Sedgemoor is modernising its Revenues and Benefits software.
Sedgemoor District Council has appointed Ballard Chalmers Ltd to provide technical support as the council starts to modernise its Business Rates, Council Tax and Benefits software. Sedgemoor is one of only two councils in the UK who use in-house developed software for these services. The current systems were written twenty-five years ago, so this is a good time to rewrite them to take advantage of modern technology and cloud computing.
These computer systems are at the heart of the council’s plans to improve joined-up services to customers and operate more efficiently. Furthermore, the systems will be developed as open-source, so that other councils can join in the future, to use and expand the software.
The first phase will look at the Business Rates software, during which Ballard Chalmers will work with the Sedgemoor team to adopt agile development techniques and establish a modern componentized architecture.
Andrew Chalmers, of Ballard Chalmers, said: “We are very pleased to have been appointed for this project, it’s a subject we have very good experience in and the application will be extremely helpful to Sedgemoor District Council and hopefully many more councils in the future as well.”
The Council will be adopting principles from the Government’s Technology Code of Practice, and in particular: Open Source, Open Standards, Cloud First, Security and Privacy, Share and Collaborate.
The systems will use a microservice-based architecture, developed in C# on .NET Core and deployed on Azure Serverless technology. Each microservice will be consumed through an Open API defined REST/JSON Web API, or by messages sent to a queue using AQMP and will control its own data storage repository. We will use Azure cloud services including Web Application Firewall, API Management, Service Bus, Azure Storage, SQL Azure, App Insights, App Services and Azure key Vault. The infrastructure will be managed programmatically using Azure Resource Manager (ARM), and deployments will be managed using Azure DevOps pipelines. User Interfaces will be developed using Angular.io.
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