Continued funding cuts combined with pandemic-related disruption and ongoing staffing challenges have left most council departments and local government services overstretched and under-resourced – at a time when demand for support is at an all-time high.

To manage these pressures and meet their service targets, council departments and service providers need to operate in smarter ways:

• Through the ability to share resources and records across departmental boundaries;
• By connecting case management more seamlessly and traceably from start to finish; and
• By making it easier for citizens to engage and self-serve – especially if they are not technology-literate.

SynApps can help with all of this, while simultaneously reducing the cost and complexity of councils’ current IT infrastructures and making better use of existing investments.

The soaring cost of living is one of many factors driving up demand for local government services, affecting everything from benefits access to housing support. The continued crisis in healthcare, meanwhile, is compounding existing pressures on social care.

All of this means that councils need greater control over how they allocate, track and manage resources. They also need to intervene and help busy teams cope with their mounting workloads, to reduce stress and give teams a new sense of pride in the job they do.

Fortunately, there is considerable scope for transformation. Better still, the savings from simplifying complex existing IT infrastructures could go a long way in paying for process automation solutions that can take the strain with almost immediate effect.

The key is to make it easy for teams to use any new functionality, and SynApps specialises in delivering an intuitive, modern user experience across all of its solutions and tools. We help breathe new life into existing systems, and empower teams to do more – so that they stay on top of their workloads, confident that nothing has been missed.

When councils are struggling to balance their resources and workloads, and teams can’t readily access information, citizens can suffer a poor experience.

By joining up existing systems across departmental divides, and more seamlessly connecting data and content with end-to-end processes, SynApps makes it possible for teams to provide a better and more immediate experience for citizens. Even if they aren’t operating at full capacity.

Better still, we can help you empower citizens to do more for themselves – whether they want to report fly-tipping, upload evidence to support council tax re-banding, or get an update on a social care application.

From handling routine citizen enquiries or complaints, to managing the ins and outs of complex social care requirements, all councils need a reliable way to connect the dots, flag issues, progress next actions, and keep everyone in the picture.

This starts with the ability to capture information closer to the point of need, digitally.

Too often, key IT systems are restricted to a given department or function, limiting the potential for case visibility, process transformation and timely reporting. Piecing together everything that’s required can take up an excessive amount of time – even if the team members with access to the information are available to find and share it.

Using easy-to-deploy, cloud-based tools and solutions, SynApps can help council departments and public service providers link data and content across a whole range of applications (from case management and social care to HR and finance, for example). Once processes and content are more intrinsically connected, we can help apply rules-based workflow automation, to boost productivity.

In social care, we can enable a completely integrated social care system. This paves the way for a clear line of sight, and more efficient case handling, from initial case triage and assessment, to resource allocation and management, right through to invoice management, financial review and compliance reporting.

And that’s just one example. We can provide this ease of integration across any local government setting.

However far you want to go in consolidating and simplifying your IT, you’ll still need to comply with formal requirements around how you retain and manage records over time. But this shouldn’t be a barrier to progress.

Using the modern archive solution and cloud-based service, OpenText InfoArchive, SynApps can help you decommission costly and redundant systems, while preserving access and control of their contents (both structured data and unstructured information),  via a much more affordable and practical set-up.

We’ll help you assess what to keep, but capacity is rarely an issue – and we can configure InfoArchive so that any number of users can access the content.

This is a great chance to reduce your IT complexity, lowering the associated admin overhead and maintenance costs.

Today whole swathes of the public sector are staking their future on cloud-based technology systems. As well as freeing council departments from the high costs and administrative burden of buying, scaling and managing their own in-house systems, a cloud strategy allows them to take advantage of the latest functionality and to support secure, compliant information and records access from anywhere.

SynApps specialises in deploying cloud-first or cloud-ready platforms and solutions which harness open technology standards, open data formats, easy scalability and the highest levels of security, to support the whole spectrum of local government requirements – from the modest and practical, to the innovative and pioneering.