The SDS blog

In July we held the first of our Really Useful Workshops at Swale House which was attended by collegues from several of our partners. This first session - User Research at the Discovery Phase - demonstrated how important it is to speak to your users/customers at the beginning of the project.

We attended the LGA Annual Conference in Birmingham and gave a presentation in the Innovation Zone about the services we offer to local authorities.

We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Tandridge District Council website on 3rd July after only 3 months in the making! In March, we were commissioned by Tandridge to assist in scoping out their new website redesign. The aim was to reduce the 1,000 content pages down to under 500 whilst giving the website a modern visual style that meets with today's responsive web standards.

The SDS Team were invited to attend the Spring Socitm Conference in London on 27th April. The conference involved a variety of guest speakers from across the ICT sector, local public services and private sector partners. The conference offered a great platform for us to see and catch up with our existing partners (always nice to see some friendly faces!) as well as offering us the opportunity to meet and chat with other representatives, not only from the public sector, to forge new relationships.

The SDS team have been supporting Tandridge District Council with their website redesign. We started work on the project in March and the new website is due to go live in the summer so it is a fast paced and exciting project.

Those suffering with homelessness and with the threat of becoming homeless can now take advantage of a new online homelessness triage tool facilitated by the SDS in partnership with local authorities in Kent.

Work has been progressing on the online taxi driver knowledge test with over 450 questions in the question bank. Questions cover policy & law, safeguarding, numeracy, highway code and road signs/markings as well as each authorities' local questions covering routes, places and streets.

Shepway District Council have now launched their online event management system, with the aim of enhancing user experience, reduce processing times, reduce the number of enquiries and reduce the amount of administration.

The SDS Team are currently working on a very exciting project with Sevenoaks District Council to assess their current Garden Waste Collection process and look to improve the existing process. The SDS Team have so far engaged with key service representatives and carried out a workshop in order to define and map out the current process for the booking and payment of a Garden Waste Collection by their customers.