Local Directgov

Taking local services to the nation

Many government websites have been much maligned and criticised, yet through the efforts of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) and its partners, the Directgov website has become one of the most popular in the country. Attracting more than two million visitors a month, Directgov provides an online directory that allows users to find information about the services available to the public from over 2,500 different government websites.

Prior to Local Directgov, users could locate local authority information, but were only directed to home pages, rather than direct to the relevant service page or form. This does not fit well with the government's vision of joined up services and accessibility.

Local Directgov aims to make it easier for anyone to access information regardless of their location or local knowledge. Users visit local authority websites for many different reasons and they may not necessarily be within the local community. People moving into the area may want to find out more about local schools and leisure facilities, relatives of elderly people may need to find out about services for the elderly and students may use the sites for research.

What was needed was a major extension to Directgov that could provide direct links to all the relevant services on each authority's site, cutting out hours of searching and giving users one central resource from which to find any government service.

Local Directgov was launched at the beginning of 2006, after just six months of development. Led by the London Borough of Brent and London Connects, London's regional e-Government agency, Local Directgov brings together the benefits and knowledge gained from four years of the Local e-Government Programme. Developed and hosted by System Associates, it works by providing a search engine for each type of service. Users can enter their location into the search engine using their postcode, address or local authority and Local Directgov will provide links that take them, where possible, to the appropriate page of their local authorities' site.

System Associates won the contract to build and host Local Directgov following its successful work on www.yourlondon.gov.uk, a site designed for London Connects, to provide a similar service for London. David Macken, managing director of System Associates, explains: "We won the contract for three key reasons. We've experience in local government, running a number of local authority websites. We've also developed big portal operations, such as Your London. Combined with the company's recent investment in resources and technology, we were able to meet the demands of a project of this scale."

Coordinating information from 388 authorities

For the project to be successful, as many local authorities needed to be involved as possible and a dedicated team at the ODPM was developed to facilitate this. As a result, all 388 English local authorities were enlisted for Local Directgov. Each authority's web portal officers agreed to enter the relevant services and links into esd-toolkit, a knowledge repository created by local authorities, to share information and best practice with each other online. As well as contributing to the Local Directgov project and giving their citizens better service, this also helps local authorities with auditing and scoring by SOCITM, the Society of Information Technology Management, which promotes the effective and efficient use of IT in local government and the public sector.

Maintaining links

When there was a critical mass of authorities and links in the system, an interface was added to the esd-toolkit to update the Local Directgov database. This uses web services technology to send messages to the database whenever an authority adds or updates a link in the toolkit. Once the database receives the messages, the links are validated to ensure they work correctly. They are then added to Local Directgov's list of valid results. This system ensured that the correct links were in the database from the beginning, but it also means that whenever an authority updates its web site, the new information is fed into esd-toolkit and the new links are automatically registered by Local Directgov. Many web projects fail because dead links make them useless to their users, so this system will be key to ensuring the programme's continuing relevance. As well as the links determined by the authorities themselves, System Associates periodically spiders the authorities' websites, scanning all the pages to identify potential links to services which may have escaped the esd-toolkit.

Integration with Directgov

The next stage of the project's development was to integrate Local Directgov with Directgov. System Associates provided all of the Directgov content owners with a list of more than 90 types of services available from local authorities. Each type of service has a URL that the content owners can link to from their own web pages. This URL provides direct access from the Local Directgov search engine and these now comprise approximately 300 separate links

Hosting

Local Directgov is expected to attract a significant number of visitors over the coming year and it is important to have an infrastructure that supports its growth and future plans. Local Directgov runs on a total of 15 servers managed by Systems Associates. For continuity, these are hosted in two separate data centres, separated by a distance of 60 miles. Six servers provide the web interface, while three run the Local Directgov application itself. A further three systems provide database facilities. Load balancers enable the two mirrored data centres to maintain the Local Directgov service, even when there is internet congestion or a large number of users.

Delivering a joined up vision

As well as hosting the service, System Associates continues to improve it. Phase two of the Local Directgov project is well under way and will include a number of new search engine-based features.

Local Directgov is proving popular and stakeholders are committed to driving further traffic to local information via Directgov. This project has tried to achieve what many other countries have tried to do, and failed. The secret of its success has largely been due to the efforts put in place by local authorities in getting services online. David Macken says: "Up until recently, the emphasis has been on getting local authorities to achieve their e-Gov targets. Now that all authorities have an online presence, the bigger task of creating a more joined-up e-Government can take place."

This is a position supported by Jim Fitzpatrick, the Minister for Local e-Government. "The Local Directgov Programme is making a significant contribution to local e-Government. It will prove an invaluable aid to local authorities, helping them to meet efficiency targets, increase traffic to local authority websites and encourage citizen take-up of those online services. When fully developed, it has the potential to revolutionise how citizens interact with government and offers a more customer-focused, joined-up approach."

With Local Directgov live and fully integrated with Directgov, the local authorities involved in the scheme are already reporting significant increases in traffic to their sites, as well as increased uptake of services. Local Directgov shows that when done correctly, joined-up local e-government projects can significantly improve accessibility of information for the citizen as well as increase take-up of online e-Government services.

Note: The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) was renamed in 2007, and is now known as the Department for Communities and Local Government.

View the Local Directgov site (link opens in a new window)