Direct and Care Services (DACS) was a department of Glasgow City Council providing a range of welfare services to the residents of Glasgow, including home care services to almost 9,000 residents, Home care enables many Glaswegians to stay in their community rather than moving into a care home or staying in hospital.
In April 2009, the organisation became a limited liability partnership (LLP) and left the council. DACS had a turnover in excess of £150 million and a workforce of around 3,000 employees managed by a team of 300 managers and coordinators.
The Challenge
Thousands of records were updated monthly with changes to personal circumstances, such as new customers, alterations to care plans, hospital discharge instructions and next of kin contact numbers. Although equipped with smart phones for e-mail, the managers supervising the care providers had no mobile access to customer records which often led to poor communication and misdirected resources.
The requirement was to have a stand-alone web presence that had appropriate linkages to the existing Glasgow City Council site.
The website needed to fulfil the following key criteria:
- Be easily administered and content managed by non-technical staff.
- Allow the publication of RSS documents to which staff and members of the public could subscribe.
- Be hosted independently, with the highest availability levels, and be compliant with the e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF).
- Include a micro site capability for specific initiatives such as conferences or promotions.
- Have a public internet component as well as an authenticated extranet for staff accessing from either public or home computers.
- Have an online survey capability to gather opinions and feedback from staff and customers, available on both the extranet and internet.
- Include analytical tools to gather information on website traffic and patterns of use.
- Capacity for blogging, both personally and corporately, with a feedback mechanism for approvals and moderations.
The Solution
Motive provided a solution based on the Kentico CMS (content management system). As a market leader, Kentico provides a robust platform on which Motive customised both design and content to DACS’ specification.
Motive’s end user interface design means that all content is easily managed through an intuitive yet powerful CMS that is clear and simple to use, particularly for non-technical staff. There is a structured method to authorise changes to ensure only the appropriate staff can upload and approve content.
Motive’s solution means that there is no limit to the number of RSS documents that can be created.
Analytical tools are easy to use with the functionality of Google Analytics.
Motive has optimised the website meaning that search capabilities are fast and return the most appropriate results first.
The Result
With the strong foundations of the Kentico CMS, and the technical savvy of Motive’s developers and designers, DACS has been able to benefit from the best of both worlds.
Communication, both internally and externally, is much better resulting in improved customer service and substantial back office savings.
Staff find the website easy to manage and update.and are reassured that it is secure and discreet.