NLPG at the Heart of Hackney’s Award Winning

03 December 2009, 1:58pm

NLPG at the Heart of Hackney’s Award Winning Citizen Index

The NLPG (National Land and Property Gazetteer)is providing the essential address and location information to the London Borough of Hackney’s award winning ‘Citizen Index’. The Citizen Index is a central repository of citizen information that will be used by all service systems and new online service portal. Because the NLPG is a national dataset the Citizen Index is also populated with information from neighbouring boroughs to ensure that Hackney’s systems can cater for those who work but do not necessarily live in the borough.

The NLPG is run on behalf of local government by the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) with Intelligent Addressing (IA) as the national custodian. The Citizen Index is at the core of a database project within
Hackney Borough Council which has just won the ‘Customer Access’ category at this year’s Local Government IT Excellence Awards organised by SOCITM (Society of IT Management).

The primary aim of the Citizen Index is to improve service delivery to citizens through a single point of contact regardless of the service area. In the Call Centre alone there will be an anticipated 30 per cent improvement
in call handling times. By intelligently merging data from different Council sources including Revenue and Benefits, CRM, Housing, Parking and the National Land and Property Gazetteer, the Citizen’s Index provides a single view of the borough’s citizens which can be accessed and searched Council wide. Additions and edits to this information are made in seconds and immediately available to all council departments and systems.

Hackney Borough Council has mandated that all systems must be capable of integrating with three main data sources, GIS, the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) and the Citizens Index. As a result every system used by the Council is now populated with the Unique Property Reference Number from the NLPG so each citizen reference is also associated with an address and precise geographic location. This is also important for the next stage of the project, the ‘My Hackney’ online self-service portal. This will also use the Citizen’s Index enabling citizens to authenticate themselves and then conduct their business online. My Hackney will also provide a rich source of service and other Council information facilitated by maps and the citizen’s precise location.

“The Citizen Index, is empowered through web services which enable any of our systems to integrate with it,” said Ewa Plachta, Hackney’s Data Manager. However the real power derives from our data management policy and the underlying quality of the core data of which the gazetteer is a prime example,” continued Plachta.

www.nlpg.org.uk

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