System and service procurement criteria

How to select and buy products, services and systems that will work well together.

The need to get diverse systems, products and services to work well together and with the web platform introduces significant new requirements and selection criteria into all procurement processes. These new criteria need to be understood and assessed for all new system procurement.

A guidance document should be created and disseminated that explains the relative importance of particular system attributes and the impact of not meeting the required standards so that informed and pragmatic procurement decisions can be made.

Search is key

Search is the primary experience that people will use to judge the quality of the council’s websites.

The Local Authority’s search facility must understand and show the difference between online Local Authority services, authoritative structured information (such as school performance tables), authoritative unstructured information (descriptions of planning processes and outcomes) as well as user generated content.

The search facility must not be limited to just one website, but should provide links into other Local Authority sites (or those of its partners or agencies) to present a coherent and joined up facility.

All of this needs to be done within a second of the user entering their search request.

Integration

The capabilities provided by the federated services must be integrated by the existing and future web properties.

While it maybe advantageous to make a big splash by launching a large number of upgrades in one go, this strategy allows for the capabilities to be integrated on a needs basis.

All of the websites and systems owned and run by the Local Authority and other community based websites should be identified and the benefits of integrating each capability with them should be assessed and scored based not just on the benefit to the users of that website but also the benefit to the portfolio of websites as a whole.

Federated web services

Sharing common capabilities across a family of websites.

A federated service is one that provides its capabilities to a network in the knowledge that users will also be utilising other services in that network.  This means that they both provide their capabilities in a way that other services can integrate them and that they integrate the capabilities provided by other federated services.

The core capabilities that any Local Authority web system should federate include: login and profile management, user activity streams, search, top level navigation, security auditing and content notification.

Connect the external digital community

Allowing services built and managed by the Local Authority to be used by individuals or groups within the digital community will benefit all parties.  Services such as taxonomy and localised gazetteer suggesters will allow local newspapers, bloggers, forums and hyperlocal websites to relate their content directly to Local Authority content and services.

In addition to simply allowing links to form between the web systems in the region, the Local Authority must foster greater connections between them allowing them to find opportunities to share with each other to mutual benefit.

Connect customer channels and platforms

All interactions with the Local Authority should be joined up. So that no matter how individual strands have been facilitated conversations started via one channel can be continued or added to on any other.

This means some form of CRM software that is used for or interfaced with by all channels needs to be part of the digital strategy.

For some channels this means staffs training for others such as Internet TV, SMS it needs to be a requirement as part of the procurement process.

Provide dashboards

Knowledge may be power, but too much information stops you from gaining any insight into it. The Local Authority’s website should provide the ability for users to choose what information they wish to see and the information should displayed in ways that allow it to be understood quickly.  This implies the need for a consistent dashboard interface data using visualisation techniques and good interface design practises. Dashboards as a collection of widgets, often overlaid on the pages they refer to, are an engaging way of showing metadata, analytics etc.