September 29, 2015
Review of the Cadcorp Local Government Conference 2015
Nearly fifty people attended Cadcorp’s annual local government conference held in aptly named ‘Glasshouse’; overlooking the Regents Canal at Camden Lock, London, on 22 September.
The title of the conference ‘Twice as good, in half the time, for half as much’ was meant to reflect the challenges and expectations faced by a UK local government sector operating under financial pressure: to be doing more with less.
Opening the conference, Demelza Guy of Cadcorp, pointed out that many councils have faced up to these challenges by changing working practices, through sharing services and resources, and – crucially for the focus of this conference – by using information technology to improve efficiency. She said the conference was an opportunity for GIS professionals to discuss ways in which location intelligence might be used to achieve even greater gains in local government efficiencies, especially in the ways in which councils interact with citizens.
Peter Marsh, GIS Manager at Arun District Council, gave a first-hand account of his council’s experience in deploying a corporate GIS which was procured from Cadcorp last year. He stressed that one of the business drivers for GIS was to promote customer self-service by having a closer integration between GIS technology and the council website. As an example, he showed how location intelligence is being used to support ‘choice-based letting’ of council properties in Arun, through a self-service application accessed via the council website. When tenants click on property of interest, they are shown the location of the property on a map together with information about facilities close to the address, such as schools, bus stops, and doctors’ surgeries.
Louise Mustafa from the software outsourcing company and Cadcorp partner Northgate Public Services outlined how Northgate address the challenges faced by local government.
Demelza Guy then presented the case for local authorities to design their web mapping applications to take account of the specific features of mobile devices. She pointed out that smartphones have overtaken laptops as the most popular device for going online, and that 50% of all access to council websites is now from such devices. Despite this, the most common reasons for channel shift failure are through not taking account of a visitor’s location and from not optimising services for a mobile device. What then followed was a live demonstration of Cadcorp’s web mapping product – Web Map Layers. It was shown how the application can detect the device being used. When a mobile device is detected, the application launches a simplified mobile interface which features finger-tap data interrogation and navigation, a Quick Search facility, and geolocation detection.
The pressure for local authorities to be better, cheaper, and faster, is not limited to customer interaction via the website. UK sales manager, Gary Randle, showed in his presentation that this pressure extends to the back office. He specifically focussed on the potential benefits of councils using hosted geospatial services, namely reduced upfront costs; the inclusion of software and hardware updates; ease of data management; faster deployment; and improved performance and flexibility. He detailed three hosting models that Cadcorp offers: map data only, map data plus software, and Inspire services. In each case, Gary was able to draw on the experiences of a Cadcorp customer that has deployed each model with success.
For some attendees, the high point of the conference was the announcement of a new Cadcorp product called Notice BoardTM. Notice Board enables a local authority to add a mobile-friendly spatial searching capability to their existing website, without necessarily having to wait for the whole website to be made mobile-responsive. Cadcorp has developed the product on the premise that many people who visit a council website are not browsing, but are looking for information about a particular locality – very often their home address or current location. For example, they want to know what day their green waste is being collected or they would like to find out the contact details of their councillor. They want answers to these questions to be presented as quickly and simply as possible.
We heard how Notice Board addresses this need by displaying the information most commonly requested by website visitors. It uses advanced spatial search techniques in order to generate personalised responses for each visitor to the site based on their location: either an address entered by the user, or a geolocation captured by their mobile device. Search results are summarised as ‘notices’ pinned digitally on a single page of the council website. Users can request more detailed information, including maps, by clicking on hotlinks within a notice. Notice Board detects when a website is being accessed from a mobile device, and it will adjust the screen layout accordingly.
Following lunch, there were two presentations from the Ordnance Survey (OS). The first, from Graham Hughes, reviewed what had been achieved by the Public Sector Mapping Agreement in the five years since its initiation in August 2010. It was shown how case studies have proved invaluable in helping assess the financial benefits of the agreement.
Graham’s colleague Dave Russell followed with an update on the OS product range. We heard how four new OS OpenData products (Open Local, Open Roads, Open Rivers and Open Names) will fit into the OS OpenData Stack, and how new descriptive terms will be associated with features in OS MasterMap. We also heard about two completely new OS products: OS MasterMap Highways Network and OS MasterMap Water Network.
Most Cadcorp user conferences finish up with a ‘Tips and Tricks’ session in which the Cadcorp presales team lift the bonnet on SIS software. This conference was no exception, except the focus was entirely on web applications. Initially, Ian Usher focussed on the Web Map Layers product, showing the new administrator interface. He then showed enhancements to the search capabilities of Web Map Layers, and how easy it is to embed a map in an HTML page of a website. Moving on to the new Notice Board product, he showed how to link from Notice Board to Web Map Layers using a shared URL, and then how easy it is to use Notice Board as a vehicle for posting an alert on a council website.
User conferences are invariably much more than a series of formal presentations. They offer attendees an opportunity to put faces to names and to share experiences through networking. Judging by the level of interaction in the ‘Glasshouse’, the Cadcorp Local Government Conference was a success on all counts.
