September 12 2008

Kennet may be home to some of the most impressive countryside in England, but the Council is looking very much to the future when it comes to providing today’s citizens with online services. The Council is spearheading the use of Toplevel’s ‘OfficeForms’ to give local people a better experience when interacting with the Council, as well as cutting the time, effort and cost of dealing with online requests for services.

Improved efficiency

Kennet’s Web Manager, Chris Franklin, explained: “eforms were already the backbone of our website, allowing the public to interact with us online, but we will now become even more efficient in dealing with requests in the future. The public will get an improved service, while we will be able to streamline internal processes and make our operations more cost-effective.”

Work on the development of the eforms is being carried out by Steve Drewett and Chris Duff. They were looking for forms that were easy to use, both for staff when creating the forms and for residents when filling them in. For instance, the chosen system allows users to save partially completed forms and return to them later; enables the Council to validate data while forms are being filled out so that errors can quickly and easily be corrected; and allows help and advice to be given to users tailored to specific circumstances. The chosen solution also needed to be easily integrated with current systems and to be cost-effective.

Initially the council is using the new eform system for housing and planning, where there are opportunities for quick improvements, but eventually the eforms will be used for all services.

Chris Duff explained: “The beauty of ‘OfficeForms’ is that it can handle everything from the simplest to the most complex forms. We’ve built all the forms we’re currently using ourselves, and found creating them to be very intuitive, while we’ve had no problems integrating them with our back-office systems in ways as complex as we need.”

Article reprinted by kind permission from Kennet Times. Read more about Kennet's improving online services.