For a number of years, the strong message coming from the Better Connected studies has been that getting the website right is fundamental to achieving major savings for the public sector.

We have the skills and the tools to help you achieve a website that delivers for your council - that is a website that gives real value in terms of the services it delivers to your customers and the savings it makes for the council. We cover all that is needed, summarised below:

The website is there to earn its keep - if you are going to spend an average of £50-£100k a year on keeping the website up to scratch (and if you're spending more, look very carefully at the costs), you need to be assured that you are achieving at least 5-10 times this in direct benefits and savings - in other words, the website should be saving you at least £1 million a year.

For many councils, integrating the website with the back-office systems can be seen as complicated and expensive - in some cases giving rise to estimated costs of £1 million of more - but it doesn't need to be complicated or expensive.

Creating an effective website for your council is not easy - and certainly isn't something you can leave to the IT service, or to corporate communications section to deliver for you. Creating a website that delivers real value to the organisation, and real savings in cost takes a corporate effort and requires the following essential elements:

Putting the customer at the heart of your strategy for becoming the Council of the Future is absolutely vital.

The new coalition government promises a very different approach to public services and the relationship between state and individual, but will be grappling with a huge budget deficit. What are the implications for the management of information, the effective use of technology and efficient service delivery in the public sector? Are the prospects grim, or is there in fact an opportunity to do things better and save costs?

Saving substantial sums of money must be at the forefront of every public sector manager’s thinking, and ICT is the enabler for almost every solution from customer self-service and shared services to flexible working and radical service redesign. The promise is there, but how to guarantee the benefits?

In an effort to make “Learning” more focused on the specific needs of our membership, we have reviewed our course offerings and launched a completely new programme for the next 12 months. The new programme offers a wider range of course, at more locations, and with more detail provided on each, to help you judge better who to nominate for the course, and the likely benefits to be achieved from it.

"Once processes are more efficient, the realisation of benefits, eg cash savings, needs to be managed to ensure actual achievement"