Stretching from the Cotswolds down to the edge of the Roman City of Bath, North Wiltshire District Council (NWDC) is the local authority for North Wiltshire. The district was formed on April 1, 1974, by a merger of the municipal boroughs of Calne, Chippenham, and Malmesbury along with Calne and Chippenham Rural District, Cricklade and Wootton Bassett Rural District and Malmesbury Rural District.

Employing a workforce of over 600 staff, the council provides a wide range of local services from building control inspections to rubbish collection. For the council to function effectively they need an easy to use, reliable information repository. As the organisation has grown, the Lotus Notes system that had been previously implemented didn’t offer the functionality that the council’s wide range of activities demanded.

Julie Arthurs, Web Manager said: “Our existing intranet was becoming increasingly complicated to make even simple changes. We wanted an off the shelf solution that would provide us with all the features of our existing intranet, with the flexibility to adapt to the growth of our organisation. We chose the SORCE Intranet product as it provided us with not only ready made applications that we could immediately implement but also the flexibility to customise and develop applications that would improve the internal processes of the council.”

A key requirement for NWDC was to be able to automate the booking of rooms within the council offices.

With open plan areas throughout the organisation, meeting rooms are a facility shared by different departments. The SORCE Intranet provides NWDC the ability to automate the scheduling of rooms, equipment and even refreshments.

In addition to booking rooms through their intranet, NWDC also wanted to convert their existing, paper based, staff handbook to a searchable intranet application. By automating their handbook, access to information is faster and printing costs are removed.

John Nicklin, Sales and Marketing Director said: “Many organisations, just like NWDC, have learned the value of implementing an intranet not only to aid communication, but to improve the organisation’s processes. Driving efficiency through the intranet, using applications, provides a transparent, documented process to the council. Employees are then able to save time while having access to information at a time suitable to them. For councils such as NWDC these processes also provide an audit trail which allows them to comply with government regulations.”