Applications focused on business need

"Having corporate and service-specific applications to meet the business needs and comply with interoperability standards"

As councils move towards their vision of the Council of the Future, they will reach a point where the current portfolio of service specific applications (the social care case management system, the environmental health system, the housing management system, etc) will be in conflict with the emerging information architecture, and something has to be done to ensure that the requirements for a well-managed information base take precedence over the internal structures of indvidual software applications. Key to this is the vision that all core information will be held just once - so the names and addresses of local citizens and of their families who are in receipt of services, the names and addresses of local businesses, would be held in a central data structure, and all applications which require such information would cross-refer to this central point.

Achieving this position of infromation being "held once, used many times" is not straightforward, but there are tools and approaches available to help - tools such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Architecture - but ultimately, some older legacy systems will simply have to be replaced with newer systems in which interoperability is more readily achievable.