iNetwork, the local public services improvement partnership, has announced a collaboration with public sector technology specialist NDL. The principal objective of this is for members to benefit from NDL’s industry experience and solutions in order to deliver more innovative and cost-effective services to their users and communities.

 

iNetwork, which was previously the North West e-Government Group (NWEGG), enables local public services to share best practice including using technology to improve services within the cost-cutting agenda. To achieve this, it needs to look outside for new ideas from experts who really understand these issues. It has agreed a very limited number of collaborative partnerships with commercial organisations, which now includes NDL.

 

Many iNetwork members are already successfully using NDL’s integration and mobile working products. Therefore iNetwork believes the collaboration will provide an invaluable open forum for discussing how users’ experiences can help others adopt or extend their use of NDL’s technology.

 

According to Phil Swan, iNetwork Director, “We will only collaborate with companies whom we truly believe will provide real benefit to our members. NDL has demonstrated over a long period that it really understands the issues they face, in particular through the high standard of independent thought leadership it displays in its market reports. It’s very rare for companies to provide such unbiased and valuable insights into the technology issues facing the public sector. This approach illustrates NDL’s passion for the sector and its unique commercial approach.”

 

Declan Grogan, Managing Director of NDL, commented: “We have already worked with a significant proportion of iNetwork’s members, many of whom are spearheading the adoption of technology to achieve efficiencies. This partnership is a real collaboration: not only will we support iNetwork’s ethos of sharing best practice among members, but also we will listen to their experiences and feed these into future developments of our technology.”

 

iNetwork is funded primarily through public sector membership subscription and through specific grants. It is based at Tameside Council Offices in Ashton-under-Lyne. The partnerships is driven by people who believe that collectively they can make a real difference to the quality of cost effectiveness of local public service delivery. iNetwork supports over 70 organisations by providing collective leadership, safe spaces for collaboration, diffusing innovations, delivering training and learning opportunities, lobbying and influencing, and brokering support between organisations.