These days, it would be hard to find an area of local government life that isn’t at some level enabled by a piece of technology. 

It’s therefore troubling that one of the most persistent issues I hear from councils across London and far beyond is how poorly served they feel by some of the big ‘legacy’ suppliers who dominate the local government IT market.

The broader tech industry often reports feeling dissatisfied with the relationship, too. SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) in particular find it incredibly hard to engage with some of local government’s procurement processes.

Whatever the cause, it’s common to hear councils discuss how they can ‘escape legacy’; finding a route to replace their existing systems with more modern technologies that more closely resemble the kind of dynamic, connected, user-friendly applications we use and enjoy in our personal lives.

So what options do councils have to achieve that?

Below I sketch out four options, each of which requires a slightly different approach.

Hint: while many conversations focus on points 1 and 2, option 4 is arguably the best long-term route out.

1. Improve your experience of your current system

Without wishing to sound defeatist, option number 1 may be to accept that moving away from your current system is not feasible in the short term. (I outlined why changing technologies is so hard in this blog.) In this scenario, councils should at least focus on getting the most from their current technology and supplier.

Making things better starts with good contract management. When I speak to Chief Information and Digital Officers who have recently joined local government from the private sector, they often report being surprised by how rarely some councils hold suppliers to their Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Sometimes that’s because the SLAs were not put into the original contract, sometimes it’s because of the divided responsibilities between procurement, IT and service teams. And sometimes it’s just because staff are simply too stretched. Over the past 13 years, London local government has cut 54,000 staff in an effort to save costs. Everyone left is quite literally doing what would have been 2-3 people’s jobs a decade ago.

One of the things that can make holding suppliers to account easier and more impactful is if councils raise concerns and challenges collectively. At LOTI, we’re always open to bringing boroughs together to speak with one voice to big suppliers where there are common challenges, or a common desire to request new features on their future road map.

It’s not escaping legacy, but it might just make the experience of the current system better.

2. Procure a different but equivalent system

A second, incremental, option is to procure a system that offers essentially the same functionality, but where the features, cost, roadmap or service levels from the new supplier are better. In most other settings, you’d expect this approach to drive more competition and encourage better service from suppliers. Yet this can be hindered if councils leave it too close to a contract end date to work on issuing a better tender spec. Too many IT specs end up being a line-item description of the incumbent system, or largely the same as one from years ago, meaning only a very narrow number of suppliers can respond.

Therefore, what’s needed is good early market engagement, tenders that clearly set out the outcomes and core features boroughs want to see (e.g. free and unlimited access to their system data, preferably via API (Application Programming Interface)), and then followed up with the strong contract management mentioned above.

The challenge with this approach is the after an enormous amount of work, boroughs can be left with no significant organisational improvement.

3. Gradually break up functionality into components until the core system is not needed

The approach here is to gradually chip away at the different functionality a bigger legacy system offers and replace it with more modular tools that perform those functions better or more cost-effectively.

For example, some of the big housing management systems essentially combine the functionality of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool), a reporting tool, dashboards, notifications engine, payments engine, work planning tool etc, underpinned by some data storage. Councils could look to find replacements for each of those functions in turn. They might build their own data visualisation layer that pulls data from their incumbent system to provide better user insights. They could use low code tools to create forms that provide a better user interface. They might also procure smaller, more specialised tools from SMEs, or open source government-as-a-platform features like GOV.UK Pay. They might use a more generic CRM system to record service interactions, and make use of cloud hosting they use for other services. The idea is that bit by bit, councils can eventually swap out all functions in a lower risk way, until eventually the original system has been entirely replaced.

This strategy depends, of course, on the core system enabling data access and APIs to allow for interoperability between the modules. Councils also need to engage in great early market engagement sessions to understand what new tools are out there. This is why LOTI partners with techUK to help broker better conversations between local government and the tech sector.

4. Redesign service model and seek new technologies that can enable it

This is the big one, but also the one that seems to be the best long term route.

Rather than talking only in terms of what IT might better serve the current service model, councils should first ask “What do we want our service to look like?”, define that new service model through great user research and service design, and then explore what tools and technologies can make it possible. A new service model is more likely to require a whole new suite of tech, negating the need for the old generation of legacy systems.

IT aside, we know that framing the conversation this way round is important. For the past 10 years, whenever I’ve visited a local authority I ask: “If you could design your service or corporate function from scratch today, would it look the way it does now?” Not once in a decade has anyone ever said “Yes”.

The huge financial pressure facing London boroughs (they need to collectively save £400m this year, and project a £700m funding gap next financial year) is such that they have no choice but to innovate on their service models, and quite radically.

This is why in all areas of our work, LOTI looks at effective change being made up of People, Process, Tech and Data. Thinking in this more holistic way is one of the core aims of LOTI’s Sandbox experiment, in which we are mocking up and performing areas of adult social care services in order to pose the question: how might we fundamentally re-design the service model? Then: what combination of tools, data, people and processes can help us do this?

In short, the real escape route from legacy is to move it beyond an IT conversation. Otherwise we risk being held back by the limits of technologies that were borne from an earlier era.

None of these options is easy. No doubt we need more of all four, but I believe it’s the latter that hold the most promise.