Image source: Hillingdon Council
Interview: The borough’s chief digital and information officer, Matthew Wallbridge, explains the thinking behind its new digital strategy
It’s not often that a digital leader will cite a government document from 20 years ago as a factor in a new initiative, but Matthew Wallbridge has no hesitation in talking up the importance of the Gershon Review as an influence on Hillingdon Council’s new digital strategy.
The review of efficiency in the UK public sector was carried out in 2003-04 by Sir Peter Gershon and provided the foundation of the campaign of the time to join up public services and find major savings. Wallbridge, chief digital and information officer at Hillingdon, says it is still highly relevant.
“The fundamentals were spending your budget in the best possible way, understanding your outcomes and having the processes that surround them, we’re going back to them at the moment with the reduced funding space,” he says.
The emphasis on processes and their design is a foundation of Hillingdon’s new digital strategy, approved by its cabinet earlier this month and accompanied by a plan to invest £9 million – in addition to an existing budget of £7 million for corporate technology – over the three-year timespan.
It is the council’s first digital strategy, developed over the year since Wallbridge – who over the past 20 years has had roles in other London boroughs and the private sector – joined as a corporate director with responsibility for digital, data, customer experience and business support.
Significant shift
“We had done some good work around AWS Connect but there was a recognition that we didn’t have a digital competency or plan,” he says. “We had an IT team which we reviewed and recognised that we had to shift from IT to technology, so we embedded a digital team and made a shift from performance management to business intelligence.
“We shifted from statutory and KPI reporting to get under the skin of the organisation and understand the cost, where we are going with our data and to drive the service design to make it more fit for purpose for residents.
“Also, we wanted to be as efficient as possible in transactions, recognising that there was a technology debt and a debt in processes, with a lot of manual processes in the organisation.
“We wanted to modernise; the more we can be more efficient in processes, the more we can use resources to spot vulnerable people, and the more we can help people transact, will make it easier to focus on things like digital inclusion.”
Principles and workstreams
The strategy involves four principles and five workstreams. The principles include: prioritising residents’ needs; carrying out an agile approach to delivery; delivering new business models driven by data; and adopting a ‘one council’ approach by creating project teams and shared goals.
The workstreams will focus on: building services online by default; sourcing better data to make better decisions; modernising council infrastructure and systems; building digital capacity and inclusion; and delivering a digital place.
Wallbridge emphasises the need to build more end-to-end processes based on human centred design, supporting people who are able to transact on their own, and regards the Government Digital Service (GDS) design principles as a strong methodology for obtaining good results. He also talks up the importance of the “horizontal perspective”, looking at the processes from a borough’s resident’s point of view, as a basis for design processes.
The strategy document refers to a roadmap that he says is already in place and subject to reiteration depending on financial and legislative conditions and the experience of implementing the strategy.
“We have governance surrounding it, a business design authority and technical design authority that sit across the organisation and feed into the corporate management team,” Wallbridge says. “It’s my governance that reviews the roadmap monthly.
“We’re regularly working with the services to prioritise on what they do, and the roadmap is to prioritise the things we do all the time, and the market will influence that all the time. The market is not static, new things are coming along, and it’s an ever moving feast.”
Early investment
He says much of the new investment will take place over the next 18 months, aimed at delivering savings and service improvements more quickly, and that priorities have already been identified, in line with the need to build the foundations for modernisation.
“So we’re building the data platform to have a single view of our residents and households. That’s an important step for the organisation to have a single version of the truth.
“The second priority is making sure we have the ability to platform services, using the Power Platform and Power Apps, building digital services to make sure we have a true end-to-end process for residents and staff. They’re the foundational capabilities you need to be successful.
“For local government the trick is to take back control, rather than buying lots of applications and AI processes, building them yourself. It’s not the cost of buying things, it’s the cost of change, and when things are changing so rapidly it’s good to build in the resource and capability so you have the know-how to do that.
“If you can do it from a digital and business intelligence and data point of view you have the conditions for success.”
Further spending
This will be followed by digital investments in major services such as housing, temporary accommodation, and adult and children’s social care.
“We’re doing a lot of work in those areas to understand the data and processes and have transformation plans,” he says.
Investment is also planned in the council’s web front end to encourage more online self-service and give its customer contact staff more time to deal with vulnerable people. This will build on the existing system that draws information from line of business systems to recognise the numbers of vulnerable people and give them priority in call handling.
A refresh of back office services is another element of the strategy. At the moment this involves reviewing the processes, aiming to reduce the manual elements and achieving efficiency gains, which Wallbridge says could amount to around 20% over the next three years.
There is also an emphasis on the importance of ensuring that the council owns the data in its systems and using APIs to support data sharing. It intends to ensure the terms for these are included in future procurements, using a template that can vary depending on the details of a system, and where possible to build them into existing systems.
APIs and integration
“Where we have open APIs we use them, but we are also creating quite a lot of our own connectors. For one of our big applications we have an integrator workstream to understand how it integrates with our core line of business systems. We have a team to do that.
“If we can’t get the data we can’t make good decisions and we’re losing money.”
Wallbridge also emphasises the aim to “build rather than buy” applications where possible.
“We’re never going to build the big systems, but in terms of the applications on a workflow basis, the more you can build your own the more you can control. Buy the big ones, build the other ones and make sure they connect.”
He also acknowledges the great potential of AI, describing it as a “critical enabler of change”, but sounds a note of caution that the applications will have limited value if they do not integrate smoothly with other systems – a shortcoming he believes is quite common among the tools now on the market.
Again, it comes back to service design and the need to ensure any AI applications fit within the way Hillingdon wants things to work; but AI is on its agenda.
“We’re not at the front or back of queue with AI,” he says. “We are building up our competencies and reviewing our governance around it to make sure we can do it more quickly and safely, and we are collaborating with other local authorities on what best practice looks like.”
People potential
The people factor is also being addressed. The strategy includes a commitment to build digital skills among employees, and the creation of a rolling programme of digital apprenticeships, on which the council is currently working.
This will add to an existing arrangement with Brunel University of London providing placements for students, reflecting its strengths in courses on predictive analytics and machine learning.
Wallbridge concludes with a reiteration of the importance of process design, along with a readiness to learn from other organisations.
“You should understand the problem then do the discovery. It can be a day, month or a year, but go back to challenge why we are doing services and what is the art of the possible. And there are clever people in my team who are always looking around to see what good looks like in other places.”
