The potential for data during covid recovery

LOTI attended the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s (GMCA) workshop focussing on strategically using open data to improve public service provision in the region. The workshop was run in two parts:

• Part 1 – looking at how they can foster a more open data culture and
• Part 2: looking at specific open data sets that GMCA could publish.

We heard about Leeds’ (who are doing a lot of work in this space, and we’ll be attending the Leeds Digital Festival over the coming fortnight) approach to publishing open data, and their experience of trying to adhere to a difficult motto of ‘open by default’. We appreciated the candid feedback shared by participants, who recounted the need for working in the open, being pragmatic about causation vs. correlation, and linking up strategic thinking to residents’ and officers’ needs as important elements for enabling a more open data culture. We will remain engaged in Manchester’s work on this and will share our learning as much as we can, in future weeknotes.

We bore these lessons in mind as we resumed our virtual meet-ups for LOTI’s Data Analysts’ network last week. It was an opportunity for boroughs to hear more from LOTI’s newest member – Barnet – on their data journey and plans for the future of the service.

We also heard from FutureGov, the Delivery partner for Camden and Central Bedfordshire’s data collaboration project with the local Voluntary services as part of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) Covid-19 Challenge.

Paul Hodgson (City Data Manager, Greater London Authority) shared the progress made on LOTI-led pan-London data collaboration projects including a visual dashboard of Electronic Vehicle (EV) charging points across London. Developed in collaboration with London Councils, borough officers can now drill down to see the charging activity as well as patterns and trends of how this is being used. This will be particularly useful in light of wider roll-outs of electronic vehicles across the capital, and boroughs’ efforts to support Londoners to maintain social distance during recovery.

We ended the meet-up with updates from borough teams with regard to shielding data, managing local outbreaks and future plans for test & trace. The full recording is now available on YouTube, and the slides are available here.

Innovation in Procurement

As we shared in Weeknote 59, borough Chief Digital and Information Officers (CDIOs) shared key issues across the commissioning lifecycle, which was set out thematically on slide 5. Last week, we worked with PUBLIC to work this up into problem statements for different stages of the procurement process. This week, we’ll be engaging with CDIOs and tech procurement leads to prioritise these statements, and identify who this affects and potential ways we can solve it.

Cyber-security and resilience workshop

One of the many challenges facing boroughs that are designing and implementing IoT and Smart City technologies is meeting complex Cybersecurity and resilience requirements.

Our workshop explored these challenges with reference to EV charging as a case study.
We heard from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) on their forthcoming Smart City Cyber Security principles and discussed what further guidance, tools, standards and frameworks would help boroughs navigate this space. Meha Shukla, a researcher at UCL and consultant at Skill Formation, outlined a proposal embedding the forthcoming NCSC principles into a set of tools for procurement teams which we will be further exploring with boroughs in the coming weeks.

You can watch the recordings of the session here: Part 1 and Part 2 are available here. Please note: the NCSC sessions were redacted from the recording. If you wish to learn more about the content shared during this workshop, please contact Jay Saggar (Data Projects Manager, LOTI).

Digital, Data and Innovation

We held our workshop for CDIOs in London boroughs, in collaboration with Bloomberg Associates, to explore how we can help London boroughs to better understand the capabilities they need to develop in the fields of digital, data and innovation to thrive in the digital era.

Using LOTI’s data collaboration methodology, we tried to identify, understand, compare and/or communicate the skills, people/roles, ways of working and technologies boroughs need in a series of interactive exercises. The results were telling, and we’ll be spending this week drawing similarities and themes between them. You can access the slides to the workshop here.

Touching base with our members

We finished the week off with the latest meeting with our members, using it as an opportunity to brief them on what’s coming up by way of workshops, as well as a deeper dive on planning our Covid recovery projects. You can access the slides to that meeting here.

We were also pleased to welcome four new faces to the group:

• Aruj Haider – the newly appointed CDIO for Westminster
• Tariq Khan – the newly appointed CDIO for Camden
• Yogita Popat – the new Head of Organisational Insight and Intelligence for Barnet
• Barry May – Head of Customer and Digital, Barnet

This Week

This week, the LOTI Central Team will be:

1. Holding two workshops to inform our work on our Assistive Technology project.
2. Holding our first virtual meet-up for our new community of Data Scientists in London boroughs.
3. Meeting with the Information Governance for London (IGfL) group to encourage their endorsement of our revised 7-step Information Governance process.

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