denotes premium content | Feb 8 2012 
Feature
posted 31 Aug 2004 in Volume 1 Issue 3
Battling the democratic deficit – online
There’s no doubt e-government initiatives can improve efficiency and deliver enhanced customer service. But they can also provide a solution to voter apathy and increase citizen participation in the local government decision-making processes. Andrew Unsworth, head of e-government for the City of Edinburgh Council, outlines the value of Council Papers Online, a project aimed at improving accessibility to the council’s decision-making processes.
Traditional ways of working and living are changing. The 24-hour society has raised customer’s expectations. They want personal and joined-up services available when and where they want them.
These expectations are no different when it comes to one of the most crucial relationships – that of the government and the citizens they answer to.
As with most other levels of government in the UK, the City of Edinburgh Council has embraced a strategy for delivering improved access to information and services to citizens. To this end, it has entered into a £150 million, ten-year information and communication technology (ICT) partnership programme to deliver a ‘Smart City’ vision.
Smart City is about changing the way the council organises and delivers its services to be efficient, effective and customer focussed. Its aim is to use ICT to deliver all of these services to citizens, businesses and organisations.
Key strands
The council wants to improve the quality of customer relationships and access to services to meet the needs of citizens. They also want to reduce administrative costs and direct more resources to the front line, allowing for more efficient organisation.
Another component of the strategy is the need to improve citizen participation in the political process. A council is a democratic organisation, but the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ is resulting in lower election turnouts at both national and local level. In 2001, turnout at the General Election was 59.4 per cent – the lowest since the introduction of universal suffrage. At a local level, the figures are far worse. The Scottish Parliament gained only a 49.4 per cent turnout in 2003, while English local councils only achieved 32.8 per cent in 2002. In Scotland, turnout is better than in England, with 59.4 per cent of the electorate voting in the 1999 elections for Scottish Unitary councils.
With trends on a downward slope, government organisations have to introduce policies and services prompting the electorate to show interest in decisions taken by their local authority.
Active citizenship
Reversing this downward trend is a primary objective for the City of Edinburgh Council. While concepts such as electronic voting are being embraced to make the voting process more accessible, there is a fundamental need to boost active citizenship by creating an environment where all citizens can engage more easily and effectively with the council to influence public service issues. By 2010, the council’s goal is to have citizens setting Smart City plans for the following ten years.
This proactive communication strategy also makes the council more effective and open in partnerships with other organisations such as community groups, health authorities and police forces.
This level of citizen participation cannot be achieved without access to the council’s democratic process. Council papers have always been available to the public at the authority’s information centre in Edinburgh, or through manual distribution to libraries and committee members. Yet many citizens are reluctant to come to council offices.
In May 2004, the council launched its Council Papers Online Project. This service allows citizens to access all unrestricted documents (such as agendas, reports and minutes) for the main council committees through the website, www.edinburgh.gov.uk/cpol. Citizens and community organisations can now access committee papers and reports being considered by elected members either from the comfort of their own homes or via free access in internet cafés introduced to every library as part of the Smart City programme.
Our targets have been achieved through the integration of a document-management (DM) tool into our core infrastructure. The tool includes an intuitive search engine, project collaboration to share information and a workflow engine to automate business processes and move information intelligently around the organisation.
To date, the project has not exploited either workflow or project collaboration functionality. Yet it was essential to invest in a product that could support both improvements to the document creation process at a later date and, critically, become a strategic tool for other Smart City knowledge applications in the future.
Getting information online
Our primary objective with Council Papers Online was to deliver decision making to the public. We have concentrated on using document management alongside our existing processes to deliver the first phase of the project.
Currently, paper reports are signed by the eight council directors and collated by committee clerks who then prepare an agenda for the committee meeting. This information goes to the council’s reprographic unit where paper copies are produced for distribution to committee members. The documents are also scanned and their images turned into PDF files and published on both the council’s intranet and internet sites.
The adoption of this technology has enabled the council to publish agendas and relevant documents to the website up to five days before the committee meeting occurs. It’s a big change from the retrospective publishing of decisions taken. Now, citizens and community groups have a chance to look at the business slated for discussion and can contact a councillor or make queries about the papers prior to that committee meeting. The minutes of the meeting are then published within two weeks.
A powerful search engine makes document location simple. It’s intuitive to use and as a result, straightforward for even non-technical users to understand. The decision-making process has achieved the visibility we need to enable citizens to take a more active role in local government.
Achieving efficient operations
The project is also helping the council to become a more efficient organisation and meet its green government obligations. The annual cost on paper and printing for committee papers alone was in excess of £150,000. By introducing document management, we anticipate reducing paper consumption by over 50 per cent and making a subsequent reduction in print costs.
According to Councillor Donald Wilson, executive member for modernising government, the project has been a boon to councillors and citizens alike.
“Community councils and local development communities prefer the flexibility of online access,” says Wilson. “Councillors are also better equipped to serve their constituents during surgeries [regular meetings with constituents] as they can solve issues straightaway by referring to council documents – for example, if a citizen wanted to know why a particular decision was or wasn’t taken they can be quickly pointed to the relevant meeting minutes or reports. This level of immediacy improves relationships and moves towards the idea of councils being proactive, responsive organisations.”
Extending knowledge management
The real efficiency benefits will come when we begin to exploit project collaboration and workflow tools of our DM system to streamline the way we prepare reports and bring them into the process prior to presentation to committee.
This will require a change to both committee services and the way senior managers work across the organisation; a concept currently under planning and discussion. Fully integrated document management will require directors to adopt electronic authorisation of reports. The system will enable more people to comment on a report and multiple authorisations of that report. Currently, if a report needs to be signed by three directors, it has to go from office to office. Using the document management solution, we will be able to track the authorisation process, which should significantly shorten the production process.
Key to achieving this is excellent version control and robust workflow processes. Using collaborative working will reduce the need to attach multiple versions of documents and the need to continuously send to multiple e-mail recipients, reducing storage volumes.
There is also an opportunity to improve efficiency and save further costs across the council by rolling this solution out to working groups and internal committees. I believe the system will become a core tool for all of our 10,000 intranet users over the next couple of years, underpinning the delivery of our Smart City strategy.
Implementation lessons
In hindsight, it would have been possible to attain these productivity benefits earlier.
A more radical first phase implementation that included process change as well as the delivery of customer-facing services could have enabled a more rapid return on investment.
But information management is a vital component of Smart City. We had to get this first deployment right with a system that was 99.9 per cent available and infallible. One of the major challenges of council papers online was winning the hearts and minds of council members. As a capital city, decisions made by the council are prone to more scrutiny than those made by some UK authorities and have little leeway for failure.
It was also essential to get the committee services group comfortable with this way of e-working. Understandably, they are extremely cautious. A wrong decision can have costly implications for both the council and Edinburgh citizens. Getting things right was a priority. We were more wary in opting to publish online first and adopt project collaboration and workflow second.
To ensure staff comfort with the new technology, we undertook extensive prototyping and technology demonstrations followed by a five-month pilot to internal users via the corporate intranet. Focus group and feedback sessions helped to design the look and feel of the system, build user support and critically identify the need for a clear taxonomy. Knowledge tools are an excellent way of describing what information is contained via the index to ensure users can quickly find what they are looking for. Without investing in this process it would undermine the value of the entire investment.
Council Papers Online is one of the first database applications we are running both internally and externally to the public, so security implications were something of an unknown. This issue added both cost and time to the implementation process. But collaboration between our solution provider and our strategic partner BT has delivered a secure solution that can be replicated for future applications. Additionally, the development of a secure means of sharing information with the public will support the council in ongoing freedom of information developments.
Measured success
Council Papers Online has only been live to the public since May. Since then, we have received excellent support, particularly from community groups who are finding it a very useful tool to raise awareness of local decisions being made in their area.
But it’s important to undertake real measurements of the system’s success.
We will be measuring the uptake of the system, looking at how citizens are using the information and which document types are most regularly accessed. This information will be invaluable for ongoing strategy development across the council’s online service portfolio.
We also plan to correlate the use of council papers online with inquiries coming into the council. This will ascertain whether the system is being used to raise awareness of issues and forge closer links between the public and elected members.
This will only be achieved if the public utilises this new tool. Local press launches and meetings with community groups have been supplemented by taster sessions at library internet cafés to raise awareness across the city. We will monitor adoption levels to assess whether more marketing activity is required.
The council’s commitment to this project is significant. While there are many e-government projects focused on efficiency and improved services to the citizen, this is also about improving active citizenship. Providing transparency of the decision-making process is something that makes the City of Edinburgh Council a more open organisation and builds the trust required to re-energise citizen’s interest in, and ownership of, local government. The council is firmly committed to active citizenship and, as a result, we’re winning positive feedback at a political and personal level.
