The Civica group is a market leader in specialist systems and outsourcing services that help organisations to improve service delivery and efficiency.
Civica required a personalised, citizen-facing web portal for local government. The system needed to satisfy the requirements for security of personal data within local government, as well as having a personalised homepage for the site. The portal also needed to have community sites, consisting of groupings of services into a more community based collection organised along web 2.0 lines. A key feature needed to enable the community to contribute content of their own to the portal. The portal also needed to allow a citizen to register online for access to services. They should choose their own User ID and password and be prompted to enter key information and identifiers. The aim of the Citizen Web Portal is to provide citizens with access to various services as a means to providing self-service, saving the council time, money and resources.
Civica approached ICS Solutions to help with the design, build and implementation of this solution. ICS Solutions developed a Citizen Web Portal based on SharePoint 2010 which allows citizens to check council bills and pay them, see what is going on in their local community, books sessions at the local gym and tables at local restaurants, file reports based on problems in the local area, communicate with local services such as the library, and get involved with local plans and planning permissions. ICS Solutions also included a search feature into the Web Portal which enables users to search local landmarks and read about their history.