London Borough of Lewisham

---

London Borough of Lewisham

Fujitsu and Microsoft took responsibility for the development of a toolkit that enabled the creation of avatar-based interfaces to council services. The toolkit is based upon Fujitsu’s ‘Delivery Suite’ solution kit, which incorporates a natural language processor, a conversation manager and an external systems interface. Access to a system or services is made via the avatar through a keyboard; using a mouse to 'point and click'; on-screen touch; or voice.

Customer's Challenge

Internet based technology enables organisations to communicate more cost-effectively, giving customers convenience, speed, choice and potentially more involvement in the democratic process. Yet many people cannot share in these benefits because of disability, learning difficulties, different language skills, economic disadvantage or because they never had the opportunity to become familiar with computer technology.

The London Borough of Lewisham, like all other local authorities, has many specific e-Government targets that are set out in its e-Government strategy. Lewisham was particularly aware of the divide between citizens who welcome new ways to access council services and those people who are not familiar or comfortable with technology.

As a result of a number of initiatives in this area, the council was successful, as part of a consortium, in applying for funding for a project from the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. The consortium, which was led by Lewisham, included three other municipalities: City of Edinburgh Council, Kista Borough in Stockholm and Ventspils City Council in Latvia; with Fujitsu and Microsoft as technology partners.

The project proposal was to explore how to improve access to the council's Internet based services by using animated on screen characters, known as avatars, as personal assistants that guide users through online transactions. The project was called AVANTI. It began in June 2001 and was completed in July 2003.

Fujitsu's Solution

Fujitsu and Microsoft took responsibility for the development of a toolkit that enabled the creation of avatar-based interfaces to council services. The toolkit is based upon Fujitsu’s ‘Delivery Suite’ solution kit, which incorporates a natural language processor, a conversation manager and an external systems interface. Access to a system or services is made via the avatar through a keyboard; using a mouse to 'point and click'; on-screen touch; or voice.

This underlying technology enables the avatar to decide what action to take. It can, for example, answer a user's question, ask another question, store some information or interface with council systems. The toolkit also allowed trained users from each city council to develop their own avatars and design their own 'conversations' according to local requirements. The cities were thus able to build one or more applications based on the core technology, utilising their native language.

The four councils identified relevant services in which the solution could be applied and developed applications to demonstrate these. The consortium set up a work programme to control the project. This covered the stages of project dissemination, defining user requirements, development of the toolkit and prototype demonstrators, testing and verification, demonstration to the public and finally exploitation of the AVANTI service.

Each of the participating cities in the AVANTI consortium worked with the service providers and groups of local community representatives to specify user requirements and to evaluate the final demonstrators. These groups played a key role in steering the development work and identifying requirements.

Lewisham developed a housing benefits advisor and an eConsultation application. Edinburgh began with a libraries application then extended it into a directory of council services. Kista highlighted its range of service through a frequently asked questions application. Ventspils integrated the avatar with the city's portal and developed an application around discounts available for elderly and disabled citizens.

Benefits to our Customer

The AVANTI research project proved the avatar concept could be beneficial to those members of society who are not used to computer-based systems. The technology was tested in controlled environments and was shown to meet the needs of users. The cities could therefore see how Internet-based council services could be improved for people who were previously excluded.

The system architecture was designed specifically to integrate with existing business processes. It was designed to allow for quick and cost effective implementation of new services to be carried out by suitably trained council users.

“Our aim is to enable every citizen in the borough to interact easily with the council,” said Simon Berlin, Head of e-Government at London Borough of Lewisham. “The AVANTI project has shown that we have the scope to offer citizens yet another convenient means of access to services.”

The city projects were innovative, demonstrating how the core concept and the AVANTI toolkit could be used in a wide range of diverse areas, including benefits advice, library services, discount eligibility and opinion polling. The demonstrators ranged from deep conversations in narrow domains of knowledge, such as benefits advice, through to broad, shallower conversations, such as frequently asked questions and directories of council services.

Our Approach

Fujitsu had been researching and developing interactive e-advice technology for some years and brought its knowledge and experience in this area to the AVANTI project. The project built on Fujitsu's Delivery Suite™ solution and developed it into a Citizen Relationship Management solution. This provides a framework for the development of customer or citizen centric systems. It was tailored extensively for the specific requirements of the AVANTI project.

As the technology is web-based, it can be deployed to any browser anywhere in the world so the solution is replicable in different situations. It can, for example, be utilised by commercial organisations to enhance Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and improve interaction with customers who find current technology difficult to use.

Fujitsu's solution was migrated to Microsoft.NET technologies to provide a platform for taking the development forward, opening up the potential to integrate new speech technologies and integration capabilities.

The project explored the potential to incorporate other languages and utilise alternative devices such as interactive televisions and mobile telephones. It also investigated password-free options, such as smart cards and biometric technologies, for user authentication. The AVANTI solution was designed to be flexible and extensible to allow for these new technologies to be incorporated as required, subject to user requirements and technology maturity.

The language, culture and technological challenges of a trans-European project were successfully managed through extensive collaboration.

Our Expertise

The AVANTI project developed extensive knowledge of the barriers stopping some citizens from accessing e-Government systems and defined, developed and tested a solution to address these. The consortium researched the psychology of citizen interaction across the four cities and defined processes for development of citizen-centric solutions. Finally, the AVANTI toolkit and the five demonstrator applications have significant potential for deployment in a wide range of possible areas, both in the public sector and in the private sector.