35 mins, 2006        [password required] Local councils are often huge organisations, providing a wide variety of services, from running libraries to keeping the roads free of ice. Critical to their operation are information systems. This film visits Cornwall County Council to explore how five of these information systems work. ADMINISTRATION: Councils are vast bureaucracies generating mountains of information. Storing this in a way that people who need it can access it quickly is a major systems challenge which goes to the heart of local government efficiency. Cornwall Council is developing a system called ERDMS - Electronic Document Report Management System. Freedom of information and data protection are key considerations in the system. TRANSPORT: The council has to make sure the roads don't get dangerously icy by knowing what the weather's going to do and gritting them at the right time. To help them in this they use a system called Roadcast, which is linked to sensors dotted throughout the county. Another system - the pavement management system - allows them to monitor the road network and helps them decide when roads need resurfacing. WEBSITE: The council's old website was hard to use - each department of the council designed their own pages and there was little overall control of how the website looked or how users found their way round it. So now they've redesigned and rebuilt the site, and introduced new software which means people have to stick to a single standard style. But it hasn't been easy to persuade staff of the value of a more standardised approach. CARE MANAGEMENT: Another responsibility of the council is to offer care to people who are unable to look themselves - for example, the elderly or handicapped. Cornwall Council has a care management system which is designed to identify the needs of people being offered care and to highlight problems which have to be addressed. Their aim is to have a single assessment system, so that all the different people involved in looking after someone can co-ordinate their efforts. PERFORMANCE INDICATORS: One of the big challenges facing local government is to prove that they are spending taxpayers' money well. Councils are using performance indicators to try to measure how well they're doing - and in Cornwall these performance indicators are brought together in a single system. The idea is that this will help them highlight areas where they're falling down, so they can then take action to improve things. But are they measuring the right things?