The DNA-Scotland Programme aims to establish a single property information source that adheres to common agreed standards and, together with the citizens account, will be used to improve service delivery within Councils and throughout the Scottish public sector. Corporate Address Gazetteers (CAGs) created by Councils will be linked to a national address gazetteer.

Benefits to the Customer:

• Customers will benefit from improved services where CAGs are used to integrate back office systems to enable faster, more accurate access to Council information.
• Improved business processes will allow reduction in time spent in duplicating effort in keeping address based datasets up to date and free up frontline staff.
• Information will be constantly updated thus avoiding existing problems when people move into new properties.
• All address-based information will be current and be made available throughout the public sector. This will in turn improve emergency services and reduce errors due to incomplete information, e.g. for new developments.
• Address-based information will be continually improved as more users and organisations access it. Queries about addresses will be fed back to local custodians for correction/inclusion.
• Use of national Addressing Standards (BS 7666) enables information to be exchanged with other organisations and applications without developing complex exchange routines, thus reducing the cost of developing applications.

Management arrangements

A key element of the new management arrangements for Customer First is the appointment of lead councils tasked with specific operational responsibilities. Therefore, with effect from June 2007, Stirling Council has agreed to fulfil the lead council role for operational management of and support arrangements for the national address gazetteer.

The Council has arranged with the Improvement Service that Forth Valley GIS will provide the operational gazetteer services. These include managing ongoing user acceptance testing, co-ordinating update and scheduled maintenance of the national gazetteer from the 32 council corporate address gazetteers (CAGs), managing data quality assurance and quality improvement work, frontline support, performance monitoring and review. Ongoing development workstreams will also be handled by Forth Valley GIS.

Managing communication with the gazetteer community is also a priority. The National Gazetteer Community of Practice on the Improvement Service website is a key resource for sharing information and encouraging collaboration amongst practitioners.

Forth Valley GIS will work closely with many other Customer First representatives including Iain McKay, who has now taken on the role of Gazetteer Business Development Manager, to take forward opportunities for wider use of the national gazetteer.

Further information

Contact: Iain McKay
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