Microsoft Citizen Service Platform: Helping Your Local Authorities

Mark Smith, 09 January 2011

Kiwis are being served by 78 local authorities all around New Zealand, composed of 11 Regional Councils, 12 City Councils, 54 District Council, and the Auckland Council. Imagine the problems they face in providing essential services. What challenges do they have to overcome in order to get their job done? The work of our local authorities affect our daily lives, may it be our social, economic, environmental, or cultural well-being. Now Microsoft, with the input of government customers and partners worldwide, have created the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, which is a solution set that helps local, regional, and national governments solve their unique business challenges. Component-based and rapidly configurable, Microsoft CSP can support common technology and process foundations across agencies helping local governments to deliver high quality, and highly efficient, services to citizens, rate payers and businesses, everywhere.

The Citizen Service Platform offers a comprehensive set of solutions that helps governments reduce cost, work efficiently, and be more responsive to citizens. It supports governments or local authorities who want to use an e-Government approach. It helps meet their key business challenges. Improve the effectiveness of their people and processes. Local governments do not serve citizens, control costs, balance budgets, or achieve operational excellence. People do these things, and organizations excel when they empower their people.

This technology has been used, tested, and proven to have improved different local, regional, and national authorities around the world. In the UK’s West Lothian Council, which is a regional government, was able to cut costs up to 80%. And saved £3 million (NZ $5.6 million) a year in their Elderly Program because of more effective services. Another example is the City of Bergen in Norway, where city commissioners used to bring as many as 500 pages of paper documents to each of their biweekly meetings, was able to transform itself into an eco-friendly government. By using solutions based on Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform, the city moved to efficient and paperless meetings, saving more than 3 million sheets of paper, eliminate 43 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and save NOK 2,400,000 (NZ $481,757) per year. And in Australia, different councils have embraced the Microsoft’s Citizen Service Platform. One is the Baw Baw Shire Council, which has integrated data from multiple sources to create a single view of each citizen, allowing enquiries to be answered quickly and consistently. And the Bega Valley Shire improved compliance and citizen service with a document management system that automates workflows. (Click on hyperlinks to view case study for each council.)

To learn more about:

1. Microsoft Local and Regional Government
2. Microsoft Government
3. Citizen Service Platform

* Image from http://www.microsoft.com/industry/publicsector/government/csp/img/CSP_diagram.jpg