Lagan launches Local Government Version 8

Lagan, a division of KANA, formally announces the latest release of Lagan Local Government Version 8.  Lagan is a global leader in G2C (government to citizen) solutions connecting government and citizens worldwide.  Lagan enables governments and citizens to communicate online, on the phone and on the move. With 200 public sector customers worldwide, Lagan helps local governments serve the everyday interests of more than 60 million citizens.

Version 8 reflects input from Lagan’s worldwide customer base, including improved support for Lagan customers’ evolving channel shift strategies for both service and information requests.

The latest release (8.0.2) offers new benefits for local governments seeking to deliver better service experiences to citizens: lower maintenance costs, speed to enhance, depth of deployment, compliance and customer service.

Announcing the launch, Mark Duffell, CEO of KANA Software said:  “With Version 8, we are responding to the demands of our increasingly sophisticated customer base, particularly through improved support for our customers’ evolving channel shift strategies.  In a time of austerity, public sector organisations across the world are under pressure to continue to provide front line services but with reduced budgets.  Version 8 gives our customers important mechanisms to help them address this challenge."

Lagan Local Government Version 8:

• Allows citizens to answer their own questions, reducing the cost of service delivery per citizen.  In conjunction with the Knowledge option, Version 8 enables both citizens (on the web) and agents (in the citizen service centre) to get answers to questions from the same knowledge source, the latter with added “internal-only” supporting information.

• Supports more sophisticated processes, across multiple channels, more easily, more quickly.  A new case form injection feature enables Lagan eForms to be used as templates for the support of processes through simple business user re-use.  This powerful feature, also leveraged by Lagan Citizen Portal and Lagan OnDemand, delivers  support of different presentations of the same process on different devices easily.

• Extends Lagan further into the back office, allowing better service to be delivered to the citizen.   New Virtual Office features provide better support for key business processes such as following up with a citizen (email and letter correspondence) and fulfilling a case (case history filtering, better presentation of case information).

• Enables compliance with the most rigorous policies regarding system access.  The new Access Control List (ACL) based Advanced Security mechanism within Version 8 significantly improves upon the capabilities inherent in previous versions. It provides a GUI-based configuration mechanism, permission-based access to functions by user role and rule-based access to data and data fields.   the new Advanced Audit mechanism records all system access, including creation, print and search operations in a separate secure database.

In the latest Local Government Marketscope report from Gartner published in 2011, Lagan achieved the highest possible “strong positive” rating for a second successive time, the only company to achieve this in the Local Government sector over the last four years.