LISBON CÂMARA has scooped the top prize in this year’s Information Institute Awards.
The award was for Lisbon Câmara’s LXM Project, dubbed the Municipal Geographical Information Integration and Availability Application.
The project forms part of an overall shake-up and modernisation programme in information technology management, which the council instigated in 2005, but had already been developing over recent years.
Each year, the Fernando Costa Award distinguishes original projects in the information technology area, and in particular, information systems developed by and for public administration entities.
The projects must be innovative and demonstrate applications relevant for today’s society and public administration in particular. The prize in 2004 had been attributed to the Director General of the Finance Information Technology Department for an application that was developed to calculate municipal property tax (UK council tax equivalent) on-line.
The LXM Project was devised in June 2004 as a way of speeding up and facilitating the management and availability of geographic information – accessible via a browser, and integrated with other IT applications that use this type of information.
The benefits of the system have been proven in its daily use in cross-referencing information coming in from various different departments, thus allowing quicker, easier, and more comprehensive data evaluation and resulting in faster decisions on aspects concerning the city as a whole.
Project LXM is web-based and designed for interdepartmental internal use only. It has already meant that staff in diverse council departments can access information relating to any project, at the click of a mouse.
