City Tools: shining a light on the technologies powering London’s boroughs

All London boroughs care deeply about providing amazing services for their residents. To do that, they need to have great technology and strong relationships with the best suppliers.

And yet, as anyone who has worked in the local government technology field will testify, that is not always the case.

Doing anything about this is challenging.

One reason is the sheer scale. Collectively, boroughs and the city spend over £14 billion a year delivering their services. The technology that powers those services is inevitably complex and difficult to track, decode and understand.

Second, the examples we hear — of good news stories and frustrations alike — are mainly based on anecdote. What we’ve lacked is an evidence base to more systematically look at how we can improve the system.

Until now.

On 13th November, the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) and Bloomberg Associates, a pro-bono municipal consulting service, released City Tools: London, an interactive dashboard that maps the technologies, suppliers and contracts used to power each service and function across London’s boroughs. The project is based on Bloomberg Associates’ Digital City Tools report, but adapted for a London context with the expert local knowledge of consultant CIO, Omid Shiraji.

22 boroughs submitted data on their technology via a survey, which was combined with open data from all 32 boroughs and the City of London to build up a richer picture. Data specialists Eden Smith have added a visualisation layer in Power BI to allow the data to be interrogated from different angles. In the public dashboard, you can filter by the supplier, system, service area, contract end dates and borough.

The City Tools Dashboard, available at http://loti.london/citytools

Some of the key insights from the data are captured in the accompanying report.

Among a list of potential benefits outlined there, I personally hope LOTI can facilitate the use of this data to:

1. Help boroughs see where their contracts for particular service areas or with a particular supplier end at a similar time. They could use this information to share their experiences, discuss their needs and improve their approach to the market, potentially exploring joint procurement opportunities.
2. Enable boroughs to share their expertise with each other. In the survey to collect the data, many boroughs also shared their level of confidence in supporting and developing different systems. Seeing details of their individual and collective expertise should enable better peer support and the ability to form new partnerships.
3. Make it easier for SMEs to identify which boroughs have contracts ending in service areas where they have products to offer. This should help them target their engagement at boroughs most likely to be receptive to new approaches. For those SMEs who offer products that integrate with legacy IT systems, knowing exactly which legacy providers are used and where should help prioritise product development.
4. Understand and address some of the causes of dissatisfaction. A striking insight from the report is that boroughs with fewer vendors overall feel they aren’t getting good value for money. We want to understand what factors are at play there. This should be a chance to engage the market constructively, clearly stating what good looks like, and ruling out the behaviours that have a negative impact. Top of my list would be ending the practice whereby some suppliers charge local authorities to access their own data (where it’s not part of their standard dashboard). Clearly, suppliers have frustrations of their own, and we want to understand those, too.

What next?

We are under no illusions that data is a cure-all. We also know that the first version of the dashboard is just a prototype that needs to be enhanced and accompanied by many other things to deliver real change.

To that end, over the next few weeks, LOTI will be:

• Engaging with boroughs to identify areas where the current data can provide immediate value. With the data revealing that a substantial number of contracts end in 2020, there is real scope to trial some new collaborative approaches to thinking about the technology they want to procure.
• Exploring real user needs — from both the local government and supplier side — to inform how the tool is developed and used in future. We are not interested in building a platform for its own sake. We equally recognise that we need to understand what changes in process, policy, culture and mindset are required to make the data useful.
• Working with the GLA’s Economic Development team to see how City Tools can be developed in a way that fully complements their recent initiatives to develop tools that help Govtech SMEs more easily navigate the London public sector market.
• Based on all the above, making decisions on how to automate (where possible) elements of the tool, and properly resource the initiative so that it becomes sustainable.

In short, the dashboard and report are just the start, but I believe they provide a strong foundation on which much else can be built.

You can follow LOTI’s progress on this front on Twitter and Medium.