The City of Edinburgh Council is responsible for providing services such as education, social services, housing and culture and leisure to the City of Edinburgh’s population of 470,000, which is spread over 264 square kilometres.
The council’s current strategic priorities are the development of the city and regional economy, environmental sustainability, health, wellbeing and inclusion, services for children, and working to improve community safety and quality of life in our communities.
In order to deliver this, the Council employs 16,646 people across 6 departments, and has a total revenue budget of £1042 million for 2009/2010. Council Tax makes up £225 million of this with £816 million coming from Government grants. The city’s total capital budget is £294 million.
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Projects
The City of Edinburgh Council’s customer services strategy fits in with the Smart Cities vision, as the co-design of services with our customers is an important part of our strategy. A number of projects are underway in the Council – including the Smart Cities pilots listed below – to deliver our customer services strategy and improve the council’s services.
The Business Process Change pilot will incorporate both lean thinking and customer journey mapping approaches into a strategy to improve our internal business processes. The approach is being trialled in the Council’s Revenues and Benefits Division. As well as aiming to identify measurable process improvements, the pilot is developing training and tools which will be used across the Council to support business process change. This will allow us to deliver other customer service process reviews and to share our methodologies with Smart Cities partners.
The procurement and development of a new Internet presence for the City of Edinburgh Council will give us the capability to deliver a more useful, accessible and usable website with up to date, reliable and accurate information. The ability to complete transactions online requires a new platform that is both adaptable and scalable to incorporate future innovations and new technologies.
The Wireless Service pilot has trialled the provision of free wireless internet access for citizens in some of the City’s local libraries. The lessons learned from this experience will be shared with all Smart Cities partners and, once evaluated, may lead to more wireless service provision across the City.
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Edinburgh City Council needs to replace its web content management system and develop a new Council Website and Intranet to develop its web presence and deliver both financial and time efficiencies and an improved customer experience.
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The pilot aims to improve customer experience, reduce avoidable contact and move towards more cost-effective channels for customer contact by incorporating both “Lean” thinking and Customer Journey Mapping approaches to business process improvement.
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The city has already provided a number of PCs in libraries in Edinburgh for the public to use. This pilot will determine the viability of adding wireless internet access to the People’s Network and procure and install the necessary core technical infrastructure.
About Smart Cities
The general aim of the Smart Cities project is to create an innovation network between governments and academic partners leading to excellence in the domain of the development and take-up of e-services, setting a new baseline for e-service delivery in the whole North Sea region.Smart Cities will create:
- a network of North Sea e-Government leaders with ambitious transformational e-Government Strategies aiming to deliver innovative and excellent public services with documented improved quality of life and enhanced competitiveness;
- an academic and research network which will support and help local and national authorities in realising and focusing their ambitions;
- a unique approach of developing e-services by combining the academic approach, the government view and proven practices and knowledge in a powerful process of co-design. This will result in a transferable methodology useful for EU innovation networks and authorities and a model for the NSR;
- a new baseline of customer-centred, personalised, information-rich and geolocated services in the North Sea Region combining existing solutions already developed by the partners and co-designing new customer services, wireless applications and strategies for take-up and multi-channelling
The project aims to understand which e-services services work best and why; it will facilitate transfer of e-Government successes across national borders; it will identify and support the real transformational impacts of such transfer of good practices on local government; it will equip decision makers with the knowledge and ambition to achieve further innovation in the delivery of e-enabled public services; and will engage national authorities in this ambition. At the European level, the project will support the creation and growth of communities of practice across the NSR building organisational commitment to and capacity for inter-regional government service sharing. Smart Cities will raise the bar in many aspects.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Smart Cities infoflyer.pdf | 113.65 KB |
| Smart Cities Project Guide.pdf | 4.29 MB |
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