Birmingham City Council has implemented a mobile app to support field workers developed with support from the Local Digital Fund.
It has taken the Guardian App to private beta and begun to publicise the initiative, describing it as a game changer for local government.
Its aim was to develop a platform that enables field workers, of which Birmingham has around 3,000, to capture and access data from a variety of databases, present casework in a consistent format and assign risk markers to people or places.
The council completed user acceptance testing in December and is now bringing together insights from its use to support further development.
New thinking
Its head of delivery, James Gregory, said in a video: “The next logical development from the implementation is how we stop talking about enabling a particular government field worker to work better in their day jobs and how we start to re-engineer the thinking about how we do field work across the council.
“What this app can do, because it’s built on a modular platform, is enable field workers to have various different roles. So you could conceive of a future where you’re got a housing officer going out to visit someone in their home but also doing an environmental health assessment. Not withstanding any qualifications that people might need, they will have all the information at their fingertips and a single form to complete.
“It actually starts to break, in a positive way, the functional ways we do things across the council.”
The project was awarded £350,000 from the Local Digital Fund, run by the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, last year.
