Thanet District Council in Kent recently moved over from managing their DiTV service themselves to having their microsite managed by the DigiTV Bureau Service .Roz Edridge, e-Business Manager at Thanet District Council explain why...

 "Thanet District Council has participated in the national DiTV project for two years as part of the Kent Connects pilot site.  Following the initial set up as part of the pilot, responsibility for generating new content and maintaining and updating existing content was passed to the Council’s web content team.

With pressure on resources as a result of an ever expanding website, the Council realised that maintaining an information rich DiTV site was becoming difficult and that it did not infact fulfil the key objective of DiTV which was to provide local residents with an additional channel to contact the Council.

The option to opt for the DigiTV Bureau managed site at the same cost as a self-managed site seemed to address both issues, offering a monthly updating service and a much wider transactional capability.

From the time that Thanet agreed to progress this option, the creation, sign up and go live of the site was a matter of weeks.  The Council identified a number of additional forms within the Report It and Request It menus that it felt would be more beneficial to its customers than those available from the pick list, and these were developed by DigiTV’s Bureau Service at no extra cost adding value to the Council’s investment.

Monthly updating is at a time convenient to ourselves, which means we have been able to slot this into the work programme of our Corporate Communications team in terms of supplying regular news and events updates and these only require one week’s lead time which will assist with keeping information topical and current.

Whilst we experienced some delays with obtaining a contract, when this did finally arrive it was simple to approve and our questions were answered by return. 

For Councils looking to trial DiTV as part of their channel mix but who have limited human resource to support it, I would thoroughly recommend the Bureau option."

Roz Edridge, e-Business Manager, Customer Services, Thanet District Council

August 2006