The Members Meeting Room was packed on Tuesday as staff gathered together from across the Services for their fortnightly update on the Digital by Design Programme and their opportunity to give feedback on the demos of the new products we are developing.
Paul James, Head of IT and Joint Lead of the Digital by Design Programme thanked everyone for their attendance and reiterated to the Services the importance of the showcases: “As we approach Release 2, the first big release of Digital by Design, we particularly want to hear from you. Is this right for the Business? Is this what you need? Your feedback at these sessions is incredibly important”.
Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics
An approach to matching data across multiple data sources has been agreed and will be developed over the coming weeks. This will involve the development of complex ‘matching algorithms’. Why is this necessary?
Matching up records from different systems
A human looking at a person with the same name, date of birth and address on two systems will recognise that it is the same person whereas a computer will see them as two different sets of data unless they are programmed to identify such patterns. Matching algorithms are a way for computers to identify patterns within different systems.
Matching algorithms are essential for BI because of the sheer volume of data that is being dealt with. Matching data across systems will allow us to analyse a wider range of variables leading to the production of detailed insight behind the factors that cause underperformance or result in poor outcomes.
The first two systems we have pulled in data from are EIS and Capita 1 and there are already powerful possibilities emerging for the analysis of matched data, for instance, looking at links between school absences and children in need.
Now we’ve laid down the groundwork and put the infrastructure together to build the data warehouse it will be a lot quicker going forwards to bring in data from different sources.
The Showcase was also the opportunity to emphasise to the Services that BI also depends upon the quality and accuracy of the data inputted. Spelling mistakes in names, incomplete records, wrong dates or lack of dates all reduce its effectiveness.
Contact & Case Management
Our options appraisal for a case management system is now complete and we are preparing costs and benefits for upgrading the current Lagan system used by the Contact Centre and other services or procuring a new case management system.
Single View – Combined information at your fingertips
The last two weeks we’ve been shadowing the Contact Centre Referral and Information Officers, the MASSH triage team (Multi Agency Safeguarding and Support Hub) and the Revenues and Benefits team at the Contact Centre.
We have done this in order to conduct Process Mapping to measure the number of steps or clicks it takes to find matching information across different systems. Single view will add value by reducing these steps and displaying this combined information at your fingertips.
Search Screen Demo
We have built a demo of a simple Search Screen that can match citizen data from differing systems, link them together and display the results to the user whilst identifying which system the results have come from. The new system allows you to search by flexible name and/or address criteria.
We are addressing the Information Governance issues and have drafted data sharing agreements for EIS and Civica. So that our testing of the new Search Screen Staging Environment will not be held up our initial user testing will be with users who currently have permissions for both systems.
User-friendly Account creation for ‘YourHub’
We’ve implemented and configured a quick user-friendly authentication solution to verify citizens via an email. It also allows citizens to use existing accounts to sign in e.g. Facebook, Gmail and to reset their password via a self-serve method. This is a huge improvement over the current system whereby to create a ‘My Stockport’ account a password has to be generated and sent out via a letter, taking around 10 days. The new system will also pre-populate online forms once a customer is signed into their account.
Feedback from citizens
Feedback from citizens has been key to the last couple of weeks for the Information Advice and Guidance (IAG) and Digital Transactions Service Workstreams. Multiple prototypes have been created including a working prototype of the new ‘YourHub’ (both Desktop and Mobile) for “Find my next collection”, “Councillors” , “Planning Applications” and “Council Tax” to enable the User Testing which took place last week in libraries.
During the testing we both observed people interacting with our designs and asked them to talk about their experience as they went along. Feedback is often very specific, for example we have now changed the styling of the button links as some customers thought they were headings rather than clickable links.
The findings from the User testing have guided the styling that has been added to “Find my next collection” page which we demo’d at the Showcase and will be incorporated into the Living Style Guide for stockport.gov.uk which will be used by all work streams.
Demo: Find my next collection
A prototype was shown of the ‘Find my next collection’ mobile version demonstrating that customers can easily see when their next waste collection will take place, which type of waste will be collected and what to put in each type of collection. There are easy links to online waste forms such as ordering new bins and reporting missed bin collections and forms are pre-populated with the account holder’s details.
Healthy Stockport Website
The Healthy Stockport website now has an enhanced look and feel for article and topic pages that matches the new style guide. A sidebar has been added to all pages, pagination now makes it easier for the user to absorb information and links and background information have been added to the footer. This turns the product into a much more appealing offering for citizens.
More content has been prepared that can be used for the Healthy Stockport and the stockport.gov.uk site. New articles provide a much more efficient way to help citizens by simplifying access and improving understanding. Success stories / case studies now feature as a direct result of feedback from Inception that indicated that customers like to know how other people have faced up to the same challenges and health issues.
Analytics have been added to the Healthy Stockport website to enable the Information Advice and Guidance product stream and the service area to monitor user engagement on the website. This will highlight which content is important to users and which content needs further development.
The Healthy Stockport website domain ownership has been handed over to Stockport Council which means that we have full control over this domain and how it is used and deployed and are therefore able to made changes and fix issues much quicker.
