With a greater number public services moving online, Bridgend Council has been undertaking their own programme of improvements to digital services, with an update due to be discussed by the Corporate Scrutiny Committee this Wednesday (pdf).
Compared to other councils, BCBC’s digital offer was said to have been poor, with its website rated 1 out of 4 by an IT practitioners society (SOCITM).
A number of council services are set to be managed online only, including benefits, council tax, non-routine waste collection, pest control and other forms of reporting.
Council staff will be able to, if they don’t already, undertake routine paperwork (absence, leave, updating personal details) by self-service instead of having to go through management. BCBC is also to switch to cloud-based IT infrastructure, which will be overseen by Microsoft.
As part of this programme, BCBC’s website is due to get an upgrade – a preview of which is above.
Anyone will tell you that the BCBC website is at least 10 years out-of-date and that was confirmed by the IT society as mentioned earlier. Swansea-based S8080 have been appointed to oversee the new website’s development and the new site will be mobile-friendly.
Its expected that the online-only services (“My Account”) and the new website will launch on 31st January 2018.
£2.63million has been allocated to oversee this “digital transformation”, but to date, only £741,000 of that has been spent.
The transition to a new website, self-service system and cloud IT is expected to cost an additional £198,000. Once the service is fully implemented it’ll anticipated to save BCBC up to £328,000 a year.
