.

Wiltshire Police
The force is replacing the bobby's notebook with a PDA as part of an overhaul of its IT infrastructure. The first trials, that will give police on the street access to station systems at all times, goes live this month.

The force is also building a data warehouse of information from legacy systems so that officers can search for all data in the same place. It will be accessed from a desktop portal also due to go live this month. Electronic archiving and online forms are also being piloted.

Birmingham City Council
By introducing service level agreements and performance management capabilities, the council's helpdesk, supporting 3,000 users at more than 100 locations, has improved efficiency and guaranteed quality of service.

Before the project, 68 per cent of the 1,000 calls the helpdesk received every month were resolved in less than two days. Now, with the same number of people, staff handle just over 3,000 calls a month, and resolve half of them in less than an hour. The project should pay for itself in less than two years.

SCOTLAND

Scottish Assembly
The e-procurement service launched in March allows public sector staff to order goods from approved suppliers direct from the desktop. The service is hosted so that it can be accessed through a standard browser, causing the minimum of upset to users.

It offers goods from a wide range of suppliers: health sector buyers, for example, can choose from 36,000 items offered by 515 different suppliers.

The aim is to streamline purchasing and achieve better value for the taxpayer. The Highland Council, East Scotland Water and NHS Highland have signed up for the service.

NHS Tayside
Scotland's most advanced NHS trust has spent £1m to meet government targets for electronic health records two years before the 2004 deadline.

The health records repository, due to launch in November, will provide a single record accessible by any healthcare worker in the area's 72 GP practices, five major hospitals and 12 cottage hospitals, using the trust's existing virtual private network.

A lightweight directory access protocol server will manage the 6,000 passwords, giving users a single entry point to multiple NHS systems according to their requirements.

Northern and Fife Constabularies
Two Highland forces have collaborated to develop a thin-client version of the Holmes 2 national incident management application.

Holmes 2 is used to organise, process and cross-reference data from big operations, and has been rolled out across almost all the UK's police forces since its launch in 1999.

By developing a thin-client version of the application, forces can set up remote incident rooms, dialling into Holmes 2 using the wide area network and reducing traffic on the network because processing is all carried out on the central server.

WALES

NHS Wales
The Digital All-Wales Network (Dawn), which links the country's hospitals, is being upgraded to broadband at a cost of £20m. The Dawn2 network will provide up to 1,000 broadband connections linking 550 hospitals, GPs and home workers.

The ICT Foundation Programme, funded by the National Assembly along with health authorities and local health groups, will reimburse GPs the cost of the connection to Dawn2.

Surgeries will also be able to buy desktop hardware and standardised Windows-based software at a fraction of the usual price.

Welsh Development Agency (WDA)
Over the past three years the WDA has spent £500,000 on developing a customer relationship management system to ensure a single view of all the activities the agency is undertaking with its clients, and to allow its worldwide staff to share information.

The system also provides the management information submitted to the Department of Trade and Industry every month for incorporation into national statistics.

Phase two was completed in May this year, adding support capabilities including a consultants' database. Phase three, adding functionality to capture and measure the results of marketing campaigns, is due to go live in November.