Solving Council Problems with Technology

Technology provides solutions to many councils' problems.

20:10 25 April 2018

Technology plays a great role in improving local and central government services. One proof is the creation of a single gov.uk website in 2011, a project that has changed most people interaction with government forever. Each page in the website was designed to resolve a specific problem, which improved overall customer satisfaction.

 

Technology can also be used to gather data needed to formulate solutions to challenges that affect members of the public. Using technology, such data can be efficiently gathered in a timely manner.

 

The head of the local government ombudsman said that this is a problem as senior managers suffered from a lack of external intelligence. He said that many chief executives “seize upon the complaints evidence” as a means of “triangulating what they’re being told by staff with what they’re being told by external experience”. Essentially, a council manager’s feedback loop currently happens weeks after a complaint has been made and something has gone wrong. This loop as well as response time could be improved if decision makers are able to immediately get a hold of the data they need and implement changes right away.

 

According to the authors at Public Digital Ltd: “The web traffic data from your existing websites is a good place to start, not least to help identify how many of the thousands of web pages maintained by your organisation are visited by almost nobody. Data from call centres is also rich with insight about what your users are failing to find out from your websites.”