DWP modernises to speed up benefits

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The Department for Work and Pensions has revealed the progress of an electronic document management solution it has been working on with IBM.

The ECM (Electronic Content Management) project, which will organise information and data of around 100 million documents linked to 15 million customers has been built and tested.

Work is presently being done on its integration with the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for the Pension Service. It is due to go live in October this year.

"With what we've built, the technology is invisible so the user will be using their existing desktop with the technology sitting underneath," said project manager Jacqui Leggerty, who was speaking at IBM's Information on Demand conference in Hague. She has been working on the project for 18 months.

Leggerty said that it was part of a wider business transformation where the work was being done behind the scenes without users seeing the many changes. She said that this was the final phase where the system was being optimised.

She said: "What we are trying to achieve is now is to maximise the use of information, not only in the pension's service but with the ability to the share it."

The solution was being built on a SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) as a true shared service. Work was being done between different groups within the service to create a highly configurable solution that was reusable.

She said that the Pension Service integration would lead to further work with the other sections of the DWP: "We have the Child Support Agency and Jobcentre Plus just lined up behind that to start piloting hopefully next year."

The point was made that rather than simply being an IT project, the solution was very much business orientated. Leggerty said that it was vital that information could be collected for some of the most vulnerable people in the UK who would contact at a time of need or financial hardship.

Leggerty said: "It makes the difference in putting food on the table and keeping their homes. We need to make it seamless as possible."

She gave an example of how the solution would improve customer service: "Currently dealing with paper it would take about five days for correspondence, to get from post to an agents desk where they will need a day or two to make the assessment and payment. What would happen now is that we would have a same-day response."

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