Council Spotlight: Birmingham’s Guardian App, a game changer for local government
In 2022, Birmingham City Council were awarded £350,000 in funding through the Local Digital Fund to help develop their Guardian App into a Private Beta.
The aim of this project was to develop a platform that enables their field workers to capture and access data to present casework in a consistent format, and the ability to assign ‘risk markers’ to people or places.
Birmingham has over 3000 staff who can be categorised as field workers. Their duties involve meeting residents and managing council properties and services. Each planned visit requires access to sensitive information held on a variety of databases, such as Northgate Housing. Being able to access this information securely on a mobile device enables an efficient use of staff time.
This project also sought to address another key concern for managers and field workers: risk management. To ensure the risk marking worked effectively, it needed to be contextualised, location specific, up-to-date and accessible in the field, with the ability to update it in real time.
After the project team completed extensive user acceptance testing in December 2022, Local Digital’s Tom Lowndes, Collaboration Manager, and Dan Jones, Content Producer, visited Birmingham to gain insights into the development, the benefits and the next steps for the application.
In this video, you can learn more about the application from:
- Mohammed Javed, Housing Officer
- Carol Gordon, Project Manager
- Zaheer Akhter, Product Owner
- James Gregory, Head of Delivery
If your local authority has similar user needs and would like to see if this platform could address your common challenges, please email BirminghamGuardian@birmingham.gov.uk.
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