Dorset Council’s cabinet has approved a plan for the procurement of a new low code digital platform through the G-Cloud framework.
At its meeting last week it backed a proposal aimed at streamlining its legacy software contracts and supporting the increased use of online services.
It is aiming to find a supplier through G-Cloud to work on a one-year contract, with the possibility of two one-year extensions, with a maximum value of £540,000.
The proposal document indicates that the council “cautiously estimates” savings of at least £310,000 per year on the investment.
It points to a preference to work with the open standards based Liferay platform, working with ‘cubes’ of functionality developed by other customers for tasks including case management, website search, viewing a council tax account and booking a site inspection.
The planned approach is for the council to spend six to nine months on understanding the platform and developing plans to migrate from existing product such as its website content management system, to look which at which applications could be accommodated within the platform and to deploy new cubes.
The move marks the latest step in the consolidation of digital systems from the coming together of Dorset County Council with five districts and boroughs in April of last year.
Dorset Council’s chief executive Matt Prosser told UKAuthority at the time that the digital consolidation was expected to take some time, and that a significant step was the separation of digital change functions from ICT infrastructure and architecture.
Image from iStock, donskarpo
