NEWS > R/KYV reaches finals of Information Age Magazine Awards |
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R/KYV has been selected as a finalist, in partnership with West Dorset District Council, for the IM2001 Awards for Implementing Corporate Document Management & Workflow Category: Content Management Project. VALID has reached this position in the face of stiff opposition, with entrants up 35% to 350. Final results will be announced on November 29 at The Grosvenor House Hotel Awards Ceremony. More details can be found at our case studies. R/KYV was installed in December 2000,just as West Dorset DC was going through a major office refurbishment programme that put considerable pressure on office accommodation. Within just six months, R/KYV was managing six business units: Corporate Services, Information Management Services, Environmental Health, Personnel Services, Exchequer and Economic Development. R/KYV has enabled the Council to make more efficient use of the available office accommodation as well as providing improved access to the documents that have been scanned and indexed. This is of particular significance and now means that those field workers who ‘hot desk’ at the outlying offices can easily access electronically held documents when they need them. It is now recognised that Document Management is capable of far more than merely providing a storage and retrieval facility for images, and the second phase of the programme is aimed at exploiting some of the other features that are available from the system. The Government has set out a strategy for modernising public services and has identified various milestones that will ultimately lead to making available electronic services on-line to citizens and businesses by 2005. As part of this process each Local Authority was required to produce an ‘Implementing E-government’ Statement by 31 July 2001. Document Management is a key element of the Council’s information strategy for meeting the Government's strategy and will enable the provision of complete Electronic Records Management. By combining Document and Records Management with data held in legacy systems and the Geographic Information System, West Dorset DC is on track to meet the Government’s targets for electronic service delivery. Currently, the Council is preparing for the introduction of a corporately designed, formal Electronic Records Management scheme that complies with the Government’s Metadata and Interoperability Frameworks and Standards. Document Management has been procured as a corporate solution and will be a key element in the management of records that are accurate, authentic and, where needed, admissible in a court of law. R/KYV has been in place for less than a year but in this time, practically every business unit within the Council has been positively affected by the system - either as a scanning and storage facility or as part of an overall programme of cross-department business process reviews. At present West Dorset has 100 plus users who regularly access the system and this figure is increasing week by week as further applications are rolled out. Several of the nearby Councils have expressed an interest in purchasing the workflow modules West Dorset has developed or is in the process of developing on the basis that they do not want to ‘re-invent the wheel’. Central Government is encouraging this type of collaborative working with the expectation that the cost of system development and implementation will reduce and service delivery will improve. |