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Corby Borough Council has become one of the first local governments to start business use of Cloud technology, with a new hosted self-service platform for residents, MyCorby [2].

“My resource is reducing but workload is increasing,” Robert Hinde, customer first manager, told PublicTechnology.net. “A channel switch strategy where we reduced expensive face t face transactions but maintained a very high level of customer service seemed the best solution to our challenges.

The Council says the town's population is expected to double in size to 100,000 in the next two decades and so needed a system that would be as flexible as possible. “I also needed a hosted system so there would be no issue with capacity issues,” he added.

In response, Hinde and his team worked with a firm called Firmstep to deliver the MyCorby platform - a portal that enables residents to access information and services at their convenience, 24 hours a day. MyCorby went live in February.

The overall cost of each customer interaction has been dramatically reduced, compared to the cost of a face-to-face meeting or telephone conversation - releasing funds to be reinvested in other service improvements.

“We have existing budget pressures and of course there are potentially bigger cuts on the way, so we needed to factor that into our planning for the future delivery of services,” Hinde said.