The Digital Experts programme

The Digital

Experts

programme

Contents

Background 4

The context for the Digital Experts programme

5

The benefits of the programme so far

6

The broad messages emerging from the programme

14

Running Digital Experts projects – practical do’s and don’ts

18

Assessing the Digital Experts programme

– concluding thoughts

23

Appendix 1 – The 13 projects in the current evaluation

24

Background

The programme was established in March 2015 when, following a comprehensive bidding and assessment process, the LGA agreed to fund 27 projects involving 42 councils. The objective of the funding was to enable more councils to use the digital tools and approaches already successfully applied by their peers, thereby demonstrating how local authorities and their partners, by exploiting the potential of modern digital technologies, can deliver improved services to residents, operate more effectively and generate efficiency savings.

By early 2016, 13 of the 27 funded projects were judged to be sufficiently advanced to warrant being presented to the wider local government community and for lessons to be drawn from their experience. The LGA therefore commissioned an interim evaluation, which has involved an analysis of the 13 projects’ monthly progress reports since March 2015; a site visit to each lead authority; and detailed discussions with a range of key participants, including council staff but also partners, volunteers and residents where possible. The projects are summarised in Appendix 1.

The outputs of the interim evaluation are: • A case study for each project, covering

the main issue it was trying to address, the local context, the project objectives and targets, the approach and progress to date, the outcome including successes and challenges, the financial savings generated, key learning points and next steps.

• A series of ‘vox pops’ with key participants in these projects, setting out in their own words why the project was important and what it has enabled them to achieve. • Copies of any practical documentation,

such as job descriptions, project plans and so on that could help other councils to undertake similar projects.

• An overview report (this document) that draws out:

◦ the outcomes that have been achieved to date by the programme, including evidence of both benefits to residents and financial savings

◦ the lessons for the sector, including how good practice can best be replicated

◦ any recommendations for the design of future programmes of support.

All of this material is available on the LGA website. See Appendix 1 for more details. In addition to the current work, a separate follow-up evaluation will be commissioned later in 2016 to capture case studies, vox pops and the learning from the remaining 14 projects funded by the Digital Experts programme, as well as any further insights from the projects currently under review.

The context for the Digital Experts programme is well known. Central government funding for councils was cut by some 40 per cent over the previous Parliament. The Institute for Fiscal Studies anticipates that spending cuts will continue until 2020.

While addressing the impact of austerity, councils are dealing with:

• increased demand, not least through demographic change and the knock-on effects of funding reductions in other public services

• major government initiatives including welfare reform and Troubled Families • the move towards devolution of public

services

• new public health responsibilities • health and social care integration • fundamental alterations to the local

government finance system

• continuing pressure on core services such as housing and waste management.

Faced with these seismic changes, most councils have been quick to recognise the opportunities offered by digital tools, technologies and approaches to target and deliver services more effectively, to support remote working and to save money, complementing other work for instance on shared services and demand management.

They have explored different methods of improving residents’ access to information and services including telecare, online applications for school places, cashless parking payments, web chat and ‘apps’ to inform or alert service users. At the same time, they have been making their workforces more productive by introducing mobile technologies, route planning tools, and video-conferencing.

The primary objective of the Digital Experts programme is to help spread these

innovations more widely within the local

government community, first by demonstrating the benefits the participating projects have delivered to their residents, staff, and partners (including financial savings) through their investments in digital tools and approaches, and second by offering practical pointers as to how best to replicate success.

Councils have recognised the rapid transition among residents away from desktop and laptop computers towards the use of tablets and smart phones, as well as the benefits such devices can offer staff visiting clients. Cannock Chase Council’s web team in 2015, for instance, identified that 56 per cent of people accessing the council’s website did so via tablet devices or smart phones. A number of the projects in the Digital Experts programme therefore focus on developing apps or mobile solutions.

The context for the Digital

Experts programme

The benefits of the

programme so far

analysed under three broad headings: financial savings; benefits to residents; and other benefits to councils and their partners.

Financial savings

A number of the projects have identified specific financial savings that have already been achieved or will be delivered over the lifetime of the project. These savings come in various forms:

From avoiding contact through

providing residents with direct

digital access to services.

Since the launch of the MyStaffsApp, active users have used it in over 39,891 sessions (each session comprising multiple clicks), generating over 250,000 hits. Staffordshire County Council estimates that even if only 20 per cent of these sessions avoided a telephone call (at a cost of £2.83) the savings on avoidable contact already

amount, as at March 2016, to nearly £22,500 across the partnership.

From moving people onto cheaper

contact channels (‘channel shift’).

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council estimates that it saved over £7,000 in the period April 2015 to the end of January 2016 through its investment in live web chat.

Dacorum Borough Council is projecting (and aiming) to save 4804 working days over a five-year period through its work on channel shift, based on 26 newly digitised processes and assuming a ‘mid-range’ approach to policy change. On this forecast model (based on assumptions and expectations), the borough estimates that delivery of channel shift could save in the region of £435,000 over the period.

Figure 1. Artwork to be used in MyStaffApp re-launch campaign

From reducing the time spent on travel

and office-based administrative tasks

by equipping staff such as social

workers with appropriate mobile

solutions.

The Tri-borough team (covering

Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham) has estimated that the three councils could save in excess of £1.8 million over a three-year period by cutting just eight minutes off the time taken to travel between office locations to collect, review and update case information for each adult social care visit. Equipping staff with appropriate mobile technology would also enable staff to look up information about a customer while in their home and to spend time showing them related information and resources that might be relevant to them, helping to encourage greater levels of self-sufficiency.

From encouraging greater levels of

customer self-service and eliminating

rekeying by customer services or other

staff by integrating processes and

developing links straight from an app

or website directly into back-office or

contractor systems.

Wyre Council estimates that the cost of manual intervention in a typical council tax transaction is approximately £2. The council’s previous work on integrating an electronic claim form for benefits into its main benefits system also identified savings in ancillary areas such as printing, postage, electronic storage and the disposal of confidential data.

Between December 2015 and mid-March 2016, Test Valley Council received and processed 420 electronic change notifications for council tax. Assuming that every notification received directly through this route avoided both a customer telephone call and rekeying into the back-office system, the council estimates the savings at over £2,000.

From making greater use of

community resources to deliver

support previously provided or

commissioned directly by the council.

Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council estimates it has saved around £1,200 by using

volunteers to provide digital support to over 100 older people, rather than involving the council’s Wellbeing Facilitator and Health Navigator staff.

Reading Borough Council estimates that 1600 volunteer hours were given to its project during 2015/16. Using the London Living Wage of £9.40 per hour as a proxy, this represents over £15,000 of input.

In several cases, there has been significant cost avoidance. The four councils involved in developing the MyStaffsApp, for instance, have highlighted how having a dedicated project management resource (funded by the Digital Experts programme) driving the work on behalf of all the partners has been hugely beneficial – indeed the three districts involved believe that without this collaborative, shared approach, the time and cost involved in developing the app individually would have been prohibitive.

The Staffordshire project, among others, has encouraged more efficient use of the digital assets, both local and national, created by previous programmes of investment. The councils are integrating the app into their CRM systems while also linking to the National Land and Property Gazetteer, enabling residents to be presented with the mix of county and district services relevant to their location.

Although the benefits are more difficult to quantify, and good digital information and services are only part of keeping people out of care for instance, many of the projects are also anticipating that their emphasis on encouraging greater online confidence, resilience and self-service among residents will help to reduce the pressure on councils to provide services directly and therefore generate long-term savings.

Essex County Council sees its Living Well Essex website as part of a wider conversation with local people about what the council can provide and how they can help themselves. The website provides information and advice on a wide range of topics, and will eventually include a comprehensive support directory of local services that residents can investigate and acquire without the council being directly involved.

Of course, as one project team pointed out, realising financial efficiencies is not straightforward, since the traditional design of many council services means that in practice the time savings are spread across many different people’s jobs, particularly among back-office staff. However, identifying potential savings is an essential first step.

Benefits to residents

It is widely accepted that online access to bank accounts, shopping, application forms, housing, job offers, and so on, now provides greater (and often cheaper) consumer choice, while social networks and other forms of digital communication can help tackle social isolation as well as providing a means of mutual help and support.

Within this overall context, the Digital Experts projects have delivered a range of specific benefits to residents:

Easier, round-the-clock, access to

information, advice and services.

The apps that many of the projects are developing give residents the ability to find information or carry out transactions at times and places that suit them and outside normal working hours. In the Staffordshire project, which involves both the county and several districts, the app has been specifically designed so that residents do not need to know which organisation does what.

The Living Well Essex website brings together a wide range of information and signposting on key topics such as health conditions, financial and legal issues, the home and surrounding environment, and any other scenarios where people may start to require help. There is also information for people who look after others and advice on what to do if you are concerned about someone’s wellbeing. This information was previously spread across multiple sites, but is now available round-the-clock in one place.

Simpler, cheaper and more convenient

contact with the council.

Contact via digital channels can reduce the costs to residents of calling or visiting the council. The web chat projects in Redcar and Cleveland and Southampton have also given residents a new option for interacting with their councils, which many people find both more convenient and more practical.

‘Much easier than trying to speak to someone on the phone’

‘It’s useful to have a printable record of the advice given’

‘I find live chat so useful as you can usually state things in writing better than saying’ Customer feedback to Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council about their web chat service

More integrated and interactive

service delivery.

By integrating their apps or websites into their own back-office systems, and creating digital links to contractors, councils have been able to offer residents a quicker, more seamless and interactive level of service, including automated acknowledgements of service requests and updates on progress. Residents may also sign up to receive ‘push’ information.

Blackpool Council’s project has focused on developing fully integrated processes for reporting missed bin collections. Residents in Tamworth (part of the Staffordshire

project) can now request reminders of when their bins will be emptied.

By implementing a digital Citizen Access tool for council tax, Test Valley Council was able to reduce the time taken to set up accounts – on house moves, from around 3-4 weeks to the same day. The previous delays had resulted in customers having less time to pay and facing potentially higher instalments. The initiative also helped to reduce the number of avoidable chase-up calls from council tax payers.

More awareness of the support and

services already available.

A theme emerging from a number of the projects is that residents are often unaware of the support and services already available to them locally. Stockton-on-Tees’s project focused on promoting the use of two existing websites – the Stockton Information Directory and Stockton Welfare Advice Network. The project team found that people were keen to take advantage of options such as the local ‘handyman’ service once they knew of its existence.

More opportunities for local people

to get involved.

Several of the projects involved volunteers in delivering digital support and training, thereby promoting local community engagement in this agenda. As Reading found, the volunteers often valued the opportunity to learn from their peers as well as to contribute to their local area.

In Stockton-on-Tees, the project gave the borough’s Over 50’s Assembly a renewed focus and sense of purpose. Asked ‘what was in it for them’ the volunteers uniformly expressed their commitment to helping people and making a contribution to the area. Some had direct personal experience of feeling isolated and alone, for instance as a result of bereavement.

Greater confidence in dealing with the

digital world.

A number of the projects focused on giving local residents, particularly older people, greater skills and confidence in negotiating the digital world we now live in, thereby helping to address digital exclusion, promote sufficiency and encourage more self-service. Even where residents chose not to make extensive use of the technology themselves, they were now aware of the resources available online and could ask friends or family to access relevant support.

Mr X has a disabled wife and their current accommodation is unsuitable. He was unwilling to leave his wife alone while he visited the local housing office to complete the application forms for sheltered

accommodation. By being shown how to go online he was now in a position to fill in the forms electronically.

Other benefits to councils

and their partners

In addition to financial savings, the projects have highlighted a range of wider benefits for councils and their partners:

More skilled, productive and involved

staff.

The projects have frequently given staff new digital skills, making them more productive and enhancing their sense of career

development, as well as providing them with the digital tools one would expect in the 21st century (such as mobile access to information and case details).

‘We were a bit nervous at the beginning because we’d never used live web chat before. But actually it’s made our job more varied and we’ve found we can easily handle three calls at the same time’. Customer services representative, Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council

Greater collaboration between

local councils.

Several of the projects have involved collaborative efforts by groups of local authorities, helping to share resources, costs and encourage joint learning. In Staffordshire, for instance, Lichfield District Council is working closely with Tamworth to map the processes involved in integrating streetscene reporting, while learning from the work Tamworth has already done on council tax.

Cannock Chase and Stafford Borough Councils aimed to leverage both their shared services partnership and the learning Stafford Borough had already developed through implementing an e-forms system in order to introduce the same system in Cannock Chase. The purchase and implementation of the new system in Cannock Chase was greatly expedited by the existing knowledge of the system within the councils’ shared ICT Services function and by the existing relationship with the software supplier.

The Staffordshire project has been designed to procure a common technical platform and joint training in design and development for staff in the participating authorities. However, recognising that localities differ, each council is then able to take the initiative to focus on its local priorities when integrating services into the app and promoting take-up.

Closer working with the voluntary sector.

Voluntary and community sector organisations have been an integral part of several of the projects. In addition to building closer local relationships and creating a more joined-up service, this has brought a number of practical benefits – for instance, voluntary and community organisations in Essex have helped to develop the Living Well Essex website in a variety of ways, including by providing content, involving their client groups in testing and promoting the site through their networks.

The Essex County Council project team believes there is a real value in all local partners, including social workers and their clients, being able to see the same information on the Living Well Essex website. This promotes an open and transparent dialogue about care options.

Reading Borough Council’s project to recruit digital volunteers involved partners such as Reading Voluntary Action, Reading University, Reading College, Jobcentre Plus, Launchpad, and Age UK.

Figure 4. The Living Well Essex homepage

More involvement in other local

initiatives.

The projects have also been a stimulus for the participating councils to learn more about the activity already underway in their local areas and to forge closer links with other local initiatives.

A representative of Stockton-on-Tees’s Digital Experts steering group now

participates in a multi-agency Touch Screen Technology Group which brings together different partners and projects across the Stockton and Hartlepool areas.

Exposure to new models and ways

of doing things.

Where a range of partners have been

involved, particularly innovative private sector firms at the forefront of digital innovation, councils have been encouraged to adopt new models and approaches to implementing digital solutions.

The Tri-borough project has given the team an invaluable insight into different methods of analysing user requirements, which they hope to apply in future projects. In developing their app, the Staffordshire partners have been involved in several collaborative design workshops that created a ‘proof of concept’ and drew on demand analysis.

Greater self-sufficiency to develop

future applications.

The intention from the start of the Staffordshire project was for all the participating organisations to become self-sufficient in designing and developing their own versions of the app. During a range of training and design days, staff learnt how to add functionality, text, website links and images to their apps.

Data to drive further improvement.

One of the key features of digital technology is that is not only helps to deliver information and services, but it also provides data and feedback on which to base future improvement. Dacorum Borough Council, for example, believes its next big leap will be to combine data from residents and service users (with appropriate safeguards) with a range of other information sources in order to design and tailor services even more effectively to local needs and preferences.

Statistics collected by Southampton City Council showed that on average 55 per cent of the electronic forms relating to environmental and highways issues on its new website were abandoned before completion. One of the objectives of the council’s web chat project was to gain insight into how customers were using the website and where improvements could be made.

Better resident perceptions of their

councils.

Finally, the ability of the projects to help enhance residents’ perceptions of their councils as modern and efficient should not be underestimated. Many people now transact much of their day-to-day business online and councils need to keep up with these expectations.

‘At last a council moving with the times – 21st century’. Resident comment on Redcar and Cleveland’s live web chat service

The broad messages

emerging from the

programme

A number of high-level themes have emerged from the programme. These include:

Locality matters

Although some of the projects are internally focused and small-scale, the most ambitious of them underline the major role councils still play in their localities – as ring-holders, organisers and catalysts for action. Local government remains best placed to bring together various groups within local areas and to engage residents in programmes of change.

And despite the financial challenges they face, councils still have many resources they can draw upon, including:

• the insight gained from their daily interaction with and feedback from their communities and service users

• the skills, enthusiasm and commitment of their staff

• their relationships with local partners, including the voluntary and community sector and their suppliers

• the willingness of local people to offer their time as volunteers

• the experience of other councils undertaking similar projects.

In preparation for the introduction of live web chat at Redcar and Cleveland, customer services representatives spent time developing templates of standard information for typical queries. Although the process was time-consuming, the templates proved very effective. During the testing phase, colleagues were also encouraged

to send queries to each other, which helped build understanding of the system and confidence in the new approach.

Staff at Test Valley Council also took on the role of customers to help test their new Citizen Access system.

Dacorum Borough Council has found working with university researchers very beneficial and is hoping to continue this relationship in the future.

Councillors have a particularly important part to play. They are typically the sponsors of a project and key to its success;

they bring insights into local needs and aspirations through their close contact with residents; they can have an invaluable role in challenging, shaping and promoting new initiatives; and ultimately they set the policy framework within which digital innovation will take place.

Councillors in Essex have been active in promoting the Living Well Essex website to local groups.

As the outputs from the Digital Experts project in Dacorum Borough Council are rolled out across different service functions, the relevant portfolio holders will be involved in making important choices about how far and fast to push forward with channel shift in their service areas.

Figure 5. The proposed facilities on a Tri-borough mobile device

Digital projects benefit

from being part of a wider

approach

The most effective projects in the review have generally been part of a wider ambition to reshape local services, improve service quality and cost-effectiveness and exploit digital tools, technologies and approaches to effect fundamental change.

This has ensured the projects benefit from senior level support, adequate levels of resourcing and the ability to make

connections within the organisation. Without such support, there is a danger that projects are isolated and unsustainable – the

proverbial ‘lipstick on the pig’.

Redcar and Cleveland’ wishes to improve the links between customer contact and service delivery, with an increasing emphasis on encouraging resident self-service. The plan therefore is to integrate the live web chat facilities supported by the Digital Experts project into the council’s new customer portal and CRM system, so that both residents and staff can instantly gain access to relevant, personalised information, such as the current status of outstanding jobs.

Channel shift offers a good illustration of the need for a wider approach. Unless people are actively encouraged and supported to make use of digital channels and find that their experience of not just the digital front-end but the whole end-to-end service meets their expectations, any channel shift initiative may only succeed in increasing overall contact volumes, as customers fall back on making telephone calls or visiting the council in order to complete their business.

In contrast, a successful approach will involve developing an in-depth understanding of different customer groups, employing a user-led design methodology to reshape services, and putting in place monitoring and review mechanisms that respond to customer feedback.

‘Digital first is not just about an improved website or new technology. It is about moving the whole organisation from traditional models of delivery (ie face-to-face, phone calls, letters, etc) to a model where a large part of contact will be conducted online. This has the potential to fundamentally change the relationship between services and users as well as altering the way that staff works. As a result, the new digital vision is as much a cultural change as it is a change of delivery.’ (‘Digital Dacorum: A New Vision and Strategy’)

The downside of being part of a wider approach is that delays in other linked projects may have an impact on your

initiative. In Staffordshire, for instance, it was originally envisaged that the MyStaffsApp would link to two high-volume applications – library services and e-payments. In both cases, however the relevant systems were themselves undergoing change, meaning that integration had to be postponed. This underlines the need for contingency planning and a certain level of flexibility when undertaking digital projects.

Clarity of purpose is

essential as is the ability

to monitor progress

Even with relatively small projects, it is important to consider the outcome you wish to achieve. For instance, through their collaboration with strategy consultants, the Tri-borough team realised that they should not be trying to recreate a full office environment on mobile devices. Instead they needed to focus on what it makes sense to do ‘on the go’ and on the pinch points experienced by professional staff.

Having a clear outcome in mind should also help the organisation negotiate the many dilemmas and choices that digital projects continue to present. For instance, there is rightly a great deal of emphasis currently on cyber security, particularly in sensitive areas such as social care. However, there is an equal need to take advantage, for example, of the potential of mobile working to improve services, support professionals and reduce costs. Finding the right balance between security and practicality will require a continuing dialogue.

Meanwhile, the projects that have proved best able to demonstrate success in delivering benefits, particularly financial savings, are those where a measurement framework has been put in place at an early stage. While it may seem difficult to justify the effort involved in creating such a framework when resources are tight and many short-term decisions have to be made to address immediate budget constraints, having a good baseline remains a valuable tool for improvement as well as for providing evidence to help support the business case for future investment.

From the outset, Redcar and Cleveland’s project team collected statistics on the number of web chats offered and handled. Users were also prompted to complete a post-chat survey, which included a question about whether in the absence of the

web chat option the resident would have contacted the council by another route. By extrapolating from these figures and applying research from Leeds City Council and Socitm’s standard cost per contact model, the council has been able to provide illustrative figures for their likely efficiency gains.

User stories can also be invaluable in complementing statistical data and bringing residents’ experiences to life. Collecting such qualitative data is an important element of any project.

Running Digital Experts

projects – practical do’s

and don’ts

The Digital Experts programme has already generated a wealth of practical tips about what is likely to make a project more or less successful. These include:

The ‘Do’s’

1. Do view the project as more than a technical or ICT initiative. At an early stage, you may need to consider involving councillors, communications and web staff, service managers, contact centre staff, partners (including community and voluntary sector

organisations), suppliers (including the providers of outsourced services) and so on. It is important to have a governance structure that connects to other parts of your council and to other projects. Involving front-line staff and gaining their input, for example at the design phase, can help gain their buy-in and commitment to change.

Newcastle-under-Lyme took the opportunity to look at the existing ‘as is’ processes with their Revenues and Benefits staff, to identify how they currently operated and how they would use the council’s new web portal. This greatly smoothed the transition and helped make staff more welcoming of the portal. The implementation of a Citizen Access solution for council tax at Test Valley Council was managed by a project team including staff from revenue systems, customer services and local taxation. The project team reported regularly to the Transformation Board, led by a corporate director with representatives from across the council including communications, IT, audit and revenues among others.

At Redcar and Cleveland, the involvement of a wide range of staff from the ICT and web teams, the service areas and the contact centre, supported by senior management, was crucial in ensuring a smooth

implementation for the web chat system.

2. Where a project has a strong external or community focus, do consider how you will get active participation from residents, volunteers and local councillors. It can be valuable to carry out a scan for existing initiatives before kicking off your own project. Several projects found work already underway locally or regionally that they were able to build upon or link to.

A former councillor at Stockton-on-Tees has chaired the Digital Experts project steering group. The project team has been able to link to a wider Touch Screen Technology Group operating across Stockton and Hartlepool.

Reading Borough Council found that a number of centres in the borough were already providing drop-in ICT support, and where possible the borough sought to work with existing groups and venues (such as a lunch club) to help reach the target groups and generate demand.

3. Do pay sufficient attention and commit enough resources to both the project itself and to programme and project management. Having a good project plan to help marshal resources and keep the project on target is particularly important. Some council work is

particularly complex and can be easily affected by external factors, while

apparently simple tasks such as having the right staff resources booked and scheduled to work on the project, or having equipment available and a room booked for training, have typically proved much more time-consuming than some of the projects had anticipated.

Wyre Council has highlighted that there are over 20 criteria for requesting a single person council tax discount, whereas setting up a direct debit is relatively straightforward. This area of work is also subject to frequent changes as a result of the Government’s welfare reform programme. Meanwhile, the council’s project was delayed when staff had to be diverted to dealing with the aftermath of the severe flooding that the area experienced in December 2015. Stockton-on-Tees’s volunteers, although retired, lead extremely busy lives, so scheduling their engagements with the different groups had to be done well in advance. Where a visit was made to an individual resident’s own home, for safety reasons two volunteers needed to be present, adding a further complication to any timetabling.

4. Where customer research or engagement is involved, do think carefully about how you will get the right number and range of participants or reach the right people. Several of the projects found it difficult initially to get the right demographic mix for the research they wished to undertake – in particular how to involve younger people in employment. Engaging with hard-to-reach groups, such as isolated older people, is also challenging and may require closer links to be developed with council staff or external organisations delivering social care or other front-line services. Your councillors may have very useful connections with relevant local organisations.

Following discussions with the mobile library service in Stockton-on Tees, it has been agreed that volunteers will be allowed space on the bus, enabling the project to reach some of the most isolated people in the area.

5. The point was made earlier in this report that just putting information or facilities online – that is, the ‘build and they will come approach’ – will not guarantee they will be used. The financial benefit of channel shift is partly a function of volume, so it is important to consider carefully how both what is already available and any new initiatives (such as online services, live web chat or a comprehensive social care website) will be promoted and marketed, not just to residents but also to partner organisations, staff and volunteers. As we have seen, voluntary and community sector bodies and councillors can play an important role here via their often extensive networks.

The Living Well Essex website has been promoted to other local councils, at housing group meetings, to staff and end users at organisations such as MS UK, Age UK and Healthwatch Essex, at local CAB offices, at health and wellbeing panels and at events such as Super Fast Essex, as well as through displays in County Hall and regular articles in the county’s newsletter. The team found that face-to-face presentations and demonstrations created the biggest increases in interest.

Rather than using the standard image of a customer services representative that came with their web chat system, Redcar and Cleveland ran an ‘X-Factor’ process within the contact centre and a picture of one of the staff now features on the site.

Figure 7. Blackpool Council promoted their new online bulky waste service through the local newspaper

6. Finally, do put in place, at an early stage, appropriate mechanisms for capturing key performance data including evidence of cost savings, improved outcomes for residents and other benefits, customer stories and feedback from users. A number of the projects in the interim evaluation recognised they have further work to do in this respect. But gathering such data is vital in helping to build a picture of success and to make the case for future investment.

At Newcastle-under-Lyme, the IT project manager worked with revenues and benefits staff to map their current processes and to calculate the time taken to process a typical transaction (including the time taken to take a call, scan and index documents, and complete any follow-on activities such as entering data or writing notes). The project manager then calculated the time required to complete the same transaction using the Citizen Access Portal. By using data on transaction volumes and the hourly rate (including on-costs of a typical advisor), the council was able to make a ‘before and after’ comparison of its efficiency.

The ‘Don’ts’

1. Don’t assume the technical aspects of any project will proceed smoothly. A number of the projects encountered difficulties in linking systems or in transferring information smoothly.

The Tri-borough project faced significant delays when their social care app supplier’s development team encountered some technical issues in establishing a secure connection via the Tri-borough’s corporate mobile device management system. In Southampton, there were integration issues between the web chat system and MyAccount, the city’s online account for residents.

Blackpool Council initially encountered a number of data quality issues when seeking to create a fully integrated end-to-end process for reporting missed bin collection.

2. Don’t underestimate the need for

adequate and consistent resourcing of a project and the potential for hidden costs to emerge during its implementation, for example the requirement to:

◦ buy an extra licence for administration purposes

◦ upgrade the version of an existing system

◦ purchase a new system module or turn on an additional module within an existing system

◦ buy additional software to print transaction reports as PDFs

◦ review and amend existing cyber security arrangements

◦ acquire more development time or customer services support from

To fully enable council tax e-billing at Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, a separate module within the revenues and benefits back-office system will need to be enabled and configured.

The requirement to deploy outsourced customer services staff on Southampton’s web chat system necessitated discussions around contractual relationships and performance management metrics with the supplier, with a consequent impact on the potential cost and timescale for the project. The inconsistent availability of the web chat feature, which was initially only available at certain times and on certain web pages, may also have discouraged use by customers.

3 Don’t assume suppliers, including outsourcing partners, will give your project priority, respond positively to your requirements for change or even bid for your work. They may have their own agenda (for instance, protecting their market advantage over competitors) or multiple calls on their consultancy, technical or implementation resources. Some areas of expertise, such as cyber security or mobile working, are in particularly high demand at the moment. Some projects found they had to spend time and effort coordinating the input of a range of suppliers who needed to be involved in the successful delivery of the solution.

A number of projects encountered delays arising from integration challenges. Wyre Council integrated e-forms and back-office software from different suppliers, and needed to work with both to identify and resolve issues. Other projects, such as MyStaffsApps, necessarily had to defer integrating with high volume transaction areas – such as e-payments – as a result of ongoing negotiations with vendors that were outside their project scope and sphere of influence.

The Tri-borough team had to identify and involve all the relevant parties in their mobile working initiative. These included front-line

workers, ICT staff, external consultants and the full range of systems suppliers whose products needed to link together.

Similarly, don’t assume that internal resources will be readily available at the required time. Internal ICT functions, web teams and service departments are all under enormous pressure and may not find it easy to commit resources, however willing they are in principle to help. 4. Where a project focuses on building

residents’ digital skills, don’t

underestimate how difficult people may find it to use modern technology. Even people familiar with laptops may struggle initially with touch-screen devices. On the evidence of some of the projects, the generic training available on devices such as iPads often seems to assume a certain level of physical capability and ICT awareness that may not exist. In projects such as Stockton’s, tailored training run by project staff and focused on specific local websites proved much more effective.

‘When you go out to different groups, you’re often competing with other activities. So make the sessions fun. A quiz where teams had to look up the answers using Google was really great.’ A Stockton-on-Tees Digital Experts volunteer

5. Finally, don’t make assumptions. Some of the pre-conceptions that were challenged by the projects included:

◦ The digitally excluded are always older. In fact, digital training sessions in Reading proved more popular than expected among the 25-44 age range.

◦ The main user will be the service recipient. Essex has found that key users of the Living Well Essex website are younger family members and friends. The site is also heavily used by social workers and partner organisations.

◦ A one-off engagement will be enough to build basic digital skills and confidence. In fact, repeated

interventions are likely to be required. Southampton initially looked to their central web team to handle their web chat enquiries, as they were ideally placed to advise customers on navigating the website. However, it soon became apparent that customer queries mainly related to practical issues of service delivery and that the council’s customer services function (run by an outsourcer) was much better placed to handle the wide range of queries being received.

Assessing the Digital

Experts programme –

concluding thoughts

however thorough and comprehensive the bidding and assessment process, is likely to have its mixture of successes and failures, even within each project.

Nevertheless, despite some of the initiatives facing technical challenges, resourcing constraints and unexpected delays resulting from external factors, the 13 projects in this interim review have been able to demonstrate a great deal of progress, a wide range of benefits and much learning.

In particular, the progress of the programme has underlined:

• The value of learning from and working with partners, whether other councils, local voluntary and community organisations, or residents themselves. The caveat is that initiatives cannot just be taken wholesale from other places, but instead need to be shaped to fit local circumstances.

Both Redcar and Cleveland and

Southampton have focused their projects on implementing web chat but their approaches have had significant differences. Similarly, Reading and Stockton-on-Tees have shaped their volunteering projects in different ways.

• The need to put in place measures of success, whether direct or proxy. A number of the projects still have further work to do to collect performance data and analyse the efficiencies they have been able to achieve. Their task has not been helped by the fact that digital tools and technologies are constantly evolving, leading to gaps in the analytical tools available at national level (for instance, work on calculating the cost per contact of web chat is still in its infancy).

• The need to understand and manage the supplier market more effectively, particularly since many of the projects required integration between systems and support from ICT suppliers.

• The need to have a project plan that is robust in identifying the resources required and the timetable for delivering different elements of the project and yet incorporates sufficient flexibility and contingency

arrangements to allow for unforeseen external factors or technical hitches. Our interim recommendations, therefore, are that the LGA, in the design of future programmes and working with the sector and partners in Government, should continue to: • encourage councils to work across

boundaries, sharing infrastructure and learning with other local partners • find ways to promote the work already

underway in local government, including the projects being carried out under the Digital Experts banner – for instance by featuring innovative work in the Innovation Zone at LGA conference, or involving some of the project leaders in follow-on work eg around channel shift

• maintain a dialogue with supplier

representatives and government around topics such as system integration, security and open source app development.

Appendix 1 – The 13

projects in the current

evaluation

Details of all 13 projects covered by the interim evaluation, including case studies, vox pops and additional practical material, can be found at: http://www.local.gov.uk/web/guest/ productivity/-/journal_content/56/10180/6357119/ARTICLE

The table below gives a brief summary of each project

Local authorities involved Project focus

Blackpool Council Developing fully integrated processes principally for waste management, initially for requesting bulky waste collections and subsequently for reporting missed bins and fly-tipping.

Dacorum Borough Council Conducting research into the initiatives and actions that bring about channel shift and their effectiveness. Combining the findings of this research with local demographic profiles to create a locally appropriate method which will inform a channel shift implementation strategy.

Essex County Council Further developing the Adult Services’ information, advice guidance and advocacy website to ensure that it is user-friendly on mobile devices, and that pages on the website are printer friendly. Events and workshops will be held to promote the website and encourage residents to use it.

Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council

Procuring a customer self-service portal for council tax and business rates.

Reading Borough Council Developing and recruiting to a digital volunteering scheme to provide support to Reading residents who need help with using public access IT. The project includes recruiting a digital volunteers coordinator to support and motivate volunteers and to engage local community and voluntary organisations to ensure the scheme reaches key excluded groups.

Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council

Procuring a live web chat facility as part of the council’s approach to assisted digital and supported self-service. Engaging with residents to identify what digital opportunities they want and commissioning a developer to deliver these changes. Commissioning external professional services to provide project assurance on security and data matters.

Southampton City Council Piloting the use of live web chat to support customer self-service.

Stafford Borough Council and Cannock Chase Council

Converting Cannock Chase Council’s existing online forms into a new hosted solution, already used by Stafford Borough Council, that makes these forms available as a smartphone app.

Staffordshire County Council

Staffordshire County Council working in partnership with the district councils across the county to develop a MyStaffsApp, a smart phone app offering access to a range of services provided by both county and district councils.

Local authorities involved Project focus Stockton-on-Tees Borough

Council

Promote a range of online preventative services using mobile technology to engage with over 50’s, by developing their skills and confidence through training and promotion.

Test Valley Borough Council Procuring and implementing the Northgate Citizen Access tool which will allow residents to transact with the council online.

Tri-borough (Westminster City Council, Royal

Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham)

Enhancing the Frameworki mobile application used by adult social care teams across the three councils to allow users to add and amend case notes and view case documents while out of office, and developing document search functionality.

Wyre Council Procuring council tax e-form software to allow residents to transact with the council online.

Appendix 2 – Five key

do’s and don’ts

Make sure your project is adequately resourced, has a well-worked project plan and is underpinned by good programme and project management. Linking it to your council’s wider plans for exploiting digital tools and technologies can help.

Draw on all the different skills and resources available to you – which might include councillors, staff, residents and volunteers, public service partners, voluntary and community sector organisations and suppliers.

Think carefully about the project’s governance arrangements. Who needs to be involved in the core group, who are the key sponsors, what other programmes of work do you need to link to, including initiatives already underway locally?

Put in place a framework that establishes a baseline and allows you to monitor progress and measure success, both in terms of financial efficiencies and the wider benefits the project will deliver to residents and the council. Make sure you capture stories and feedback from service users and residents.

Think of the project as a service initiative rather than an ICT project and involve the right people, including service managers, contact centre staff and communications and web managers.

Don’t take a ‘build and they will come approach’. You’ll need to think carefully about how to promote the uptake of any new online information or facilities. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of getting the right demographic mix for any customer research or of engaging with hard-to-reach groups.

Don’t assume the technical aspects of any projects will proceed smoothly. Linking different systems and data is still no simple task for instance. You should be prepared to come across hidden costs and to act as broker between different suppliers.

Don’t assume external suppliers or outsourcers (or even colleagues internally) will have the capacity or willingness to help you at the point where you need their support. Try to get a sense early on of the pressures they are facing and what they can realistically commit to.

Finally, don’t overestimate people’s digital skills. Even residents familiar with laptops may struggle initially with touch-screen technology. And not all younger people are necessarily digitally-savvy or competent.

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