Doing more business with Council online
23 October 2012
Chief Executive Peter Guerin's 'Council Talk' column in today's Daily Post.
Increasingly Rotorua District Council customers are wanting to do business with the council online.
This means they have the option of interacting with the council from any location, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we're keen to accommodate that growing expectation.
So the launch last week of our new website - rdc.govt.nz - heralds another step in our providing more online customer services in the expanding digital age we're part of today.
Our new website features a completely revamped navigation structure, a fresh simplified look, enhanced search facilities, and a range of other user-friendly and customer-focused features.
Our old website had been independently ranked in the country's top ten local government sites, but rather than rest on those laurels we wanted to take our web presence to even higher levels.
The web provides us with an effective channel for interacting and engaging with our community and other stakeholders, and it's vital that we keep responding to their needs.
It's interesting to note that the project to develop this new website to accommodate our future needs has been a joint venture between our council and Hamilton City Council. The concept of shared services' between councils is part of a new way of doing business, one which we are now employing for a growing number of our activities.
In this most recent case it means we've been able to get the benefit of shared technical expertise for developing our new website while reducing development costs and timeframes. The site incorporates some of the features of Hamilton City's award-winning website, which they launched a short time back and has proved very successful.
Today, we find many of our council's customers want to be able to conduct business with us online, 24/7.
Our recent introduction of the Dogs Online e-facility for registering dogs and managing dog records has proved a big hit with dog owners. This project was also developed as a joint venture with Hamilton City Council.
And many people are already paying their rates online too.
In coming weeks we will be offering another new facility, enabling people to pay parking fines at the click of a mouse rather than posting cheques or coming into the Civic Centre to pay in person.
We also have plans underway for a number of other new services to be added over time, now that we have a vastly improved web platform with the flexibility to develop more features for our customers.
This project's joint venture arrangement with Hamilton City means our website development costs have been substantially less than we would otherwise have had to budget for.
Readers with an interest in business may like to check out some of our Economic Projects material on the site ['Our Services' tab], and keep an eye out too for regular updating of other council related news, announcements and new features.
Peter Guerin
RDC Chief Executive