Best Practice Group PLC: The Only Guarantee in IT

CASE STUDY: Achieving Excellence in Government Services.
North East Derbyshire District Council has made local government history by becoming the first Council in England and Wales to make the impressive leap from Weak to Excellent performance according to the Audit Commissions Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA).

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CLIENT
North East Derbyshire District Council.

PROBLEM
To embark on a programme to make
their service environment more efficient and
customer-centric.

SOLUTION
Best Practice Group helps to deliver a solution on-time and on-budget.

RESULT
BPG successfully negotiated an exit from the legacy contracts and lost no time in sourcing a new Revenue & Benefits system supplier.

HOW IT HAPPENED
According to Mike Goodwin, Deputy Chief Executive for NEDDC, 2004 was a watershed for NEDDC. This was the year the council decided, in response to government mandates, to embark on a programme to make their service environment more efficient and customer-centric. As he puts it: “We decided to start with the biggest challenge, reasoning that if we could achieve greater efficiencies in our benefit services - an area that has such a major impact on the lives of our most deprived customers - then we could also succeed in the other departments.”

To realise its objective, NEDDC decided to invest in a major system upgrade to handle customer information electronically and to enable the public to interact with council services via the Internet. “The time was right to introduce radical new technology because our old legacy system was tottering and we had to replace it by April 2007, after which the vendor was withdrawing support.”