LOTI: Weeknote 42
LOTI: Weeknote 42
Designing challenges to tackle common Covid-19 recovery themes
We spent most of last week developing our methodology for turning the five common Covid-19 recovery themes we shared in our last weeknote, into potential collaborative design challenges. Here’s a reminder of our five themes: 1) smarter council, 2) tackling vulnerability, 3) promoting inclusion, 4) economic recovery, and 5) greener recovery. We’ll be proposing our approach to our members tomorrow.
We reconvened with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (MHCLG) Digital Team to discuss commonalities between LOTI’s recovery themes and theirs, and outline our desired approach and next steps. They too are running a series of workshops to define and progress some of the key themes that have been identified so far. We joined their latest session last Friday to explore councils’ perspectives on how to effectively phase recovery for services and foster better internal cultures within councils. Councils in and outside of London shared their desire to ensure that staff are supported to deliver new digital versions of services, and — where some services still call for physical contact — that leadership are alive to the need and how best to do so. In the session around organisational culture, councils shared concerns around wellbeing and mental health, and were keen to shape thinking around new [digital] ways of working. LOTI will continue to remain closely involved with this work, and updates will be shared in our weeknotes.
Innovation in Procurement
Last week, Eddie joined a panel on UKAuthority’s webinar to share details on LOTI’s efforts to demystify the government technology sector (otherwise referred to as ‘govtech’), and progress on our development of City Tools. His full presentation is available here.
LOTI also held a session for IT and Procurement colleagues in our member boroughs to inform the development of our City Tools platform. Please check out weeknote 40 for the latest update on the City Tools project.
In partnership with Nitrous (our platform developers), we convened these officers from our member boroughs to dive into the technicalities and the tools used to upload and store procurement/tender opportunities. Our aims in this session were to identify and better understand what application program interface (API) connections, if any, could be used to integrate those procurement systems with our City Tools platform, and to understand what procurement requirements are considered mandatory in each borough.
Supporting our Digital Apprentices
Following the success of our first virtual challenge day, we met up with Microsoft to discuss a longterm partnership for the delivery of a programme of online support for the current cohort of LOTI Digital Apprentices. We agreed to collaborate on delivering two online sessions at the start of each month, with the first two sessions in the programme scheduled for Monday 1 June 2020.
The first will look at developing our Digital Apprentices’ technical skills in relation to data visualisation and the use of Power BI. Following a tutorial from the Microsoft team, insight and expertise on how Power BI is currently being used in a borough-context will be shared from a member of LOTI’s data analyst network.
Bearing in mind that some Digital Apprentices have been redeployed to support boroughs’ Covid-19 responses, a few expressed a desire to develop soft skills around resilience and confidently managing an increasing workload under pressure. We’ll be working closely with Microsoft to deliver the second session that same day on developing a ‘Growth Mindset & Resilience’. We hope to share some tips from senior leadership at LOTI member boroughs on how our Digital Apprentices can take ownership of their role and new responsibilities.
If you’re a Digitial Apprentice in a LOTI member borough — or you manage one — and would like further details on how to join our online community or register to any of these sessions, please contact LOTI directly via email.
Putting London’s data to work
We held our latest meet-up of our Data Analysts’ network to share boroughs’ approaches and the tools they’re using to meet the different needs of their residents during this time. The full agenda and notes from the meeting are available here.
Camden shared how they were using Beacon, a new tool that pulls together data from multiple sources, to explore the different levels of their residents’ needs. This allowed them to look at the data in different ways to notice new/different patterns such as the trends in the age or location of affected residents. Their approach enables them to automatically generate summary stories, which can be shared with key users and linked back to the original data for further insight.
The network discussed the implications of the shielded cohort data sets being time-bound in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Camden shared how they are working on how best they can capture nuances around this data to ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable can be met when services transition to recovery.
Similarly, Brent shared a live demo of how they were using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). They use software with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities to interrogate different data sets to deliver insights and reports that can be shared with service leads and senior officers.
There was a keen appetite to keep sharing good practice and lessons learned on a regular basis, so we will continue to support this network by holding fortnightly virtual meet-ups. At the next session, we hope to discuss the potential for LOTI to collaborate with the Greater London Authority (GLA) to create a dedicated resource responsible for supporting pan-London data collaboration projects. If you’d like to attend, please register here.
This Week
This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:
- Meeting with colleagues responsible for providing transportation for children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in London boroughs to discuss next steps on this data collaboration project.
- Meeting with the Chief Information / Digital Officers in our member boroughs to agree on our methodology and next steps for collaborating on tackling common recovery challenges.
- With our one year anniversary on the horizon, we’ll be meeting to discuss our plans for celebrating our successes and sharing what we’ve been up to. More on this to follow.
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