Hedra Consortium

Delivering joined-up customer services requires all parts of your organisation to work together, share data and contribute to designing, delivering and supporting high quality services. This presents a real challenge to a single organisation, but that challenge is multiplied even further when considering shared service arrangements to provide a single ëfront-officeí for multi-agency customer services. The problems are not just technical; cultures must be considered, business processes harmonised and accountabilities clarified.

Support services face a real test in having to balance the demands for immediate efficiency with the requirement to play their full role as a partner in citizen services delivery. Structural reform, with increasing consideration of shared services, also brings both opportunities and challenges.

The public sector faces some unique challenges in the areas of information and document management. These challenges range from the need to ensure compliance with legislation, manage information risks and yet allow information to be shared to enable the efficient delivery of joined-up services. Delivery of EDRM and related Information Management solutions for example Content Management solutions are not just technology challenges ñ they represent significant change programmes. As such this makes it essential that providers of solutions genuinely understand the public sector ñ technological excellence alone is not enough.

Public bodies require web solutions that range from informational web sites through to major e-government portals delivering complex multi-channel transactional services. Those solutions must be designed to meet the specific needs of their target audience, which often includes segments of the population that are not conventional web users.

Most public service organisations have legacy bespoke applications and associated data repositories. There is an ongoing need to maintain and upgrade these applications as well as a requirement for the design and build of new bespoke applications. In addition, the increase in joined-up working and customer choice puts further pressure on integrating these applications and making their data available across a wider range of access channels. These applications and databases use a wide variety of technologies, standards and architectures and as such there is a need to have a broad technical capability covering all aspects of the systems development lifecycle.