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| Kenny Loggins |
Dave Briggs recently wrote this excellent article asking should you develop a single customer account.
What he’s actually asking following on from an article written by Carrie Bishop is should you develop a single customer facing website, portal, app, or whatever term you want to use to describe it, and as he says, the answer is no.
Should you develop a single customer account though?
The answer to that in my view is, yes.
Different departments particularly in larger councils can work as independent business units, resulting in a requirement to create a multitude of logins for different services online.
This could result in the need to create separate logins to council tax, planning, library, social care, education, and other services, and in areas where there are two tiers of council this is even more likely.
It's an information superhighway to a danger zone of many logins.
I hardly ever use council services as a citizen perhaps I might hear you say, how would a single login help me?
Firstly you probably use more council services than you think. Perhaps you use a library or a leisure centre in your area. You probably use roads, streetlights, perhaps car parks, and you have your rubbish and recycling collected. Perhaps you've eaten in a local restaurant and you've seen a food hygiene rating sticker on the window.
I could go on but you get the idea.
Secondly, perhaps as a citizen you don't interact with your council as much as you might because one of the barriers to you using council services more is that they’re harder than they could be to access?
Of course one solution is not to require a login, and wherever possible a service shouldn’t need one to be able to use it, but everywhere you have to retrieve personal or sensitive information should have one.
Many websites now have the ability to log in with a third-party identity provider, for example Google, Facebook, or Twitter. It means you can re-use one login on hundreds of thousands of websites, but still retain control over it.
Central government is creating their own One Login, though there are no plans to make this available to local government.
Council websites can be the same and setting up your own authentication service, acting similarly to a Google, Facebook, or Twitter login, using OpenID Connect, or Azure B2C is relatively simple.
In fact some of the digital platforms that councils already use for their websites and digital services already have this built in as a function.
Each time you develop or procure a new platform, integrate it with your identity provider allowing the customer to re-use their council website login in the new platform, the same they might with a Google, Facebook, or Twitter login.
Once you have a single login across your many platforms it then becomes easier to join up data between them enabling you to do a lot more, that’s a topic for another day, and even then should you develop a single customer portal?
The answer, like Dave said, is still no.
Photo Credit: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel, Maryland, USA: copyright John Mathew Smith 2001
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