Local Government UK

Many issues currently face local government in terms of the Prime Minister’s four principles that must govern public sector reform: national standards, devolution and delegation, flexibility and increased choice.

The Gershon Review highlighted cost savings as a major focus for local government with particular emphasis being placed on procurement savings and more recently the E-Government initiative encouraged all Government departments to improve their use of the internet as a means of improving services and reducing costs.

The Transformational Government initiative is the latest Government vision to improve service delivery through the improved use of IT.

Typical challenges presented by this need to transform and improve are:

  • Explore how to deliver joined-up services and year-on-year efficiency savings by working closely with key partners from the business community and across local government.
  • Raise Council satisfaction ratings by contracting service delivery to the Third Sector to improve both the design and management of your services.
  • Improving Customer satisfaction ratings through improved performance management and monitoring.
  • Developing Human Resource strategies to compete with the private sector to recruit and retain talented individuals and to lead, train and motivate existing personnel during periods of uncertainty and change.
  • Create new planning processes which can react easily to possible changes in the way local government is funded.

Cognos is the world leader in Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management software.

Using Cognos software local authorities have visibility of their data that is second to none; allowing them to monitor and understand crucial information, drive understanding and deliver better decision making.

Our budgeting, planning, scorecarding and business intelligence solutions are being used throughout the world in the transformation of operational effectiveness and the delivery of value for money. Major benefits to the local government sector include:

  • faster and more flexible reporting to all areas of the organisation
  • improved planning processes which replace much of the spreadsheet chaos and provide more time to make decisions rather than manipulate spreadsheets
  • performance management monitoring and reporting taking information from disparate sources, collating it and publishing the results in an easy to use web browser environment
  • easier analysis of information enabling authorities to identify and share more meaningful reports with all of their partners
  • more accurate monitoring of vital value indicators based on the principle of ‘Measure to Comply and ‘Measure to Perform’ .