iStandUK has announced that it has secured funding for the fourth phase of the Scalable Approach to Vulnerability Via Interoperability (SAVVI) project.
It has been awarded £190,000 by the Local Digital team in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHCLG) to continue its work on promoting the use of data to support vulnerable people and households.
The organisation – which has a wider role in promoting the use of data standards in local public services – said in a blogpost that the next phase will be the most ambitious so far and involve five workstreams.
The first is to promote the wider use of the SAVVI data standard, through building it is a competency in the public sector, embedding its use within work on vulnerability, encouraging adoption in central government departments and in the technology industry.
Among the priorities in this stream is to build on interest from the civil contingencies community.
Second is to develop and refine SAVVI products and services, such as its playbooks, templates and data catalogue. This will be accompanied by further developing the standard, accrediting and supporting practitioners, configuring data elements for specific purposes, and providing supporting materials such as explanatory videos.
Applicability, policy, impact
The third stream covers applicability, policy and impact, and involves a horizon scan of public sector policies, assessments of areas of vulnerability and the creation of a metrics viewer.
Fourth is unblocking access to data, which involves working with the Digital Economy Act team in the Central Digital and Data Office and possibly setting up a service to support local authorities with advice about established data shares.
The fifth stream involves further work on the governance of SAVVI and engagement with stakeholders.
In an interview with UKAuthority last autumn, iStandUK’s programme director Paul Davidson said the first three phases of the SAVVI programme produced plenty of valuable lessons.
These include a perception, despite data sharing standards having been on many organisations’ agenda for several years, that there is still a lack of joining up, a lot of duplicated data, not enough in a standard form and not a lot of master data. This is making it hard for people to see the whole picture of vulnerability and to miss opportunities in dealing with it.
