LCC ICT Strategy

Leeds City Council – IT Strategy (2016 – 2020)

1. Introduction

Our vision is for Leeds to be the best city in the UK - one that is compassionate with a strong economy that tackles poverty and reduces the inequalities that still exist. We want Leeds to be a city that is fair and sustainable, ambitious, fun and creative for all. The Council will continue to work with others to achieve better outcomes for the city at reduced cost with our values underpinning everything we do.

This document is the ICT Strategy 2016 – 2020 and it replaces the previous 2011 – 2015 version. In turn it forms part of the Council’s broader portfolio of strategies and is set within the overall context of the vision stated above and brought to life in the Council’s Business Plan 2015 – 2020. At the time of writing this Business Plan is currently undergoing a 2016/17 revision. The IT Strategy 2016 – 2020 will play its part in helping fulfil our Business Plan ambitions, outcomes and priorities.

This strategy outlines a range of capabilities that will be fundamental in helping to deliver the Council’s vision, wider strategies and the Business Plan outcomes. Delivering these outcomes requires a different approach to the traditional single service orientated approaches of the past. The significant change is that they will be delivered by multi-disciplinary teams across public, private and third sector organisations in partnership with citizens and this will require a different IT strategy, solutions and approach. There are increasingly diminishing boundaries across the organisations engaged in delivering these city outcomes. There will be a far greater emphasis on consumer or utility IT solutions in the communities and in the workplace e.g. the greater use of cloud based applications and services, ‘apps’, social media and some of the capabilities that come as basic services on smart phones e.g. maps, navigation or messaging.

2. Council Business Plan & Breakthrough Projects

The ambitions, outcomes and plans laid out in the Business Plan will be realised through a series of medium/long term major ‘Breakthrough Projects’ that will run for the duration of this IT strategy.

These projects are summarised below and in varying degrees will require the capabilities outlined in this strategy to help ensure their successful delivery. We have given some examples of how these capabilities will apply. Without these capabilities they will not succeed:

Making Leeds the best place to grow old in – this is the starting point for the integrated ‘City as a Platform’ approach outlined later in this document and is based for the main part on a smarter and more joined up health and social care system (people, process and technology). This also includes the opportunity for initiatives like smarter technology in the home to monitor health but also tackle basic issues like loneliness and access to transport.

Rethinking the City Centre – for example using web, social media and collaboration technologies to help engage our communities, the private and third sectors and other stakeholders in developing and promoting the city centre. We will also use smart city technologies to safely manage our streets, the environment (including air quality), transport, and signage.

Housing growth and jobs for young people – ensuring that the 70,000 new homes required across Leeds by 2028 are well designed and sustainable and include technologies that will help ensure smart, connected and efficient homes. We will also need to ensure the associated infrastructure e.g. the transport systems and utilities are future proofed. Web, social media and collaboration capabilities will be important in helping create and promote jobs and opportunities for young people.

Tackling domestic violence and abuse – giving multi-disciplinary teams from different organisations the joined up information, systems and collaboration capabilities i.e. ‘presence’, Instant Messaging (IM), video, voice conferencing and the ability to share and jointly work on cases (reports etc.) so enabling the reduction of instances of domestic violence and abuse.

Cutting carbon and improving air quality – this will require elements of our ‘City as a Platform’ approach and associated smart city capabilities to monitor air quality and generate open data that can be combined with other data to help monitor and target interventions and resources to priority areas.

Hosting world class events – for example, supporting open data based platforms and mobile applications for cultural tourism that will allow tourists to access reliable open data based information e.g. descriptions, locations, and pictures about the cultural sites in their area. Integrating cultural attractions with tourism services such as hotels, restaurants, transport, etc. that can be used when planning a journey or during the actual stay as a virtual guide.

More jobs, better jobs – digital inclusion strategies and greater access to free Wi-Fi will support our economic development and social inclusion ambitions. We will raise the digital literacy of all citizens, businesses, public services to a basic level of competence to succeed in the ‘Digital Age’. Technology will raise the skills levels and capabilities across the city’s businesses to enable them to compete globally.

Early intervention and reducing health inequalities – we will develop a citizen driven health approach by providing people and their carers’ with the information and technology they need to enable the better coordination of their care and facilitate greater self-management of their personal goals and health conditions within the independent setting of their homes. Significant use of consumer technology solutions will figure here. The wider use of BI and Analytics will also be important.

Strong communities benefiting from a strong city - developing shareable technology enabled solutions that will facilitate communities in connecting and collaborating on local issues resulting in more resilient and sustainable local neighbourhoods.

There is also the fundamental aspiration to be an Efficient and Enterprising Organisation. To become the best council in the best city, we must continue to get the basics right. This means delivering good quality public services to deadlines and to budget; managing our assets efficiently and ensuring our internal processes are standardised and simplified. This also applies to our Information Technology design, development and deployment.

3. General Context

This strategy is defined within the wider context of ongoing:

• Austerity (LCC government grant settlement reduction of £100M over 2016/17 – 2019/20; Leeds health & social care funding gap - £680M over 5 years).
• Policy Changes (local and national – population migration, increasing demands for services, potential EU constitution changes, devolution etc.).
• Global Trends (population movement, financial stability, climate change etc.), public expectations (services immediately available, extended hours etc.).
• Technology Advances (Internet of Things (IoT), ‘always on’, ubiquitous smart devices and apps, wearable technology, big data etc.). Against this backdrop there are national and local constraints e.g. 23% of the adult population don’t have the five basic digital skills (2015) and 75,000 of homes in Leeds have no fixed line broadband connection to the internet (2015).

4. General Principles

The Council:

• Is becoming smaller in size but aspires to be bigger in influence because it has a mandated democratically elected leadership of ‘place’ role. By ‘place’ we mean the City as a whole but it also applies to local areas and these have diverse needs. For example at both ends of the spectrum, life expectancy across different parts of Leeds can be on average 10 years lower for men and 8 years lower for women.
• Is becoming increasingly a commissioner of services and is therefore correspondingly providing less direct services.
• Needs to deliver strategic city outcomes in partnership with others across the City – public services, third sector, the private sector and citizens i.e. a ‘city first’ approach with diminishing emphasis on the old traditional vertical service delivery models.
• Following on from the ‘Commission on the Future of Local Government’ report launched in 2012, is promoting the concept of civic enterprise which is essentially a new leadership style for local government where councils become more enterprising, businesses and other partners become more civic and citizens become more engaged. A simple example of this is local digital companies developing ‘citizen led’ products e.g. ‘Apps’ to help deliver our City Outcomes.
• Needs to be an intelligence led organisation so that it can target its limited resources on the things that are most important.

5. City Context and a Platform Approach

According to industry analysts Gartner, as ‘digital’ (in the broad sense this is technology that connects people and machines with each other or with information) becomes more pervasive, it is becoming clearer that traditional business and operating models are no longer sufficient. New ‘platform’ based approaches and models that include the alignment of governance, leadership, business, resource, delivery and technology layers are required. Across these layers, multiple networks of stakeholders will bring value to each other by exploiting the synergies of the overall platform.

The concept of an ‘open’ standards based ‘City as a Platform’ (CaaP) in Leeds starts with the ‘Health and Wellbeing’ platform (see Appendix 1) underpinned by the City ‘Health and Wellbeing’ strategy; a model that can be applied equally with limited modifications to support other significant agendas e.g. improving transport or making Leeds the best place to grow old.

This platform approach increasingly constitutes a set of underpinning ‘open’ (not proprietary i.e. associated with any particular supplier) standards based technologies, processes, resources and governance that will facilitate and allow the flow of data across service providers enabling the integration of services that will support (very often) citizen led opportunities. This approach will enable diverse communities to use digital tools and services to solve their particular local problems or create new opportunities.

A specific example of this platform approach is the national Ripple project which is a community effort towards an open integrated digital care record platform that all health practitioners and citizens can share and use based on an open approach to gathering common requirements, simple tools to support open information governance, open citizen engagement, an open source record viewer, open source tools to support integration and an open record architecture.

6. City Shared Strategy, Architecture & Commissioning

Part of the CaaP capability is the formation of a City Shared ICT Strategy & Commissioning (SSAC) function for public services that looks to define a common shared ICT strategy and technical architecture for below the red line (see Fig 1. below) and commission joint services and solutions within a framework of agreed Design Principles (Appendix 2). This function will also define the roadmaps for convergence to these common services and solutions. Although informal at this stage, the ambition is to formalise the SSAC and increase the resources allocated over time, reducing the equivalent local presence in the respective organisations.

Fig 1

This means that as we collectively converge over time to these joint services and solutions, we will also combine and merge resources across the public service partners to support these technologies and solutions enabling economies of scale. The timeline for convergence to these shared capabilities will be different for the different public services involved and will depend on existing contracts, the state and maturity of existing local capabilities and the robustness of the corresponding joint business cases. Sufficiently compelling cases (taking a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) view) may in some instances expedite movement to these services and solutions ahead of normal local timescales.

Business applications and tools ‘above the line’ e.g. Finance, HR, Asset Management, GIS, BI/Analytics systems are also candidates for a common shared approach over time.

7. Smart City

Our ‘Smart Cities’ strategy recognises the need to adopt a ‘whole city’ approach and initially focusses on delivering the health and wellbeing outcomes. ‘Smart Cities’ is about the smarter use of technology services and data (see the example Smart City Ecosystem schematic below). This is important to the future success of any city and the greater use of joined up open data is vital to support new models of ‘Integrated Public Service Delivery’.

Integrated Local Public Services are fundamental in achieving our city outcomes and breakthrough projects. This is integration on a number of levels – systems, information, human resources, funding, governance etc. and manifests itself in the platform approach.

Advances in communications technology and components mean that connecting devices to the internet on a large scale is now a reality. The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) will transform the lives of citizens, creating a step-change in the quality and nature of the public services they consume and the way that they access them.

In Leeds the first scalable pilots of this approach (2016) are targeted at the increasing elderly population with multiple health conditions. Sensors that can monitor the environment (temperature, movement etc.) combined with wearable sensors will enable a wide range of information to be gathered. This information will be shared with entitled users such as GP’s, family and health care professionals enabling new models of care to be developed.

In terms of the ‘Digital Economy’, in Leeds (2016) there are over 1350 digital companies, more than 350 software companies and 10,000+ digital experts. This presents significant opportunities to co-produce often ‘citizen led’ innovative solutions through the application of digital technology and ‘open data’ using a prototyping approach. For example, a new ‘Visitor app’ has been created by a company called Altrama. Using data from the Leeds Data Mill (open data platform), they have created a free interactive app which guides visitors around the city. In waste management, the publication of open bin collection data has enabled the co-creation of ‘apps’ that have improved collection and recycling rates. We will encourage these local digital experts to develop solutions in collaboration with citizens so that they can in turn sell them on. This approach will continue to be reinforced over the coming years.

8. Digital Inclusion

Over the next 3 years we will deliver a digital inclusion programme that will get 40,000 excluded households (2016) using the internet and also make them proficient in the national five basic digital skills Presently, one in five people are unable to do simple things like send a Facebook message, apply for a job online, pay bills with an app, or even check what day the bins are being collected on their local council website. For some, it means not knowing how to communicate with family and friends online which can lead to loneliness, isolation or ill-health.

We will capitalise on the work already undertaken to date to fulfil this ambitious target and drive a city wide digital inclusion strategy. We will look to work with partners with a desire to work with us not only on the delivery of connectivity and solutions but also on strategy, marketing, communications and engagement.

We will work with care providers to build a digital inclusion programme to deliver a step change in digital literacy for all health and social care practitioners across Leeds including the third sector over the next 3 years.

Finally, we will raise the digital literacy of Council and wider city staff so that they are better able to use technology in new ways e.g. mobile and using collaboration capabilities to deliver business outcomes. This will also enable them to be digital advocates to assist the wider public. We will use e-learning channels to help fulfil this and reuse appropriate materials in the public domain e.g. ‘You Tube’ rather than reinvent.

9. Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is about understanding all the different elements that go to make up the organisation (or enterprise) and how these elements join together. It is the process that interweaves business and IT and there are four fundamental layers – business, information, applications and technology. These layers need to interface seamlessly from top to bottom and each one needs to support and interface with the adjacent layer - they are not independent. Our Design Principles (Appendix 2) will be applied across all the layers and the key corporate principle of ‘simplify, standardise and share’ will particularly apply across all the layers.

In terms of a standard approach to the practical application of EA in LCC and potentially the wider city, we will look to potentially use relevant aspects of the international TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Forum) EA framework.

Business - EA starts by defining the business layer using recognised approaches like Business Capability Modelling (BCM). This has recently been adopted by LCC but could equally be extended to the wider city. This defines ‘what we do’, ‘how we do it’ and then ‘what we should be doing’ and ‘how we should be doing it’. It looks to define our business architecture. This work has started (2015/16) with the LCC ‘Core Systems Review’ initiative which is looking to define a future roadmap for the systems (people, process, information and technology) that operate at the core of our organisation and that manage our human resources, money and assets. If this approach is successful then it should be broadened to help define our wider organisational business architectures.