Case Study: North Lanarkshire Council achieves 10‑minute FOI responses and better data accuracy with Squiz's Matrix CMS customer portal

North Lanarkshire Council - Customer Case Study

North Lanarkshire Council, the fourth largest Scottish local authority serving over 330,000 residents, faced reduced funding and limited resources and needed to improve data quality as a foundation for designing data-led services and better public access to information. To support this transformation the Council worked with multiple partners including Squiz, deploying Squiz’s Matrix CMS and Enterprise Search as part of a wider digital and open data programme.

Squiz helped build a customer portal by integrating Matrix CMS and Enterprise Search with Verint’s citizen engagement solution, the Council’s VisionWare master data system, Civica council tax, and the MyAccount identity provider, while redesigning data processes to automatically create open datasets and streamline document management. The result: more accurate council data with fewer errors and duplication, Freedom of Information processing for business rates cut from 10 working days to about ten minutes, faster citizen access to services (council tax, pest control, street lighting, etc.), and simplified security through an open-by-default approach.

North Lanarkshire Council

Peter Tolland

Customer and Information Governance Manager