Ambitious, Innovative and Exciting

What is Norfolk Citizen Identity?

A collaboration between the District Councils and the County Council in Norfolk to share a joint customer identity in order to better serve our shared residents digitally.

So how does that work?

In order to have a shared customer identity we needed to provide a mechanism for them to have a digital account that they can use to access shared services from all tiers of local government.

Azure Active Directory B2C was our preferred choice as it provided us with all of the functionality required and was supported by a trusted partner and supplier of customer identity and access management in the cloud.

All authentication requests are directed to the cloud based service to authenticate and then return the customer to the required place. Customers have a choice to either sign in with their existing social accounts (Facebook, Google+, Microsoft Accounts, LinkedIn and many others) or use their personal emails and create a new account.

What are the benefits of this?

The benefits are far reaching and the potential for future innovations based on a shared identity are huge, just a few of the benefits are listed below.

• Reduce avoidable contacts by servicing at the point of contact first time.
• Better customer experience having only one account to remember.
• No need to create a new account when moving between districts.
• Shared customer data will be more accurate and up to date.
• Better visibility of all digital services provided with clear ownership for all councils.
• Potential to save costs through shared technology for digital services and leveraging the economies of scale in the future.
• Enable identity validation and shared assurance of customer identity to facilitate access to more sensitive data and services at lower cost.

With a shared identity, when a user logs into the County Council Portal we can surface data that relates to the customer from the District to present to them so they can access all available information from multiple entry points.

The same applies when accessing services from the District customer portal, we can link seamlessly to County digital services such as reporting a highways problem.

What are we doing next?

• We are bringing Great Yarmouth on-board as part of the prototype solution for single sign on and customer portal integration in the next phase which will help us to understand the process in adding new authorities.
• We will be engaging with Norfolk County Council data services to look at creating a shared data store for our shared customer details. This will be probably be accessible via APIs through an Azure API Gateway (still working through this).
• We will be planning the migration of over 12,000 customer accounts into the new authentication solution ensuring that only customers who need to reset passwords are informed and guided through this process.

Want to join us?

If your organisation would like to join us and collaborate on this solution or if you would just like to learn more about what we are doing and how just email ssmith@s-norfolk.gov.uk