LOTI: Weeknote 24

New Years’ Resolutions are notoriously hard to keep. Research shows that 35% of us break them by the end of January, and only 23% see it all the way through to completion.

LOTI’s New Year’s resolution is that 2020 will be our year of delivery.

We spent 2019 engaging with boroughs to better understand their challenges, spot opportunities to collaborate and listen to the visions they share for how LOTI can contribute to improving local government service delivery and outcomes for Londoners.

Now we need to act on these suggestions and deliver! Last Tuesday we curated a roadmap that points to 23 items that we intend to have successfully delivered and completed after a year in operation:

Digital Leadership

1. Published Digital Apprenticeships Guide (and created a polished web version)

2. Run social media campaign prompting digital apprentices for local government

3. Secured pledges to have recruited 100 Digital Apprentices by September

4. Established Digital Apprentices Network

5, Established Managers of Digital Apprentices Network

6. Organised Digital Apprentice Celebration event — we hope with the Mayor of London! (September 2020)

Sharing and Reusing / Better Partnerships

7. Developed City Tools into a more comprehensive tool for understanding and accessing local government technology procurement opportunities

8. Agreed Common Terms and Conditions to be used in all tech contracts

9. Created a common tender specification for the procuring of future Northgate Housing Services.

10. Completed collaborative procurement review of at least one additional service

11. Brokered relationships between LOTI CIOs and their corresponding Crown Commerical Service representatives

12. Hired a new team member to support boroughs in the collection of City Tools data about the different technologies that power their services

Data Collaboration & Embedding Standards

13. Adopted Joint Statement of Intent on Responsible Data Collaboration

14. Adopted LOTI Information Governance Process

15. Created directory of IG personnel in each borough

16. Trialled the use of the Information Sharing Gateway

17. Co-created a Digital Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) Tool with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, CC2I and Looking Local

18. Established a London Smart Street Infrastructure Working Group

19. Added every LOTI boroughs’ open data (or metadata) to the London Datastore

20. Created a directory of best AI resources

21. Created a process overview for Effective AI Governance

22. Launched at least two data collaboration public service improvement projects

Shared Experiments

23. Created an Assistive Technology evaluation guide.

These 23 items will be the end result of various projects that we currently have in train. You’ll see from the list that much of our work is focused on fixing the plumbing. As Eddie explained in his blog last week, year one primarily focuses on the groundwork because it effectively paves the way for more innovative thinking in our second year in operation.

With our end goal in mind, we worked together as a team to revise our ways of working. In 2020, the LOTI Central Team commits to:

1. Focusing on delivering projects that lead to improvements in public service delivery with Londoners’ needs at the centre
2. Developing a robust evidence base to inform our project selection process
3. Better communicating the rationale for our ways of working and projects to our members
4. Developing our relationships with boroughs’ elected members, CEOs, and service area leads in addition to their our core membership CIOs and CDOs in order to ensure that our work meets their needs
5. Increasing the pace of our project delivery by working with smaller groups of boroughs for the benefit of all.

Coming up this week

Lined up in the first week following our resolution, we’ll be:

1. Reviewing our AI Ethics programme proposal with Rehana Ramesh and Matthew Lloyd from Brent (helps us to deliver against resolutions 20 and 21).
2. Condensing our data collaboration ideas into a proposal to be considered by our members at the next workshop (helps us to deliver against resolution 22).
3. Holding a troubleshooting meeting to uncover the challenges and mapping out next steps for implementing Govroam at London Councils (helps us to complete our initial Seamless WiFi project).