Innovation in Procurement 

Following 30 plus interviews and engagement with over 40 suppliers, PUBLIC has developed a prototype for LOTI’s ‘Innovation in Procurement‘ guidance for practitioners. This guidance seeks to solve some of the most common problems boroughs experience with their tech procurements, pulling together best practice or creating new interventions, solutions and recommendations across the procurement life cycle.

During our meeting with LOTI members at the end of last week, we discussed the potential for collaborative procurement. There are different scales to this approach. At the lower, less onerous end, boroughs might approach the market collectively, using best practice around the creation of their specifications and outcomes being sought. The higher, more longer-term end involves boroughs sharing budgets or and jointly commissioning.

We discussed which types of technology tenders were most attractive for these collaborative approaches:

1. re-procurement of key business systems such as housing or social care systems,
2. procurement of core technologies underpinning shared transformation objectives such as cloud transition, digital portals or mobile devices, or
3. procurement of specialised innovative tools identified on an ad hoc basis such as citizen engagement platforms or smart city sensors.

LOTI CIOs suggested the second group was the most promising, as it concerns core technologies over which they have direct oversight and control.

This week, PUBLIC will be engaging with our members to discuss how boroughs can share and identify their common procurement needs looking at the potential to post them to Thirty3, share their strategies on Local Gov Pipeline, or for the LOTI Central team to convene user groups. We’ll also be exploring what working forums or processes need to be created to support this going forward.

The prototype of the live guidance document on Market Engagement techniques is now available online, and will share this publicly very soon, welcoming your feedback.

Assistive Technology

As a reminder, there are four aspects of our work on Assistive Technology.

• Creating a Library of AT interventions
• Running some practical AT trials on areas where evidence is lacking
• Identifying barriers to using  Assistive Technology (AT) effectively
• Tackling barriers

In the last week, we’ve particularly focused on the research element of this work. Our plan to build an AT case study library has started with developing a common template to capture information from pilots and commissioning some web research to identify, collate and assess the quality of existing case studies available online. After that web research is complete, we’ll be conducting interviews with LOTI AT Leads to gather their case studies and enter them into the common template.

Meanwhile, on tackling systemic barriers to the effective use of AT, we’re getting started on a number of actions identified from our workshops held last fortnight. Read the summary here. We’ll report back soon with our progress.

Meeting our members

On Friday, we met with our members to provide the latest project updates and share our forward plan for the next month.

As well as the projects above, we shared updates on onboarding boroughs to our Thirty3 platform, discussed plans to extend some community resilience work started in Camden to other boroughs, and explored how we could support our data community to tackle common challenges around Test and Trace data (please see our summary of the issues raised here). For the full lowdown on what was covered in our meeting with our members, you can access the slides here.

This Week 

This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:

1. Holding a Challenge Day in collaboration with Amazon for our Digital Apprentices.
2. Hosting a Digital Inclusion Dragon’s Den at DigiLeaders Week. Register here to attend.
3. Holding our latest meet-up for Data Analysts and Managers in London boroughs to discuss Covid outbreak management and progress with test and trace. Please register here to attend.

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