Chief Executives (CEOs) of councils want to see greater use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) to boost productivity. At LOTI we talk about the 4 main uses of AI in councils: 

1. Finding more efficient, cheaper ways of working.
2. Improving the resident experience of council services.
3. Improving staff productivity, wellbeing and accessibility
4. Unlocking new revenue that was previously unfeasible.

The first use, finding more efficient, cheaper ways of working is a need that long precedes AI in local government. CEOs rightly want to see more efficient delivery of their services and have wanted to do so for a long time.

At LOTI we’ve seen lots of examples of vendors promising big savings from new technologies to councils which only need to be bought and will automatically bring savings, and we’ve seen many great implementations of new technologies by teams in London boroughs. What is often missing is the link between the implementation of new technologies and verifiable and linked efficiencies in the business. We are not saying that efficiencies don’t happen, but simply that we’ve found that they are not measured.

Boroughs have had mixed results following digital or IT quick fixes. Where they have been implemented by the technology teams, new, unexpected benefits often arise. However, these are often post-hoc justifications for the use of the technology for things that were previously not measured. 

In the midst of budget squeezes, the division between OpEx and CapEx budgets, staff, location costs and combined services, counting the total spend of a council is possible and useful for overall budgeting purposes, it does not support measuring the efficiencies that have resulted in the implementation of new technologies or innovations. Furthermore, it also doesn’t support the evaluation of value for money of implementing new ideas and therefore impedes the process of on-boarding innovation.

When one can understand the cost of delivery it helps strategic planning and where to focus any improvement measures; it might be that the greatest efficiencies lie in tweaking the existing system or it might suggest a total service transformation would be most fruitful. 

At the same time, such an evaluation of the costs should also include reevaluating whether the service is meeting the residents’ needs as the the previous scope of the service delivery may have become unaligned to resident needs and no amount of tinkering is going to lead to a better result for the resident or the council.

In LOTI, we talk about people, processes and data all having a role to play in innovation alongside technology but we acknowledge the needs for robust business cases and ROIs. Adopting a service-orientated evaluation of costs unlocks an understanding of where to target support, what change is needed and whether total transformation would be the best course of action.