The Awards were presented 13 October at Socitm 2008 and the three winning case studies were presented the following day. You can view the presentations of the winners on this website.

This year's awards were separated into three categories - service transformation, shared services and mobile and flexible working. Intellect received a large number of projects of extremely high standard, and six councils made it through to the final stage.

See video interviews with the winners on the conference videos page.

Winners and runners up in each category were:

Service Transformation

Winner: Kooth.com - Kooth.com solves a significant problem for vulnerable young people and local authorities. The web-based counselling service provides young people with a free, confidential, safe, always accessible and, above all, anonymous and non-threatening way of asking for help when they first need it. It enables local authorities to intervene early with regard to difficult emotional and mental health problems being encountered by vulnerable young people.

Runner up: City of York Council - easy@york was conceived to ensure all the council's services are easily accessible by whatever channel the customer chooses and are also available on-line for 24 hour access. In the first financial year, the programme resulted in cost savings of £247,000 while 96.9% of calls were answered within 20 seconds and 99% of the council's customers are satisfied with the service they receive.

Shared Services

Winner: Hampshire Local Government Partnership - The Hampshire Regional Recruitment Portal is a project where 12 of the 15 local authorities in Hampshire joined in a true partnership to deliver a single technology solution for attracting candidates and managing the recruitment process across the authorities.

Runner up: Northern Ireland Civil Service - The Northern Ireland Civil Service set up IT Assist, its ICT Shared Service Centre, in May 2007. IT Assist provides “common” ICT services to some 11,000 users across seven Northern Ireland departments and will cover 18,300 users across all eleven departments and their agencies by April 2009.

Mobile & Flexible Working

Winner: City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council - Wakefield's organisational change programme 'WorkSmart' is delivering real benefits for citizens, employees and the council. The integrated programme is rationalising the property portfolio, improving productivity and providing a modern, fit-for-purpose workspace. This is underpinned by a flexible technology infrastructure that enables staff to deliver high quality services to citizens in the most appropriate way from office, home or mobile.

Runner up: West Sussex Accessible Services Partnership - This project involved the deployment of 30 GPS mobile phones to field based staff enabling them to report incidents with no paperwork. The image is recorded on the phone along with some simple textual information and an automatically generated GPS location.

For further Information contact:

Carla Baker,
Intellect, Russell Square House, 1012 Russell Square, London WC1B 5EE.
T: 020 7331 2164,
E: carla.baker@intellectuk.org