On 14th February 2020, the Local Government association ran a masterclass discussion day for councillors and elected members on data and digital transformation in local government. It took place in London. This is the slide set that was used to steer discussions

1. Data and Digital Masterclass
London
February 14th 2020 www.local.gov.uk

2. www.local.gov.uk
Purpose of the day
• This event is for elected members who are working on,
and keen to maximise, the opportunities of digital
approaches and data exploitation in their authorities.
• A sequence of speakers from local authorities will talk
about their own experiences as a reference point for
questions and a discussion within the group.

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The shape of our day
• Now: Intros and Discussion
• 1115: How digital is helping councils. Hackney guest speakers.
• 1200: Deriving benefits from data. Essex guest speaker.
• 1245: Culture, Mindset and Choices
• 1315: Lunch
• 1400: Reflection
• 1415: Councillors creating the conditions. Sevenoaks guest speaker.
• 1515: Summary
• 1530: Close

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The 3Fs
• Fire
– no test planned – exits Left and Right
– Once outside Left and Left again for assembly point
• Facilities
– Gents: this floor near the lift (and on 3rd floor)
– Ladies: floor below (and on 3rd floor)
• Fones

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Ground rules
• Confidentiality, to stimulate open sharing
• Acknowledgement that we’re at different points on the
journey and have different contexts
• Learning from each other as much as from the speakers
• Facilitator’s role to move on

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Introductions

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Introductions
• Name
• Council
• Council role
• Other experience relevant to the day
• Your interest in this agenda
• Your key point from the survey/flipcharts, especially if it’s
an “ask” from others in the room

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The Landscape we’re travelling in (1)
• Data and Digital are about more than technology – eg new ways of
working and collaborating
• Financial challenges and yet raised resident expectations
• There are a whole host of “muck and bullets” issues that people are
grappling with. eg
– Overcoming change resistance
• Staff
• Suppliers
• (Residents)
– Building a coalition within the group
– Using the machinery of government, eg budgets, scrutiny, recruitment
– Resolving worries of cybersecurity

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The Landscape we’re travelling in (2)
• Political choices and philosophy
– Role and nature of the local state (eg “digital by default”
choices, human-centred design)
– Working in the open; open data, open source
– Collaboration v commercialisation
– Managing national policy changes
– New support to front-line councilors
– Data ethics

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How digital is Helping Councils
• Please welcome:
– Philip Glanville, Elected Mayor, LB Hackney
– Rob Miller, Head of ICT

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How Digital is helping Councils
• What are you pleased with so far?
• What difficulties have you encountered? How are you
dealing with them?

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Maximising the Benefits of Data
• Please welcome:
– Richard Puleston, Director Strategy, Insight and Engagement,
Essex County Council

13. Building a better picture
of the past to help us
prepare for the future
“
”
Data Science Masterclass

15. Data Science…
Programming Statistical
Analysis
Domain
Expertise
Inter-disciplinary field
that uses scientific
methods, processes,
algorithms and systems
to extract knowledge
and insights from
structured and
unstructured data
“
”
The discovery, interpretation, and communication
of meaningful patterns in data to result in effective
decision making

16. Successful
Projects

17. School Readiness
Agency history
Trend Analysis
Risk Profile
Geospatial Data
Scale
Unknown

19. Building a Community
Community Led
Services….leading to
improved outcomes
Be part of the equation

20. Targeted Endings
Can we predict at the point of case closure who is at high risk of returning to Children and Families services within 1
year?
The key objectives:
Understand the most important factors, drivers and pathways for those children returning to social care
Understand what combinations of circumstances or factors exist for children who are most at risk of returning
Look at the predictive power of the free text fields in Mosaic and identify if there is any added value from free text
analysis
Use both the quantitative and qualitative data above to produce a model that predicts which children are most at
risk of return
Had One
CP Plan
Has Police
Referrals
No More Than 3
Assessments
before CP Plan
CP Plan
Reason
Neglect
At Least 2
Police
Referrals
Returned

21. Targeted Endings
Model 2a: Parameter
Modulation
Overall accuracy: 85%
True Positive: 79%
Model 1: Quantitative
Overall accuracy: 74%
True Positive: 48%
Model 2: Adding NLP
Overall accuracy: 79%
True Positive: 59%

22. Our
Approach

23. Defining the Problem: 1

24. Does the project align to partnership priorities?
What is the scale of the impact on our citizens, our
communities, and our organisations?
Is this a good
research question
that can be
addressed through
big data collaboration
and the application
of data science skills?
InnovativeRequires further
scoping
Biggest potentialQuick Wins
Defining the Problem: 2

25. Data science is a team sport
2. Data sourcing,
governance
3. Data exploration,
and data science
Data
People
Action
6. Impact
and
outcomes
5. Embed & act 4. Analysis and Insight
1. Problem / Needs
Identification

26. 1. The use of data has clear
benefits for users and serves
the public good
2. Be aware of relevant
legislation and codes of
practice
3. Understand the limitations of
the data
4. Use data that is proportionate
to the user need
5. Ensure robust practices and
work within your skillset
6. Make your work transparent
and be accountable
7. Embed data use responsibly
Consider the ethics carefully

27. Data in our DNA:
Conclusion

28. DeliveryAnalysisData SharingData PrepEngagement
Exploration
& Scoping
Our development pipeline
Exploratory Analysis
Literature Review
Best Practice Review
Identify Sponsor
Determine Partners Determine Critical Partners
Feasibility Framework
Ethics Checklist
Engage Partners
Draft Initial Scope
Identify Working Group
Members
Arrange Working
Group
Working Group
Agree Scope
Agree Timeline in
Principle
Identify Data Leads
Engage Data Leads
Agree Variables
Develop Data Schema
Extract Data
Data Cleaning
Pseudonymisation
Upload Data Join Data
Data Cleaning
Data Expedition
Insight
Development
Recommendations
Check & Challenge
Develop Product
Share with Stakeholders
Follow Up Impact
Evaluate
Engage with IG
Complete DPIA
Engage Partner IG Draft ISP Identify SIRO Engage SIRO
Sign ISP
A&E Admissions Domestic AbuseHomelessnessKnife Crime Let’s Get Physical Mental HealthVulnerabilities Risky Business

29. Key lessons learnt so far….
• Be clear about the business need.
• Be clear about the problem definition and about the suitability of a
data solution.
• Work closely with the domain experts – from the get go and at all
stages.
• Build capability within and without.
• Enabling cross partner data share is as much about culture, politics
and organisational capacity as the enabling technology
• But you do need to have some technology to make this work...
• Ethical considerations need to be integral within project design and
delivery
• Focus on the impact
• Are we building capability or solving a problem or widening our
reach or all of these?
Some things we have learnt

30. Analytics is not the answer to
everything and will never be
100% accurate.
It is important to test and
learn, triangulate data with
citizen research and
engagement, link insight to
action and be ethical and
transparent in our approach
at all times.

31. More Information
For more information:
www.essexfuture.com/ecda
ecda@essex.gov.uk
Insight Blog https://insight.blog.essex.gov.uk/

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Maximising the benefits of data
• What data issues have you experienced? What solutions
have you come up with so far?
• How are you using data and evidence to change what you
do and how you make decisions?

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Culture, Mindset and Choices
Jonathan Flowers
jon@thanflowers.com

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Context
“We are taking 21st century problems and trying to solve
them with 20th century tools and 19th century institutions”
- Madeleine Albright
What does it mean to be applying 21st Century Tools and
creating 21st Century Institutions?

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Purpose of this session
• Offer some thoughts from my work and my “lived
experience” in this area from last 20 years, especially the
last 4
• Discuss the culture and mindset associated with “digital”
– Opportunities
– What to watch out for (blockers, risks)
• Identify some key member choices
• Develop this in discussion

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Why Does this Matter?
• There’s an opportunity to serve people better
• There’s an opportunity to unlearn outdated ways of
working and reduce frustrations – better culture
• A new generation of employees and sector-switchers will
expect this difference
• There are risk and transitions to manage

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People care about the tools they use…

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What does “digital” mean…

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Technologies (briefly)
• Connectivity
• Devices
• Remote working
• Remote sensing (and “Internet of Things”)
• Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence
• Security/Trust

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What are the cultures, practices and
processes?
• Service design
• Agile working
• Working in the open
• New levels of collaboration
• (Social media)

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Service design
• Concept around for a long time
• Popularised by GDS
• User-centred design, human-centred design
• Understanding how people use services
• Understanding peoples’ lives
• Building a compelling human case for change
• Very challenging to organisational boundaries

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Agile Working
• A reaction against the 20th Century “waterfall” method
– Detailed specification, months/years of work, not useful
– Things have changed, or the initial understanding was wrong
– Feels “baked in” to public procurement and business cases

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Agile Working
• A new “language” for a structured process of trying things out
and learning as we go
• A sequence of “sprints” that “home in” on solving a problem
– (Fortnightly) sprints
– Daily standups
– “Show and tell”
– Retrospectives
– Sprint review and pivot

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Agile Working and Service Design
Sprints (eg)
The “Double
Diamond”

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Incremental development

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“Service
Standards”

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Working in the
Open
• Blogs and
Weeknotes
• Show and Tell

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Another “Show and Tell”

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So What?
• Different drumbeat and pace
• Demands different governance (inc scrutiny)
• Challenging to financial planning
• Opens up different member roles (with care)
• New language to learn (for everyone)
• Can appear less rigorous and more vulnerable to
challenge

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Collaboration Tools
• Almost no email
• Tools like Slack
• Shared documents eg Google docs
• Sharing with Trello
• A new way of working that’s hard to comprehend until you
experience it

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Slack
• “Social
media for
work”
• But much
more
powerful

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Collaborative documents
• Imagine a board meeting
– Link to a shared agenda document – make and share
comments and questions beforehand
– Write the notes of the meeting collaboratively as you go
• Imagine a team-produced document
– One version with multiple people working, commenting and
suggesting simultaneously
– No need for version control
– Issues dealt with on the spot

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So What
• Tool for members?
• Redefine member: officer boundary
• Very different working style that requires 100% take-up
• Addictive: hard to go back

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Choices for members
• Encourage new ways of working, with their challenges to governance
approaches, or keep them lower down and arms-length?
• What is the member role in digital development?
• How big a part of the solution do we make this?
• What digital/data “ideology”?
– Eg open source versus commercial?
– Eg role of evidence in informing decisions
– Eg opening up data
– Eg “digital by default” for services
– Eg standardised national solutions versus local ones
– Eg Local Digital Declaration

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Local Digital
Declaration
• LocalGov
Digital/MHCLG
Initiative
• Eg funding shared
exemplar projects
• Beginning to
market-shape

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There are other things to be getting
on with as well…and helping with
• Structure of local government
– Devolution deals, combined authorities
city deals, mergers, unitaries, double
devolution, (integrated care systems)
• Commercialism
– Use of assets, selling services,
investment…?
• Integrating Health and Social Care
• Inward investment
– Attracting employers, stimulating
clusters, engaging colleges, housing,
infrastructure
• Managing housing growth
• Delivery models
– Outsourcing, spin-outs,
community transfer
• Strong siloes or corporate
entities
• Civic entrepreneurialism
– Convenor in the place,
catalysing, stimulating, doing
different things
• Having the right strategic
capacity in the organisation
• Squeezing the last bits of
toothpaste out of the tube by
conventional methods

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A cultural reflection
• Reflecting back to when many people were “learning their craft”, say
2004…
– e-Government, BVPI157
– Central direction and Audit Commission
– Wellbeing power was new and general power of competence didn’t exist
– Local Strategic Partnerships, not even “total place”
– Big state infrastructure eg RDAs
– Gershon efficiencies
– Cabinet system and scrutiny were new
– iPhone didn’t exist
– FutureGov was 4 years off existing, GDS 7 years away

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“Digital maturity” example
(Other organisations
offer similar tools)

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Level of ambition is a choice
• Digital versus other things
• Digital as an enabler of other things
• Workforce capability and the potential to recruit or buy-in
• Some “ideological” choices
• Legacy tech, legacy culture
• Local priorities and needs
• Citizen and business expectation

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Lunch
• We start again at 1400
• What new thoughts or questions do you have?
• What was relevant to your context?
• What wasn’t?

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Reflections
• What new thoughts or questions do you have?
• What was relevant to your context?
• What wasn’t?

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Creating the conditions, as councillors
• Please welcome:
– Cllr Peter Fleming, Leader, Sevenoaks DC and
Chair, Innovation and Improvement Board, LGA

84. “How can people tell you what
they want if they haven’t seen
it before? If we ask them what
they want, we’ll end up doing
Swan Lake every year!”
— Mario D’Amico, senior VP of marketing at Cirque du Soleil

133. @dmontfort
@cllrpeterfleming
peterfleming72

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Creating the conditions, as councillors
• What are the key points for councilor
engagement/levers you can pull?
• What successes have you had?
• What remains difficult?

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Further
Support
https://www.local.gov.uk/ou
r-support/efficiency-and-
income-
generation/transformation-
and-innovation-exchange
Or Google “LGA
Transformation and
Innovation Exchange”

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Further
Support
https://www.local.gov.uk/our-
support/guidance-and-
resources/data-and-
transparency
Or Google “LGA Data and
Transparency”

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Further
Support
https://www.local.gov.uk/
our-support/efficiency-
and-income-
generation/cyber-
security
Or Google “LGA
Cybersecurity”

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Further
Support
https://www.local.gov.uk/case-
studies

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Summary
• We’ve heard from three authorities and from each other
• What connections do you want to make?
• What insights have you got?
• What questions are you taking back with you?
• What do you want to do, now?
• (And please fill in the feedback form)

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Have a safe journey home!