Norfolk County Council is the top-tier local government authority for Norfolk, England. Its headquarters are based in the city of Norwich. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the council’s digital transformation program to move teams from “quills and parchments” to the latest promising environments with RPA, IoT, and O365. The Council has recently undergone a major transformation, accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic that “raised gas to 11” in the program, according to Kurt Frary, CTO and Deputy Director of Information Management Technology at the organization.
Frary explains that the pandemic has shown council leaders that they need to think differently. “When the pandemic started, we realized we needed to change things. We had 7,500 staff, most of whom were working from home and had no access to regular on-premises tools. So we had to consider connectivity and a wider range of things. Without technology, we wouldn’t be able to offer digital services, “Frary says.
“There are other softer benefits,” Frary adds. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), projects that implement IoT, and examples of projects that collect data to assist in making decisions. These are currently done in different ways. The RPA project included implementing Blue Prism on the finance team to automate the billing process.
“We’ve removed most of the manual work from the system, so manual work is now an exception. It’s been very successful and now businesses are asking us to do more. The setup takes a few weeks, others look at it and say, “I get some of it.” That’s why we are now pushing it into other areas of business. “
“We also use RPA for archiving and records management,” Gerry Baker, Council’s Digital Transformation and Printing Project Manager adds. “We have millions of records, so we use RPA to link our systems and actively search for achievements.”
Frary concludes that this is all about bolting the right tools. “Now we have a complete workflow from civic requests for document signing to O365 to providing the right information to frontline staff, which provides the right toolset for the future.“
