Week 7: Trial and Improvement
LOTI’s projects are developed and delivered using an outcomes-based methodology, where we start with the end in mind. We’ve learned through experience that having a defined outcome in mind acts as a helpful anchor; ensuring that any changes made during discovery and testing phases lead to a process of trial and improvement rather than endless trial and error.
This has come to life during our summer projects, where we’ve been learning and adapting along the way.
Information Governance
One of LOTI’s key aims is to support our member boroughs to share data quickly and easily with each other when it’s appropriate to do so, in a way that is legal, ethical and secure. Our working hypothesis for this specific project is that standardising London’s approach to information governance (IG) is likely to play a significant part in solving some of the data-sharing problems identified by our members.
As part of our planning phase, our members pointed us towards existing examples of data-sharing arrangements that we could use as inspiration, including the Information Sharing Protocols (ISPs — umbrella sharing agreements) used by Norfolk and the Tri-Borough. Based on our analysis of those ISPs, we attempted drafting a LOTI version for London.
However, our thinking evolved following our meeting with the Greater London Authority (GLA) where we learned more about the use of the Information Sharing Gateway (ISG), a digital tool for creating and managing Information Sharing Agreements (ISAs). All organisations on this platform are required to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which sets out principles that they will adhere to, replicating at least part of the function of an ISP.
This week, we met with Andrew Mobbs and James Sivell from London Fire Brigade for a demo of ISG and saw firsthand what the platform is capable of doing. It includes prompts for users, highlighting relevant legislation as they create an ISA. It additionally ensures that each organisation’s Data Protection Officer has full sight of agreements prior to signing off any transfer of personal data. Andrew and James also clarified that ISPs and ISAs themselves tend not to have legal status. Given there’s a legal obligation on all public sector organisations to comply with all relevant data legislation, there’s no legal need to duplicate these requirements in a different format. The ISG brings legislation to life by guiding users in plain language to ensure they are in full compliance.
Our learning will form part of Camden’s IG workshop for LOTI members next week. It’s important to highlight that ISG is not a silver bullet for all IG issues, and the workshop will explore the different factors that make data-sharing hard. This is both to understand their impact on information governance, and also to identify what future LOTI initiatives may be necessary to achieve our desired outcome of making data-sharing easier.
Digital Apprenticeships
Through this project, LOTI member boroughs aim to have 100 digital apprentices in post by September 2020. Our initial working hypothesis was that boroughs would benefit from the creation of clear, actionable guidance in the form of a Playbook on how to run digital apprenticeships in local government. However, we know there’s a risk of jumping head-first into prototyping a solution.
This week, we worked with Cate McLaurin from Hackney to plan our discovery phase. We’ll continue engaging with our borough representatives during our borough visits and will reach out to Apprenticeship Leads in each council in order to deepen our understanding about the context in which they operate. We also plan to create opportunities for deeper engagement with our identified target user groups (including current apprentices, their managers and Apprenticeship Leads) to understand their desired outcomes, the problems and barriers they face, and their ideas for potential solutions.
Borough Visits
We resumed our LOTI member borough visits this week. On Wednesday we met with Emma Marinos from Southwark, and we’ll be heading to meet Paul Wickens from Lambeth shortly after this weeknote is published.
In our conversation with Emma, we learned about the exciting digital transformation journey Southwark has been on. They’ve been implementing better technology and making physical changes to their working environments to enable their staff to thrive in the digital era. We also heard about successful, user-focused internal initiatives such as their Digital Innovation Fund, which enables frontline staff to propose and test solutions in a safe space.
Look out for the summary of our meeting with Lambeth in our next weeknote.
Future Project Ideas Bank
We’ve really enjoyed reading all the project idea submissions we’ve received to date. If you’ve got an idea for a future LOTI project, please do submit it to our Future Project Ideas Bank by Friday 6 September. We’ll be reviewing these for consideration at our next LOTI All-member meeting on Friday 20 September.
We’ll be sharing all the ideas and letting you know which projects our members decide to work on in the weeknote after that meeting.
What’s next?
Next week we’ll be focusing on:
- Supporting Camden to run their information governance workshop with LOTI members.
- Working with our member boroughs to make further progress on our summer projects, implementing three wifi networks, refining our digital apprenticeships discovery plan and finalising our draft guidance on public sector use of Artificial Intelligence.
- Continuing our borough visits and helping our members submit their ideas to our open call.
Thanks for reading!
