Introducing the SAIDS Project
Mydex are delighted to announce the SAIDS Project; Seamless Access to Inclusive Digital Services.
Mydex CIC, and our academic partner, the University of Edinburgh, have received funding for this project through Stage 3 of the Social Innovation Fund from the Scottish Government and European Social Fund.
SAIDS will be working across Scotland over the next year to support clusters — groups of public and third sector organisations serving the same citizens — to digitally enable their support to citizens.
SAIDS builds on our Stage 2 Social Investment Fund Project, EPCAS, where we built a Web-App Generator (WAG) to equip the experts in a service — i.e. the people with experience of delivering and receiving it — to create digitally enabled service journeys for themselves. The final report is available here.
In SAIDS, each cluster will use the WAG to create a set of web-apps that support a citizen, and at least two other parties, to work together to achieve an outcome. There is a huge range of outcomes that clusters could work on, for example that the citizen can heat their home adequately, that they complete and document a training placement, that they are less lonely as a result of befriending, or that they can better coordinate support for a disabled child.
For example a citizen could work with a support worker to create an action plan and a member of their family could support the achievement of aspects of that action plan.
Mydex will provide each person that uses a web-app created by a SAIDS cluster partner with a Personal Data Store (PDS). This PDS will put the citizen in control and they can easily and securely share relevant data, which will be accessed through, but not stored in, the web-apps.
A lasting legacy
During the project, we will create a set of resources and learning materials, based on cluster partners’ experience, that make it even easier for other organisations to work in clusters to digitally enable their services and improve the way they work with citizens. Other organisations will be able to use the Web-App Generator on an open government license and will benefit from the inspiration and practical resources created by the project.
We are delighted to be collaborating with Professor Chris Speed at Edinburgh University, who will bring a Resource Associate to the project to investigate the value created by the approach.
So why have we picked this focus?
The challenge
Citizens, and those on the front line of trying to support them, often face unnecessary cost, risk, effort and friction in trying to get things done. As a citizen, the more challenging your circumstances the more unnecessary effort you typically face, having to sign up for multiple services, provide evidence of entitlement and identity repeatedly and fill out many complex forms. This can be frustrating, stigmatising and lead to delays in getting vital support.
Public and third sector organisations offer a range of services and supports intended to help people; many are specialist and hence low volume. That usually means the administrative burden falls on the front-line worker and the citizen they support, with paper-based processes and manual data entry common because of the prohibitive cost of bespoke software development and data being stored in different systems by different services.
The SAIDS response to this challenge
SAIDS removes the costs of software development required to digitally enable services and so allows public and third sector organisations to reduce cost, effort, risk, friction in their processes of supporting citizens. It equips the citizens served by participating organisations with a Personal Data Store that they are in control of, allowing them to choose to share relevant information when needed to get something done. This improves citizens’ experience, making where they are in a service transparent and making it easier to get support from a range of services without repeating themselves.
There are three parts to the SAIDS response, the approach that we take to accelerating the creation of inclusive digital services:
The SAIDS approach — part 1 — empowering public service practitioners
All too often practitioners — front line staff and trained volunteers — supporting citizens with a range of issues and opportunities have to make do with clunky, insecure, processes. For example, they might have to receive a referral from another organisation by email, enter some details into a spreadsheet and then phone the citizen who is the subject of the referral to complete an initial assessment. And that’s just to get started.
If there is an IT project to digitise or digitally-enable the services they deliver, the chances are they will not be involved in it. Many IT projects allow suppliers to keep charging for modifications and bury in proprietary systems. SAIDS works on:
Cost-out not cost-plus
Fundamental to the SAIDS approach is training and supporting front line staff in public and third sector organisations to use the Web-App Generator developed our Stage 2 Social Innovation Fund project. These practitioners are the people best equipped to know how service journeys work and how they can be improved. They will be in control of creating sets of web-based apps, and will require no programming skills so achieve this. They can simply create themes, map service journeys, and drag and drop elements into web pages.
The SAIDS approach — part 2 — digitally enabling services
Our aim is to support clusters to digitally enable services, rather than to create digital-only services.
Digitally enabled, not digital-only
Through the project, practitioners can create a set of web-apps that support service journeys tailored to different perspectives, e.g. person receiving support, person providing formal support, person providing informal support. So practitioners can continue to support people face-to-face or on the phone, as well as by messaging supported by the web-apps they’ve created. It makes their work easier and means they can see the same information at the same time as the person they are supporting.
The SAIDS approach — part 3 — underpinning services with a Personal Data Store
The web-apps created by a cluster of organisations using the WAG automatically connect to the Mydex Personal Data Store service. This means that the personal data required and involved in service delivery is captured in citizens’ Personal Data Stores for re-use with other services. As we say:
Capture once and use many times
For example, if a cluster was supporting employability related volunteering, one organisation might capture a skills assessment and that would be stored in the relevant citizen’s PDS, who would have it available to show a family member or employer and could choose to share it securely with organisations in the cluster, e.g. a placement provider, when needed.
Follow our progress
We will be publishing updates on our progress on this Medium post and you can follow the project on Twitter @SAIDSScot
