Hertfordshire County Council achieves substantial savings with the help of Zipporah

We were recently approached by Hertfordshire County Council to help develop their online service offerings in order to provide citizens and businesses with a faster and more efficient way to make requests of the authority.

Our ZIPI product seemed to fit the bill: a flexible and highly adaptable solution through which citizens could make requests for services, pay for requests where relevant and check on the status of their enquiries. Not only that but it also has the functionality to be further enhanced through its integration to a variety of third party systems, the authority’s back office financial systems through the simple transfer of data.

                                                             

Since implementing ZIPI, the authority has been extremely impressed with the outcomes it has helped them achieve – over the last 12 months. Hertfordshire has now achieved at least £79,000 in savings, with a total of 10,000 transactions taking place equating to revenues of £1.4 million being taken through the solution. Not only has the council gained these impressive savings, it has also made its services more accessible, and the process involved in handling these services far more efficient.

Communication is King

I’m a Blackberry user and I spend a lot of time out of the office, probably as much as I spend in the office.  So when the servers went down and we couldn’t get email or a number of other services it was a bit of a drama.  Ultimately as a business person I adapted and I found my way through the problem and nobody noticed that I was unreachable because I found other ways to get what I needed.  I can understand for others this wasn’t as easy.  The biggest thing that I noticed about the issue was the lack of information and clarity that could inform the customer.  When you have a crisis of that magnitude creating worldwide problems I can imagine it’s quite traumatic but with the levels of staffing available surely one of the first things to do was to get communication out there.  The more I think about the problems I see whether it’s with big business or with companies like Zipporah it’s communication that is key to managing all of these things.

Over the length of my career with Zipporah from the day it started until today (and probably until the day I finally give in to the ravages of old age, stress and a poor diet) there are always moments where we as the supplier and our clients may not see things the same way or a problem arises which unless caught early can become an issue and eventually a showstopper.   I’ve seen many of these everywhere I have worked even before we started with Zipporah but there has always been a very easy way to resolve the issue – a conversation.  This may be about understanding why the issues is there, understanding how the system overcomes the issue in a way the client didn’t realise, it could even be about finding a middle ground between what the off the shelf package is and what an individual requirement for a particular department is but ultimately it can all be resolved with decent communication.  Very little will move forward until both parties talk and too many problems arise based on assumption.

Sometimes it can just be a simple matter of keeping clients informed.  We, this week, have had some troubles with our servers and as a number of clients utilise our service we tried to ensure communication flowed constantly to provide relevant updates.  We thought this was important to ensure our clients didn’t feel that we weren’t making every effort to resolve the problem.  At the other end of the scale we have had several successes of late with the new processes we have put in place to fully specify all systems that we implement for clients recognising configuration and change up front to avoid confusion.  This has worked brilliantly with implementation times falling and entirely new systems going through UAT in very short timescales.  The upshot is that for many of our existing clients we will be bringing in a bit more paperwork for you I’m afraid, resulting in the need for you to agree and signoff things a lot more but this up front slightly longer process is proving to reduce time considerably at delivery and testing stage, which must be worth the effort.  So it’s not that now we are bigger we have decided to become less flexible it’s that now we are bigger we have become better at being more flexible, more responsive and ensuring you have absolute clarity on what you need us to deliver.

A “digital by default” Public Service

The government has recently launched plans to save £1.4bn from ICT spending and drive forward the internet as a means to deliver public services in the future.

Through the ICT Strategy Strategic Implementation Plan, the government expects to make savings over the next four years, helping to develop a "digital by default" public services policy, and thus improving the efficiency and quality of government departments' ICT and creating a more open and competitive marketplace.

Key Milestones:

-       50% of central government departments' new ICT spending moved to public cloud computing services by the end of 2015

-       The government also plans to publish a cloud computing strategy this month.

-       80% of the Public Services Network (PSN) compliant by March 2014

-       Set of development targets of a Government application store

With this new plan the Government shows its commitment to deliver a better service to citizens through government ICT projects.

Zipporah becomes a member of the FIA

We are pleased to announce that as of October 2011 Zipporah has become a registered member of the Fitness Industry Association. The FIA is the trade body which represents every reputable organisation in the health and fitness industry, from over 2800 operators in the public and private sectors including over 250 supplier organisations.

This exciting news comes just off the back of a successful implementation of Zipporah’s Leisure Management System at Powys County Council, and with a number of other authorities throughout the UK already showing substantial interest thanks to our excellent reputation in the public sector, this membership can only aid us in proving that the Zipporah Solution in the best option in the marketplace.