OCC authored system wins the SOCITM IT Excellence Award 2009
The SOCITM IT Excellence Awards 2009 were held in Edinburgh in
November, and we are delighted that the customer access category
was won by the London Borough of Hackney, for whom we have helped
develop their Citizen Index system.
All Local Authorities, and indeed most organisations, are faced with the problem that their line of business information is spread over many systems. In the case of the London Borough of Hackney, they have a Microsoft CRM system, but also a parking system, a library system, a council tax system, the electoral register, and many other systems which contain various details about their citizens. When a citizen contacts the local authority, they typically expect all their details to be known, regardless of which system those details might be stored on. The local authority therefore needs to provide its staff with the "best view" of its citizen data, together with the ability to efficiently and accurately update multiple systems when, for example, a citizen changes address or possibly their surname.
The central problem that needs to be addressed to tackle this scenario is one of data matching. Is J Smith from 4 Cloister Way the same person as Jon Smyth from 4a Closter Road? To resolve such issues effectively, we worked with Infoshare and used their ClearCore data matching engine to assess the quality of matches between records. We created a BizTalk driven process that feeds data changes from the various Hackney systems into this matching engine, creating best view records in a SQL Server database. To simplify integration of this data into various Hackney systems, we provided them with web services through which they could access this best view, taking account of security and privacy restrictions on the data.
The model of using BizTalk as a technical integration backbone, with a data matching system acting as the semantic integration mechanism is one we believe to be very general, and we are actively investigating other applications of this design at other Local Authorities and beyond.
