LOTI: Weeknote 58

Innovation in Procurement

To further our work on improving innovation in technology procurement in boroughs, we’ll be launching the next iteration of the City Tools platform, which is called Thirty3. Building on the report and PowerBI dashboard we published last year, Thirty3 has the potential to show boroughs’ technology tender opportunities and make them more transparent and accessible to SMEs. Working in collaboration with the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Economic Development Team, our intention is to create a virtuous circle of procurement opportunities that feed into our database of existing applications used by boroughs. Our hope is that, by doing so, we can empower boroughs to identify new opportunities to collaborate on technology procurement, re-shape the government technology market and improve the future of service delivery in London.

London Tech Week 2020

During London TechWeek we will be hosting a live demo of the new platform, developed by Nitrous and supported by data partners Proactis and Jaggaer, followed by a fireside chat with:

  • Alex Perez, (Venture Manager, Nitrous)
  • Paul Neville (Director of Digital and ICT, Waltham Forest)
  • Johnny Hugill (Head of Research, PUBLIC)

To register to attend, please visit: https://registration.gesevent.com/survey/31q89f9j0lese/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=sadiq-speaker

Learning from our experiences in year one, we know that developing this new platform cannot be the whole solution. So we have recently hired PUBLIC to help LOTI to create expert guidance for boroughs on how to inject more innovation into their technology procurement processes and also to help apply that guidance to a specific procurement opportunity.

As noted in our annual report, our work in this area focused predominantly on the boroughs whose housing services contracts expired in the first quarter of 2020. Using the City Tools data, we convened these boroughs to share the challenges they faced when working with certain legacy suppliers, identifying how they’d like their future contracts to improve. We’d like to build on that, and last week, we approached boroughs to help us identify service areas where several boroughs have contracts expiring at a similar time, to see if they’d like to work together to improve that procurement journey.

Again, building on our experience in the first year, we now know that in order to do this well, we need a longer lead time.  So we approached boroughs to ask for the termination date of their current Housing Services contracts to inform our next steps on supporting that service area as well.

In the meantime, PUBLIC will be carrying out desk-based research and strategic conversations and interviews with Chief Information/Digital Officers (CDIO) of member boroughs. This week, they’ll start holding conversations with operational colleagues from procurement and digital transformation teams, and private suppliers. To inform this, PUBLIC has published a form to gather baseline data from technology suppliers. This has been shared with over 650 Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and over 50 larger suppliers from the City Tools dataset who are either:

  1. local government technology suppliers, or
  2. London based technology suppliers.

If you’re a technology supplier to London boroughs and would like to complete this survey to help us understand how to improve the procurement process for you, please share your thoughts here.

Digital Apprenticeships

Tomorrow, LOTI will be hosting a virtual celebration to conclude the Digital Apprenticeships project during London Tech Week. We will be celebrating LOTI boroughs having successfully exceeded their collective goal to recruit a total of 100 digital apprentices by September 2020. We’ll be joined by borough officers, private sector partners and the Digital Apprentices themselves, and would welcome you to join us, too. To join us in celebrating, register for free here.

ICYMI, last week we also shared what life as a Digital Apprentice is like in London’s local government from the perspective of:

  • Emma O’Reilly, a Delivery Manager Apprentice at Hackney Council
  • Hidayat Deen, an IT Delivery Management Apprentice at Hackney Council, and
  • Fahim Ahmed, a Programme Manager at Camden Council

We also held our latest virtual learning sessions for Digital Apprentices, in partnership with Microsoft focussing on championing accessibility and developing inclusive services in London’s local government. Click here to see the full programme and to register to attend.

To support our Digital Apprentices during this period, we’ve also been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a day-long event bringing to life the opportunities that ‘digital’ could help realise in London’s local government. Our AWS Challenge Day will take place on 21 September, and will be an opportunity for LOTI Digital Apprentices to build their professional network with Digital Apprentices in different roles, in different teams, from different boroughs. Click here to see the full programme and to register to attend.

This Week

This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:

  1. Holding two events during London Tech Week. Please register here to attend.
  2. Contributing to London’s Emerging Technologies Charter workshop.
  3. Meeting with the core teams to progress our MHCLG-funded C-19 Challenge projects.

For the daily download on all things LOTI, be sure to follow us on Twitter.


Eddie Copeland
7 September 2020 ·
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