Rutland County Council is set to dramatically increase efficiency with a new gazetteer management system from Aligned Assets. Symphony iManage, the gazetteer management system in use by over 100 sites across the public sector, will be used by Rutland County Council for the management of their Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG), Local Street Gazetteer (LSG) and Associated Street Data (ASD).
In addition to Symphony iManage, they have opted to taken the Aligned Assets’ integration module, Symphony iExchange, which will allow them to set up automated exports of their gazetteer data into their back office systems, as well as automate their exports to the national hub.
The first integration to be established using Symphony iExchange, and one regarded as a ‘key system’, was to their Northgate (iLAP) planning systems. By synchronising these systems with the gazetteer, Rutland County Council have created a scenario through which changes to their LLPG are automatically exported in DTF 7.3, enabling the planning, building control and land charges departments to all be using the most up to date address data available.
Symphony iExchange will allow Rutland County Council to establish an unlimited amount of integrations, with each one uniquely tailored to the recipient system/department. They will be able to set the frequency e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, the format e.g. DTF, XML, CSV, the type of data sent e.g. only approved LPIs or only those with Council Tax cross reference, and will even being able to select export types right down to level 3 of the BLPU classifications.
By centralising their gazetteer and ensuring other systems can feed from it, Rutland County Council will start to make considerable savings. This was demonstrated in the 2010 report from the Local Government Group titled ‘The Value of Geospatial Information to Local Public Service Delivery in England and Wales’, which showed average benefits for local authorities using a product like iExchange to be between £12,500 and £22,732 per service.
Better working practices will also be available to Rutland County Council through their use of the UK’s most advanced software for Street Naming and Numbering, Symphony SNN. Designed to manage the complete life cycle of naming a street or numbering a property, it automates processes such as sending out correspondence and keeps a full audit trail so that anyone can easily see what stage a case is at. It allows the SNN Officer to search and extract data from the LLPG, whilst new builds can be seamlessly sent to the gazetteer for acceptance and entry by the Custodian.
“We were looking for a system that would enable us to manage the LLPG, LSG and ASD through one interface and Symphony iManage was the ideal choice,” explained Ben Catton Corporate LLPG & GIS Custodian at Rutland County Council. “We needed to replicate the gazetteer links we already had established with the iLAP planning systems, which we could do using iExchange, but what really appealed to us was the ability to start integrating with many more systems, something we had not previously been able to do.”
“Aligned Assets have shown themselves to be experts in their field and I would be happy to recommend them and their software to anyone.”
For more information visit: www.aligned-assets.co.uk
