There is much pressure for councils to provide online transactional services such as the ability to apply for your library card online rather than having to go to a library to do so or notifying your council of a change of address via their website as opposed to phoning them.

The drivers for this trend are primarily:

Customer demand
Increase in usage of the web for self service purposes and an associated increase in the expectations of customers
Cost savings
Online transactional services have the potential to reduce processing volumes (due to up-take of self-servicing) and processing time (due to increased automation of processing)
To meet e-government targets
To improve accessibility of services to citizens

The LAWS transactional services products seek to technically enable online transactional service processing to assist authorities address the above drivers.

The LAWS transactional services products

There are three LAWS products supporting transactional services:

Online forms
Schemas
LGOL-net

The services (processes) targeted

The LAWS transactional services products aim to support the delivery of the following transactions via a web-enabled front end.

Transaction	Description
Library membership	Apply for a library membership card
Complaints	Make a complaint about anything regarding the council and its services
Check Balance	May include council tax, business rates, housing rent, debtors, mortgages, poll tax, former tenant arrears
Change of name and address	Notify the council that your name and/ or address has changed
Death Notification	Notify the council about the death of an individual

The online transactions may be used by:

The public accessing the council website (Self Service)
Council staff in a department (Council Service)
Council staff speaking to the public in a council contact centre, a one stop shop or in person (Assisted Service)

The transactional process solution will vary from council to council

Councils are likely to use the LAWS transactional services products in ways that result in unique processing solutions suitable to their particular council. Driven by the depth of technical integration, the processing solution is likely to be somewhere on a spectrum from full automation, to merely making the online form available on the website to be completed and then printed out, or emailed to the council.

Three possible scenarios on this spectrum are illustrated below:

A “Veneer” solution: Presenting the online form on the web, with no technical integration at all
Partial automation solution: Integrating the technology to enable partial automation of the process
Full automation solution: Integrating the technology completely to enable full automation of the process

The degree of technical integration achieved is likely to vary

The transactional services products offer the potential to fully automate the processes making up a transaction via sophisticated technical integration. They allow data to move between different applications, but aside from the online form, they are not actually used (or even seen) by an “end user”.

While the end goal for a council will be full automation of a transaction (full end-to-end technical integration), a council may choose to start with a limited degree of integration. The extent to how your roles, responsibilities and skill requirements will be impacted as a result of the implementation of the LAWS transactional products will depend on the how the process changes, and that in turn will depend on the degree of technical integration achieved.

The processing solution for a particular transaction is likely to be slightly (or extremely) different from authority to authority due to the degree of technical integration any given authority is able to achieve and due to the existing systems a council uses currently in the transaction process.

The factors influencing the level of integration achievable within your council include:

Existing technical capability within the council (size of technical team, skills available)

Degree of modernisation of back end systems
Complexity and number of of back end systems
Budget constraints (extensive technical integration is likely to be costly)
Demographics of the council (e.g. rural versus urban; large versus small; computer literacy and access of the constituency)
Strategic drivers e.g. prioritisation of self service capabilities
Internal political drivers

Achieving technical integration for the targeted processes

Due to the varying levels of complexity of the five targeted processes, the effort required to achieve full technical integration (full automation of the process) will vary.

Balances – lower complexity and effort

Higher potential for full automation as are only asking for (retrieval of) information from other systems, not creating or editing information

Complaints – low to medium complexity and effort

May need to interface to a complaints system which may be distributed across departments, or centralised in one place

Library membership – medium complexity and effort

The process to issue a library membership card includes the necessity to authenticate the identity of the individual applying for library membership. This may be automatically executed requiring an interface to other systems (e.g. council tax register and library system). In addition new details have to be recorded to the library system.

Change of name and address – high complexity and effort

Needs to interface to multiple systems distributed across departments, so very complex to achieve

Death Notification – high complexity and effort

Needs to interface to multiple systems. Depending on the status of the deceased person the relevant systems for integration will be different e.g. a young person’s death may result in the education services systems needing to be updated, while an old persons death may result in a requirement to update the electoral roll, stop benefits and change benefits for the remaining family.

Note: complexity and achievability will also be driven by the level of modernisation of your service systems

Varying degrees of technical integration have different impacts

The degree of technical integration achieved via use of the LAWS transactional services products will drive the impact on the organisation.

Impact on organisational capacity requirements and processing speed (and therefore cost)

Full automation:
It is likely that a high degree of technical integration will be more expensive to achieve, but will result in a larger reduction in the need for council staff and faster processing (therefore a resulting larger cost saving)
Partial automation:
A partial degree of technical integration will be moderately expensive to achieve and will result in a reduction in the need for council staff and an increase in processing speed (therefore a resulting cost saving, but not as large as above)
Little / no automation
A Veneer solution is unlikely to reduce the need for council staff, not improve processing time (therefore unlikely to achieve a cost saving)

Regardless of the degree of technical integration achieved, all solutions will have an impact on the roles/jobs of council staff.

An example 1: The impact on the organisation

Transaction: Library Membership (Illustrative)

The organisational impact of automating the process can be summarised as:

Less time required on the part of council staff
Increased speed of processing
Change in council staff jobs - now likely to only be required to process transactions that fail the automated process

An example 2: The impact on the organisation

Transaction: Change of name and address (Illustrative)

The organisational impact of automating the process can be summarised as:

Less time required on the part of council staff
Increased speed of processing
Change in council staff jobs - now likely to only be required to process transactions that fail the automated process

Assessing the impact on your organisational capacity requirements

Guidance as how to determine the impact on your organisational capacity requirement as a result of implementing online transactional services within your authority is provided in the Capacity section of this toolkit.

Understanding your capacity requirements will enable you to:

Assess whether or not you will require more or less staff
Determine the impact on your costs

Assessing the impact on your organisation roles/jobs

Given that there is no “one size fits all” solution for councils and it is likely that the processing solution will be unique to each council, it is very unlikely that the impact on the organisation (roles, skills, etc) will be the same either.

So how can you assess the impact of your chosen processing solution on your organisation?

Record the current process
Determine and document how the process happens today, identifying which role in the council conducts each process step
Record the future process
Determine and document how the process will happen in the future when you have implemented the transactional service on your council website, identifying which role in the council will conduct each process step
Perform analysis

Perform analysis to compare the “before” and “after” process to understand:

Are new roles required?
Will existing roles change?
Are new skills within any roles required?

1. Record the current process

Determine and document how the process happens today, identifying:

Each step of the process (including handovers)
The duration of each step of the process
The role within the council that conducts each process step
Whether or not the process step is completed by a person or a system

The following process template will help you record the current process:

2. Record the future process
As you recorded the current process, determine and document how the process will happen in the future when you have implemented the transactional service on your council website, identifying:

Each step of the process (including handovers)
The duration of each step of the process
The role within the council that conducts each process step
Whether or not the process step is completed by a person or a system

The same process template will help you record the future process:

3. Perform analysis

Perform analysis to compare the “before” and “after” process to understand:

Are new roles required?
Will existing roles change?
Are new skills within any roles required?

Using the current and future process templates you have prepared will enable you to examine and understand where in the process the roles have changed, and how.