Cardiff City Council's leader Rodney Berman said providing all departments with the same source of information should save time and money.
"If the mother of a child with special needs contacts the council to ask about school places in her area, a caseworker will be able to let all the appropriate schools know and they, in turn, will be able to share information with the parent," he wrote in an article for Guardian Public.
"This could save parents endless time in emailing and discussing the same query with several schools and makes the council much more transparent: citizens will be able track the progress of their case until it is closed," Berman added. "This should see an end to the familiar experience of queries falling down the cracks between different institutions and departments."
Berman emphasised that the deal with India-based Tata Consultancy Services to provide its Digigov technology platform is not an outsourcing arrangement.
"The new partnership with TCS will not involve any council staff being transferred to the private sector. This is a partnership to ensure staff from both here and in TCS work together to learn valuable new skills from each other," he wrote.
The council is setting up an innovation centre within the council, where Tata staff will work with Cardiff's 140 IT staff on designing systems. "The current practice in councils is to decide on the service they want to offer and then talk to IT specialists about how it should be done," he wrote. "But not involving IT providers when services are being first mooted is a recipe for confusion and cost overruns."
"Building IT solutions from the ground has long been the practice in India — where they even make sure that details of planned IT systems are discussed during drafting of legislation," he added.
