Microsoft's research has identified ten common key challenges that face local governments worldwide as shown in the diagram below. What is interesting is that whilst local governments around the world operate indifferent cultural contexts and scale, the following challenges arise consistently in spite of these differences.

Click on the icons below to see how Greg Clark views these challenges and how technology can make a difference to the quality of place and quality of life, when influenced by quality ICT services.

• Improve Customer Service
• Enabling Compliance & Accountability
• Caring for the Environment
• Improving Social Care
• Enabling Collaboration and Shared Services
• Sustaining the Local Economy
• Raising Educational Standards

Each of these challenges are discussed in more detail and we provide case study examples on the following pages which show how Microsoft and our partners have helped to address these.