Devon County Council receive double award honour

27 November 2007, 5:37pm

Devon County Council has received two prestigious national awards for a project to map the County’s road network, and related assets, in order to improve the quality of the their road maintenance programme in light of decreasing budgets. Devon was presented with the 2007 National Street Gazetteer (NSG)
Best Gazetteer Integration together with the NSG Best Business Integration at an awards ceremony and conference “Underpinning Transformational Government”.

The two awards were jointly presented by Intelligent Addressing and the Improvement and Development Agency at the event which was attended by both local and central government representatives, officers from the blue light services and other interested parties.

The National Street Gazetteer is an ambitious project to create a master street map and database of related assets and features for the whole of England and Wales. Devon, as one of the country’s largest counties with over 12,820 km of streets; the largest local authority road network, 4,700 km of Public
Rights of Way plus millions of associated assets and features such as street lights and grassed areas is facing the increasingly challenging task of improving the quality of their maintenance performance against decreasing budgets.

Michael Nicholson, Managing Director of Intelligent Addressing, who presented both awards commented, “Devon has faced a great challenge in not only creating their street gazetteer but also implementing it within their day to day working practices to obtain a real return on investment.”
He continued, “They have demonstrated that liaison with District Councils is critical for success and shown how a system built on co-operation between services, hard work, investment and a drive to meet the needs of the County’s collective customers can deliver tangible improvements in costs, efficiencies and working practices.”

The project to create a comprehensive and complete street gazetteer was undertaken in partnership with Devon’s eight District Councils to maximise the use of loca knowledge in the creation of the data and also to ensure the take up by all parties of the resulting data. The data is being used by more than 600 officers throughout the county, powering Devon’s Asset Management System,
the District’s Local Land and Property Gazetteers (NLPG) and Devon’s Customer Service System. The scale of the project becomes apparent when mobile working, web applications and telephone card based wireless networking are considered. Devon also collected the award for National Street Gazetteer (NSG) Best Performing Region on behalf of the South West.

www.nlpg.org.uk www.thensg.org.uk

www.intelligent-addressing.co.uk

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