Idox
Highland Council gains efficiency and knowledge with Uniform Cloud
Highland Council gains efficiency and knowledge with Uniform Cloud
Details:
- Company: Idox
- Client: Highland Council
- Year: 2000
- Region: Scotland
- Product: Built Environment Software
Service areas:
- Environmental and sustainability services
- Planning and urban design services
- Organisational digital transformation
Introduction
Highland Council manages planning and building standards across a vast and diverse region, covering a third of Scotland, from remote areas to Inverness. Despite its low population density, the area has seen a significant increase in households since 2001, intensifying demands on planning services. Facing ambitious Scottish Government targets for new housing and sustainable development, the Council critically needed agile, efficient processes. They sought to streamline operations and leverage robust data to monitor progress and understand wider community development implications. This necessitated a reliable, advanced cloud-based solution to support their evolving planning landscape and meet these growing demands.
Challenges
Highland Council, a pioneer in digitizing planning and building standards case management in Scotland, faced unique challenges due to its expansive and geographically diverse remit. With a growing population and the Scottish Planning Project's drive for electronic documents, the Council sought to enhance its operational efficiency and ensure continuous service availability for both staff and citizens. They recognised the opportunity for a proven, cloud-based solution that could comprehensively support diverse planning requirements, including development control, enforcements, and appeals. Additionally, the Council aimed to optimise infrastructure management, thereby enabling staff to dedicate more resources to delivering first-class public service, rather than being absorbed by technical complexities.
Solutions
To address these challenges, Highland Council, building on a 25-year relationship with Idox, became the first Scottish local authority to migrate to Idox Uniform in the cloud in 2015. This strategic move was central to the Council's objective of enhancing system resilience and minimising service interruptions. The migration project, completed within a tight nine-month deadline, was seamless for end-users, with the only change being a move to a single sign-on. The transition also incorporated the Contaminated Land team into the system. By adopting a service hosted and managed by Idox, the Council gained access to the most up-to-date software versions, automatic updates, improved data security, and significant cost efficiencies, freeing internal resources from infrastructure management.
Results
The migration to Uniform Cloud dramatically improved system resilience and reliability, eliminating fears of downtime. This stability empowered Highland Council to innovate further, developing new modules for appeals, enforcement, and development condition monitoring. The enhanced data insights now provide seamless access to critical information, such as affordable housing progress and sustainability metrics, supporting strategic planning and community evolution.
Moving to Uniform in the cloud gave the Council the ability to develop modules, change workflows and expand data resources without any fear of affecting system performance or availability.
Fiona Elder
Systems and Change Team Leader, Highland Council
