Small Authority Delivers Big Success with Toplevel

"Mystery shoppers", national awards committees, and local citizens have all praised the transactional services on Adur District Council's website – delivered through a shared service centre solution from Toplevel.

Adur, on the English south coast, is a small district council – at just 16 square miles, serving a population of around 60,000, and with an annual budget in the region of £9 million. Despite its small size, Adur had big ambitions: to deliver as much "e" as possible when fulfilling the target in the national strategy for local government of 100% e-enablement of local government processes.

"Some councils met the target through email contacts or providing forms that had to be printed off and filled in by hand." explains Jeremy Beales, Head of Business Transformation at Adur District Council. "We wanted service users to be able to complete the whole of every transaction online: filling out forms on the website; submitting them electronically, except in those cases where legal constraints meant we needed a signature on hard copy; and making payments online, too."

With no ICT resources in house, and an ambitious project timetable, Adur was looking for a shared service solution from a partner that could be trusted to deliver. Toplevel was the natural choice. "Toplevel's shared services for local government transactions have enabled us to deliver an enormous amount very quickly, without having to train up lots of resource ourselves," Beales explains. "Toplevel had a range of transactions already available through its shared service that we could use, and a cost-effective and fast process for building and hosting any other transactional services we needed."

Toplevel also provided day-to-day management of the project to integrate transactions with e-payments, acting as the primary interface with the Government Gateway Payment Engine providing Adur's e-payments solution. "Toplevel delivered a very successful and effective project for us," Beales says. "They're proactive at suggesting ideas and help to solve problems, and they don't shirk taking ownership of technical issues and relationships with other suppliers."

With Toplevel's support, Adur's first service went live within a month. By the end of six months, the council had 125 services in place, some transactional, and was able to meet the strategic targets set by central government and so justify the ‘IEG’ grants.

But Toplevel didn't just help Adur move quickly. The high quality of the Toplevel solution implemented at Adur has been confirmed independently on a number of occasions. A panel of "mystery shoppers", who looked at various aspects of the council's operations, including its website, rated the clarity and ease of completion of its online transactions very highly. The council's website also scored strongly in a survey carried out by SOCITM, the society of local government IT managers, punching well above its weight for a small district council with a limited budget.

And Adur beat off stiff competition to win the Website Accessibility Award – for outstanding progress in using technologies to extend the delivery of information and services to traditionally hard-to-reach groups – in the 2006 Good Communications Awards and the Top Level applications were part of this.

However, Adur is not resting on its laurels. More recently, the authority has begun using Toplevel as the basis for capturing customer comments on the Local Development Framework. It is currently looking at integrating its existing range of Toplevel-enabled transactional services with its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and some of its back-office systems. It is also considering how it can use Toplevel to improve and support internal processes. "Toplevel's library of standard transactions, that we can either use straight out of the box or adapt, will help us move forward quickly, even where we have totally paper based processes in place currently," Beales points out.

Over the longer term, Adur will benefit from the economies of scale that come from working in partnership with other councils in their area who are also with Toplevel, and from leveraging the work done by other Toplevel customers. These economies will allow Adur to provide robust, high-quality transactional services for citizens and businesses at a lower cost – and with far fewer management headaches – than would be possible if each council acted alone.