Background

With its southern borders only 30 miles from London, the County of Bedfordshire is the gateway to the Midlands and East Anglia. The County Council provides services for the area covered by the three districts of Bedford, Mid Bedfordshire and South Bedfordshire. This area has a population of about 390,000, with a fifth living in the historic town of Bedford on the River Great Ouse.

The Transformation Challenge

In 2006, the County Council commissioned a package of work to define how best the Council might move forward in terms of transforming its customer service proposition, with particular emphasis on Web facilities.

The previous web site design had not been significantly enhanced since 1999. As a result of this, it lacked functionality in respect of enabling customers to “self service”. Web content had grown since the initial design, and the site had a low level of usability, was cumbersome to maintain and did not deliver the level of accessibility expected of a local authority (i.e. minimum AA compliance).

After careful consideration of the proposals presented to the council, it was broadly acknowledged that there were opportunities to deliver a number of transformation initiatives in house. These included:

• Acquisition and implementation of a new content management system which would facilitate the delivery of up to date and relevant information on the site.
• A major re-design exercise that would address the overall look, feel and usability of the site.
• Accessibility enhancements to ensure compliance with current industry standards.

The Solution

The main issue for Bedfordshire County Council was how confident we were as to the suppliers' capabilities to implement the selected system, and migrate our content within very tight timescales.

The council found that Genetic’s project management process met up to the challenge, and we were able to cultivate a good working relationship (partnership), which proved invaluable then, and has continued to be so, even after the implementation.

The end result was that we were able to acquire a content management system, implement it, migrate content into it, re-design the website and launch it within a period of 12 weeks.

This achievement was attributable to the Rapid Application Development (RAD) element of the Contensis system, its ease of use, scalability, as well as Genetics’ responsiveness, and knowledge of local government requirements.

The Future

The Contensis system represented excellent value for money at the point of procurement.

The council continues to realise returns on its investment, and we are continuing to work in partnership with Genetics to deliver additional functionality and web facilities including automatic metadata creation (currently underway), an Intranet (nearing completion) and Extranet (scheduled for the later part of this year).