London Borough of Southwark

The Customer 

Southwark Council is situated in South London and is connected by bridges across the River Thames to the City of London and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is home to famous attractions like The Shard, Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe. With over 317,000 residents, the council is one of the biggest local authorities in the UK, and supported by 4,000 employees it works to achieve its unified vision of becoming a data-enabled council. 

Hitachi Solutions has had a longstanding and successful partnership with the council. Since November 2019, its experts have worked collaboratively with LBS to leverage Microsoft technology and data solutions to enhance the resident experience, and in May 2021 the two began a data partnership. This ongoing four-year data programme focuses on establishing a Modern Data Platform (MDP) that will provide the council with a holistic single view of its data, as part of its ‘One Platform, One Council’ vision, and also help to ensure effective data governance. 

The Challenge

Like many other local authorities across the UK, LBS had a fragmented data estate, causing challenges with the data held across the council. As applications and technology advanced over the last twenty years, different tools were created to fit the purpose of the service area using them. While this kept processes and information neat within a specific service area, it made it challenging to see a holistic view and leverage the full value of the data. LBS found that a lot of its systems had multiple entries, and identified that the work it was already doing across the Microsoft technology stack would be complemented by developing a Modern Data Platform. With over 300 services provided by LBS, this highlighted a critical need to understand what data is held, bring together multiple disparate data sets, and create a single platform for intelligence and reporting, increasing the efficiency of response times, reducing service isolation and supporting the ‘One Platform, One Council’ vision. 

Having that data and information to hand can only lead to more creative and more efficient solutions moving forward.

The Solution

Using a personalised data strategy, Hitachi Solutions’ experts leveraged the Microsoft Azure MDP to bring together data from different lines-of-business systems, including Mosaic, NEC and Capita, into a single platform view. The MDP allows the council to use data from multiple sources to create comprehensive reports, enhancing its ability to manage and deliver services effectively. Some LBS teams previously had to gather data and compile reports manually every month, and with the MDP this process is automated, reducing the time required from three days to two to three hours. 

The ‘One Council, One Platform’ view helps various departments. One example is the Repair Services team: the data provided by the MDP gives them greater visibility of their hotspots of demand and where repairs are happening, helping the team to be more proactive and manage repair services more effectively. Another example is ‘Supporting Families’, one of the dashboard tools used by LBS, which combines police, education, social care, revenues and benefits, and housing data to give a single view of a household, then checks the household’s information against complex eligibility criteria to prompt whether funding can be claimed, with the ability to drill down into data points ensuring confidence in the information shown. 

If we have more evidence-based ways of working, we can improve our understanding of what our residents need and we can tailor our services and programmes specifically to those needs.

Why Hitachi Solutions

Southwark valued a partner that could bring multidisciplinary teams alongside its own and mentor its people to upskill, which proved crucial to the programme’s success, all underpinned by a personalised data strategy and a longstanding, collaborative relationship dating back to 2019. 

Working with Hitachi Solutions has allowed us to have multidisciplinary teams. Having an experienced team to mentor our people and help them upskill has been really crucial to the success of the programme.

The Benefits 

• Data confidence: increased trust in data, with more confidence that the information used is accurate and timely 
• More efficient: greater efficiency by reducing the need to cross-reference between systems and manually create reports 
• Increased independence: reduced dependencies on ‘super-users’, freeing up resources to advance internal reporting capability 
• Upskilling: digital skill improvements and staff upskilling, empowering teams with the tools needed to progress their work without the need for intervention 

What’s Next? 

The future for LBS’s ‘One Platform, One Council’ programme is to continue ingesting data from different areas of the business into the data platform, promoting the MDP to service areas that can use this amalgamated data to improve their respective areas. LBS and Hitachi Solutions will roll out the MDP to Housing, Customer Experience and Planning next. There are also plans to roll out Microsoft Fabric, which will allow LBS to integrate even more advanced capabilities such as AI and data modelling, with LBS becoming one of the first councils to deploy this progressive technology.