CLOUD-FIRST 

To reduce their costs and provide better service availability, Walsall Council opted to make a staged move to the cloud.

Their old hardware started to impact efficient working.  So the revenues and benefits service became the first to make the move, joining our cloud in June 2018.

ADVANCED SELF-SERVICE 

Walsall’s ambition is to move 50% of all notifications online in order to cut out print and post and it chose Citizen Access to achieve it.

The Citizen Access solutions are smartphone-ready, available for Revenues and Benefits and offer direct integration to the back office. They automate as many processes as possible and cutting out re-keying. They also work on any device, enabling customers to complete forms and upload evidence with ease.

“In less than 12 months we’ve made a successful move to the cloud and launched our Landlord Portal, with more services to follow.” ~ Jeanette Hitchcock, Project Lead at Walsall Council

MAKING THE MOVE 

Getting ready for the move meant providing information to support all the new interfaces. Jeanette recommends taking time on this part:

“If you’re moving to the cloud, spend some time planning the new interfaces. We had a few teething problems at the beginning but the NEC project manager was very responsive throughout.”

ECONOMIES OF SCALE

Hosting gives authorities all the benefits of security, availability and reduced IT costs but also offers economies of scale. The space is designed for and shared by public service customers to offer even greater savings and the flexibility to scale up when needed. Jeanette concludes:

“When we were using our own infrastructure we relied on busy IT staff to support updates and had problems with availability. Since moving to the cloud we’ve had no unplanned downtime, more responsive systems and their specialist database administrators are available 24/7.”