bytherye

[This first appeared as a guest blogpost on the Lambeth open data blog]

At Lambeth we’ve been delighted to be recognised as one of the leading local authorities for open data (see Openly Local’s ratings), and we see this as an important part of our commitment to be a cooperative council.

We’ve already seen some good examples which show how open data can be used creatively by people outside the council to create useful apps and to give a greater level of transparency for the council’s work.

The recent Made In Lambeth event was a brilliant example of this (find out more here and check out the tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/search/Madeinlambeth).

This will be a journey and we’re determined to do more. Today we are taking the next step in our journey and we’re really excited to share this with you. Our release today includes:

Our open data principles: clearly stating our commitment to become open by default
Our schedule for the data which we will release: and an invitation for you to help us prioritise the information we make open
A major update to our open data pages which now provide a range of data sets, other resources and links to apps we have built or which we have found useful
FindIt: an app which our team have produced (in large part during their own time) to make our open location data available using Google maps

We’re ambitious to go further, and as well as an ongoing programme of work to publish more data and build a rich datastore, we are currently working to build APIs which will let anyone create apps using our data. We’re hoping to have a beta version ready for testing later this summer — please get in touch at opendata@lambeth.gov.uk if you’d like to take part in this. We want to learn about what will work and build something that will make a big contribution to cooperative working.

[This first appeared as a guest blogpost on the G-Cloud blog]

Technology is changing fast and we’re excited about the potential that this offers for us to improve the way we deliver services. This couldn’t have happened at a better time given the urgent need to sustain local services while we deal with substantial budget reductions. Lambeth’s new ICT strategy sets out our vision to enable our users to be productive from any device, anywhere, any time, and will see us focusing on using the cloud, mobility and apps to make this happen.

We’re not naive, and we realise that some business processes and legacy architecture will take more time and work before we can move them to the cloud, and we also know that given the speed at which technology is changing it will be easy to make expensive mistakes if we’re not careful. An agile approach to delivering our strategy is essential and we are prioritising focus. We have already started to migrate some of our key services such as email to the cloud, and we’ll be redesigning the way we do things to give us as much flexibility as possible as we move forward, avoiding long contract lock-ins where we can.

An example of how we can use innovation to make a real difference for our customers is our work to make tablet devices available to our users. Our pilot work has shown that this will help our frontline teams deliver much more personal and responsive services — increasing their productivity and cutting out paperwork and bureaucracy. Successes we want to build on include the services we provide to homebound library users who our home visitors can now help browse the catalogue online and check books in and out while they visit them, and vulnerable children whose social workers have reduced the time it takes to complete key work by up to 14 days through removing double entry of information.

The technology for securing information on mobile devices is changing fast and looking forward we want to switch the focus from trusting devices towards managing applications and information to provide the security we need on any device so that we can give our users genuine choices (this article helps to explain how this might work). This is going to be a work in progress for a while though, and to implement a viable model which we can use to rapidly make tablet devices available to a wider user base we need to get started by deploying a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution which will let us protect the information on these devices. With that in mind we want an MDM service based on subscription charging which will allow us to secure devices, scale up and down easily, and keep the flexibility to change our approach as the available technology and our architecture changes. This is a perfect opportunity for us to take advantage of the cloud to deliver rapid benefits.

We like the price transparency that the Cloudstore offers us and want G-Cloud to be our first port of call for cloud services. Buying this way challenges some of our traditional thinking and approaches to procurement, and we are currently getting ourselves ready by working with our legal and procurement colleagues to make sure that our procurement processes are updated. The G-Cloud guidance to buy without further mini-competitions leads to more than a few quizzical looks, but I’ve been really encouraged at the readiness of non-IT people to take the time to understand this new approach and am confident that by getting this preparation done now we’ll be ready to move quickly once G-Cloud 2 goes live.

We’re looking forward to using G-Cloud as part of delivering our strategy: MDM providers please get started with your application process now so that we can buy your services!