Web Portal Service Unites Communities in Great Britain

The Local Channel (http://www.thelocalchannel.co.uk) is a web portal service for the free use of all 23,000 local parish councils and local communities across the UK. Projections predict that the service will have several million users within a year.

The Person

The customer of The Local Channel “TLC” is any person, in any community, whether they are a member of a local council, a local resident, a business owner or leader of a not for profit organization. In fact everyone in the community can benefit from using The Local Channel:

• Local residents can benefit from easy access to local information for community services, local special events and social functions. You can find out what is going on in your area regarding planning applications, future council plans and decisions.
• Clubs and charities and indeed local schools, associations and any non-for profit organizations can benefit from free websites to let the community know what they are doing, promoting events and finding new members.
• Local Businesses can benefit from advertising products, services and special offers to a local audience.
• The Council/Community can benefit from a free Local Channel website providing a communication path with the parish council.

Business Model

Revenues are raised through both national and local advertising within the portal reaching appropriate, targeted and real audiences. A percentage of the advertising revenue is then paid back to the local communities.

In order to help realize the full potential of TLC and increase functionality within the portal, Appligenics were chosen to help develop the portal further. This was initiated through Agile+ workshops - totally business-focused sessions designed to help business people devise their own solutions. New business concepts were explored in the workshops and the concept of the customer was redefined. New income streams were identified, clever methods of infiltration, alerting that encouraged local people to be involved, and ideas that moved from static ‘push’ methods to an engagement model working between people were discussed and employed.

The workshops started in late December 2003 and were completed within eight weeks. The application was generated and then re-worked to improve and hone processes before being released to the Focus Group for assessment, and then refined based on their feedback. The application went live in June 2004.

The application is a complete web portal, with all of the external screens and programs, plus it incorporates all of the back-office processes necessary to run the operational business. It includes complex processes and consists of one million lines of executable code. To put this into perspective, an experienced Java programmer can create on average 400 lines of code per day, which means that this would have required 2,500 days of programming. The application was designed using the Appligenics Agile+ design method and the supporting Designer tools. The design can be maintained and changed easily, and the one million lines of code can be recreated at will in approximately one hour.

It should also be noted that in the process, the business users devised automated processes that allows the company to scale and still reduce fixed cost. Headcount previously used to maintain applications has been reallocated to managing sales channels and increasing revenues. This approach would never have been possible without the intimate involvement of the business operations people.

The underlying system is extremely complex in terms of design and process, but this is hidden from the business user or customer, who see a system that is simple to use and maintain. In fact, anyone with only very basic skills is able to produce and update a web site for their community, club or business.

TLC Communities Diagram View larger image

Summary

Using Appligenics, The Local Channel has been able to completely re-engineer its operational front-end and the internal systems used by back-office staff. It has created experiences for a wide and divergent group of customers (people in the community, businesses, action groups, and organizations) that would not have been possible within the timeframe. It will now be translated and deployed throughout Europe and scaled to a level unprecedented with a UK application.