Microsoft has identified local government as a key market, and rolled out its Citizen Service Platform (CSP) to an audience of local council chief information officers (CIOs) in Portugal last week.

First announced in January this year, the CSP is an application framework based on products including Sharepoint, Dynamics CRM, Office and Virtual Earth.

But the move was questioned by one CIO. Dylan Roberts, head of ICT at Leeds City Council, said: “It is really a question of how they are going to fulfil the delivery. And at the moment it looks like several applications and a few case studies.”

However, Susan Attard, deputy town clerk at the City of London -­ an authority with 9,000 residents and 320,000 daily workers ­- said it was targeting savings of £1.2m through CSP deployments. The City authority introduced a Dynamics CRM-based contact centre which it said cut call volume from 130,000 to 50,000, with 65 per cent of calls resolved at first point of contact.

Microsoft said the CSP would involve partners developing specific offerings within the framework, working to templates developed especially for the market.

Non-product templates include reference data models, pre-defined workflows and role-based user experiences. On the product side templates include CRM for
municipal governments, electronic form and Sharepoint services templates.

“The CSP launch is customer-driven,” said Ralph Young, vice president for the worldwide public sector at Microsoft. “Though each local government body is unique there is a common set of requirements.”