Case studies

• City of Bergen

  City Government Moves to Efficient, Environment-Friendly Paperless Meetings

  City commissioners in Bergen, Norway, used to bring as many as 500 pages of paper documents to each of their biweekly meetings. Although case managers created the documents electronically, commission secretaries made at least 20 copies of each case for meeting attendees. In response to a challenge to reduce the city’s impact on the environment, the City of Bergen moved to paperless meetings using a document management and storage solution built on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Office OneNote® 2007. Bergen developed this new solution, called 360° Politician’s Workplace, in partnership with Microsoft and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Software Innovation. With its digital workplace solution, the city expects to save more than 3 million sheets of paper, eliminate 43 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and save NOK 2,400,000 (U.S.$366,233) per year.

• City of Edinburgh Council

  City of Edinburgh Council Works Towards Delivering Smart City Vision with Infrastructure Optimisation Model

  Based in Scotland’s capital city, the City of Edinburgh Council provides a range of services from more than 70 principal locations to 480,000 citizens, businesses, and organisations in Edinburgh and Lothian. In 2005, the City of Edinburgh Council embarked on a service-led IT transformation programme with its outsourcing partner BT. The excellent partnership work created a virtuous circle with reductions in service costs leading to efficiencies, which then generated further opportunities, leading to more service improvements.

• Leeds Learning Network

  City-Wide Learning Technology Raises the Quality of Education in Schools and Beyond

  The city of Leeds is moving to the forefront of education in the United Kingdom by creating a local learning network. This connects 259 schools and more than 100,000 employees and students to deliver new educational and economic opportunities throughout the metropolitan borough. The Leeds Learning Network (LLN) uses Microsoft® Learning Gateway, based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to improve the quality of teaching, raise standards, and provide more learning opportunities for school pupils and adults across the city. By providing a standardised infrastructure to support classroom and community learning technologies, the LLN reduces management requirements at individual schools and supports fast, cost-effective deployment of the latest learning tools.

• London Borough of Harrow

  Software Consultancy Helps London Borough Improve Citizen Service

  Asidua delivers world-class integration, software, and consultancy services to government and corporate clients worldwide. The Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner specializes in application and data integration (ADI), and focuses on helping clients improve both their business bottom line and their service to customers. Asidua was hired by the London Borough of Harrow to design and implement a solution to improve the borough’s internal business processes and its service to citizens. The Asidua solution was built on a suite of Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, and it has helped the borough increase employee productivity, improve the quality of customer service provided to Harrow residents, and ensure consistency of records across multiple borough offices.

• West Lothian Council

  Regional Government Boosts Quality of Services, Cuts Costs up to 80 Percent

  Like local and regional governments in many parts of the world, West Lothian Council in the United Kingdom needed a better, more cost-effective way to provide social care services if it was going to meet its ever-increasing needs within the limits of its budget. The Council integrated the previously isolated case management systems of its various agencies using technology from VisionWare and Microsoft. For the first time, authorized agency personnel can see all relevant information on the individuals they serve, enabling them to make better and faster care decisions that enhance the quality of life for West Lothian residents, while reducing costs. The elderly live with dignity in their own homes up to two years longer than before; the time spent by agency personnel in meetings has been cut in half; and the solution that makes this possible costs up to 80 percent less than alternatives.

• The Portuguese Municipality of Matosinhos

  The Portuguese municipality of Matosinhos links back-office data with online service delivery to make life easier for citizens and civil servants.

  

  The project to improve city services became known as SIMPLIFE (Simplify). It focused on three core areas: Public Managers – understanding who the citizens are and what they are requesting; Citizens – informing them of the services available and how to request them; Civil Servants - providing the best service through the most appropriate channels. “The challenge for us was huge. Matosinhos is known as an innovative city, but we had many problems with the interaction between citizens and the municipality,” says Oliveira. “Our main goal was to see what motivated the citizens to go to the city hall. We identified over 2,000 different reasons to go and talk to the municipality.” By solving the three core areas of SIMPLIFE, Matosinhos hoped to improve the decision support for elected officials and public managers -to improve staff productivity and increase citizen satisfaction.

• The city of Pattaya, Thailand

  Citizen Service Platform Enhances Call Center

  Blue Intelligence is an award-winning Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner based in Bangkok, Thailand, offering experienced consultation, implementation, and support services for customer relationship management both in Thailand and in other countries. The Pattaya City Call Center, a one stop information center for local residents and tourists, wanted a comprehensive customer relationship management solution to manage its daily influx of calls and enhance its business operations. Blue Intelligence deployed a unified solution based on the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform (CSP) for the call center in October 2006. The solution enhances the responsiveness of Pattaya City Call Center agents, reducing caller waiting time by up to 98 percent. Microsoft Dynamics® CRM is a key element of Microsoft CSP which allows the call center to capture and utilize information easily, increase work efficiencies, and gain actionable insights.

• Energy Services Regulatory Authority, Portugal

  Microsoft solution makes it easier for ERSE to oversee energy markets Situation

  When Portuguese energy industry agents became part of the Iberian energy trading market in July 2007, ERSE was looking to rapidly evolve its technology platform to be able to oversee pricing and price evolution in real time. The solution chosen was built entirely on Microsoft platforms and technology. This technology platform responds to ERSE's need to expand its Market Supervisory activity, which is critical for the proper functioning of the market and to increase trust in the agents, especially from consumers. As a result, in 2007 ERSE created the Market Supervision Unit to reinforce the organisation's supervision of the organised markets as a priority strategy for ERSE.

• Sant Andreu de la Barca Town Council

  Spanish Municipality Streamlines Services with New Document Management System

  The Sant Andreu de la Barca Municipality in Catalonia, Spain, wanted to modernise its administration and document management systems to provide better citizen-centric services to a growing population. After assessing several specialised solutions, the municipality decided to deploy Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, with consultancy advice from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Netpoint Solutions. As a result, council officers have enhanced messaging and real-time communications and adopted new and more productive ways of working with collaborative Web sites. The public can now access council information more easily because council decision-making is much more transparent. And developers, by using the Microsoft .NET Framework, can reuse code and bring new services to market much faster than before.

• South Wales Fire and Rescue

  Access to Critical Information in Real Time Helps Firefighters Save Time and Lives

  South Wales Fire and Rescue, one of the largest fire services in the United Kingdom, responds to about 60,000 emergency calls a year. Firefighters rely on detailed information to prepare fully for emergency situations, but, until recently, much of this data was paper based. The service worked with Microsoft® Gold Certified Partners Computacenter and Trinity Expert Systems to build an intranet portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003. The portal offers all fire service employees access to detailed information from any station across the region. This integrates with a mobile, in-cab solution running the Windows® 2000 operating system. By accessing critical information on these devices, firefighters are better prepared before arriving onsite. This can save lives, giving precious insight into possible hazards for fire crews and members of the public.

• States of Jersey

  Island Government Implements Customer Service Solution in Just Four Months to Contribute to U.S. $35 Million Savings Target

  The States of Jersey governs an island country of about 88,000 citizens. The States of Jersey wants to offer the Island’s citizens better, simpler and cheaper public services through a one-stop shop environment using a customer service and telephone centre (CSC) and a transactional Web site. Working with Microsoft® Consulting Services (MSC) and Microsoft Gold Certified Partners CIBER UK and Team Knowledge, Jersey implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 with an intuitive scripting solution in just four months. States of Jersey staff can be redeployed to the CSC quickly with straightforward training because the solution uses familiar Microsoft technologies.

• City of Camden, New Jersey

  Camden, New Jersey implements Mayor's Dashboard

  

  City implements Contact Camden and the Mayor's Digital Dashboard systems to help ensure quality service for residents, as well as accountability and enhanced collaboration across City departments.