Community Portals
Hyperwave works with local authorities to develop valuable, effective portal solutions that are extremely intuitive and easy to use, like www.hertsdirect.org, the portal for Hertfordshire County Council and several other local authorities.
Community portals offer a single, user-friendly way of interacting with an authority, and finding community services information. Not only does this make government more accessible but also helps to cut down the costs of managing transactions internally.
But the value of a portal depends not only on how good it looks, but also on how well interactions made through the portal are managed. If enquiries are answered more slowly, information is out of date or citizens find it difficult to locate the information – or perform the transaction – they want, then the portal will soon become something of a white elephant.
What that means is that any organisation planning to implement a portal solution needs to look carefully at the way its information is organised and its processes operate. If, for instance, bus timetables are published online, then there has to be a process in place for ensuring they are updated when timings change.
Similarly, it’s vital that you make it simple for stakeholders to use and find the information they are seeking. Navigation should be simple, and the design reflect the quality and range of information that can be accessed through it.
Community portals with Hyperwave
One community portal that has proved highly successful – winning government funding as well as a positive response from the community – is www.hertslink.org. The portal brings together all the different local authorities within Hertfordshire, giving citizens a single point of access to a comprehensive range of community services.
Hertsdirect is just one example of a community portal built using Hyperwave solutions. Hyperwave works with local authorities to develop portal solutions that are extremely intuitive and easy to use. The Hyperwave portal can even be customised so that different user groups see it in different ways.
What’s more, the portal is built on Hyperwave’s powerful document and content management functionality, fully integrated with any back-end systems required, to ensure users are able to complete the transactions and interactions they want to make swiftly and effectively.