Bath and North East Somerset Council (B&NESC) was seeking to assess the internal support and development mechanisms available to the Council and its ability to meet the changing needs of the organisation in respect of its Website. Socitm Consulting was engaged to help the authority with this review.

In tough times, the frequent recourse of hard-pressed management in local authorities is to top-slice departmental budgets, perhaps with some ring-fencing of sensitive areas. The problem with this is it impacts morale across the organisation, puts customers on the look-out for falls in service quality, and above all focuses staff attention on maintaining services as they are.

Lancashire County Council's (LCC) web presences are key parts of both the Customer Access Strategy and the Business Improvement Programme. The council acknowledged that web presences have the potential to deliver significant savings in the way the council does business with its customers.

LCC recognized that their web presence was in need of revision in order to introduce a stable platform and solid information architecture. This was needed to maximize their return on investment and provide a base for continuous improvement in customer service. They decided to divide the project into several stages and requested the help of Soctim Consulting in conjunction with Socitm Insight, to help them do this.

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.

Regular IT Health Checks and penetration testing are necessary to protect your network, website and individual devices against external and internal threats. Compliance and good governance aside, however, penetration testing can often come up with surprising results. Socitm Consulting's IT security partners, Encription Ltd, have been performing â?~top of the treeâ?T quality penetration testing for several years, and have uncovered some alarming cases.

Central Bedfordshire Council seek help from Socitm Consulting to improve their Web Site for users and staff and in turn be reviewed by Socitm Insight as part of its annual Better Connected survey.       

Self Service is one of the most effective ways to achieve year on year budget savings and improved customer satisfaction. Doing it badly, however – offering inappropriate self-service options, for example, or failing to understand how customers will use the website – represents a major waste of resources and turns customers away.

"Web and intranet sites which enable customers and staff to complete transactions/interactions online. Full integration with back office systems"