Cotswold council in compliance leadership

District Council implements content management system for e-government compliance in online transactions

Cotswold District Council (CDC) has joined the front runners in the pursuit of e-government compliance. Its implementation of a transactional content management system puts it among only 38 of 468 councils achieving transactional status as defined by SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management).

The council's transactional services to date include the facility for the public to add to an interactive database of events and a 'Report It' facility that prompts council tax payers for the information needed to report problems with council services effectively - for example, faulty streetlights.

Sarah Burslem, e-government manager at CDC, says the council plans to deliver licensing on-line, such as taxi licensing and liquor licensing. It also plans to make possible online planning applications.

Burslem says the decision on which services to implement online first was based on the offline usage of that service: "If we are getting a lot of telephone enquiries about something we put it on to the web to save money." The site works with other government systems and is level III WAI accessible, allowing disabled users to access information as easily as non-disabled users.

The council selected Cyprus-based NQcontent to develop the web content management environment that is designed to allow staff who are not information professionals to add and update material. David Pennington, web master at CDC, says it has been straightforward to set up a content authorisation workflow process: "There are 35-40 content authors. Each service has a manager who authorises content produced by people in that service." He adds that NQcontent was selected because the user interface of its content management system looked very usable.