Buckinghamshire Council - Moving from a legacy system to a more flexible Family Information Service
Liz Connick, Senior Early Help Digital Officer, talks about how they moved from a historic legacy system and upgraded their Family Information Service.
"We wanted something we could easily upgrade in the future and change providers if we wished"
Many Local Authorities have a Family Information Service (FIS), which fulfills the statutory duty to provide free and impartial information, advice and assistance to their citizens on any family matter. The service is available to any family member taking care of children or a young person aged 0 to 19 years of age (up to 25 years for children and young people with special needs) as well as professionals working in Buckinghamshire. Our website and directory of organisations, activities and childcare is always available allowing citizens to find:
- support available to help with issues affecting your family
- what’s on at family centres
- things to do and holiday activities
- support and inclusive activities if your child has a - Special Educational Need or Disability
- childcare and early years providers
A lot of family information services use 4 to 5 key legacy providers, as we did. We were keen to embrace new technologies including open source so that we weren’t tied to one supplier long term and that also we would benefit from developments made by other users.
The problem
Our existing directory was provided by one of several legacy providers, who developed and maintained directories for the majority of Family Information Services nationwide. Any development or improvements made were building on an old system. Our previous Head of Digital, Ben, was keen to future proof and look forward instead of using legacy-based systems. He is involved with the Open Referral UK project, so we were guided by his experience and knowledge.
Open data standards, such as Open Referral UK open the door to the development of more efficient, effective and cost effective public services. No longer dictated by aged data structures and information siloed in legacy systems. The adoption of Open Referral UK should see the information contained in the Family Information Service being more transparent, easier to access and to build upon.
The process
We used the Digital Outcomes Framework to procure a new system. The process looked at user needs first with an emphasis on the problems we wanted the system to solve and outcomes for users, rather than being very specific about the technical requirements. So it was more ‘we would like the system to do this’, rather than specific features. It was very new for us tendering in this way and not having the architecture pinned down in the actual tender.
Challenges
The biggest barrier is for developers to understand the breadth of what a Family Information Service delivers. Our old system had quite a complex backend, for example. It included statutory and non-statutory reporting, employment data for childcare and early years providers as well as the Ofsted feed and had to meet the UK GDPR requirements to ensure privacy of our data. It also had to deliver a front-end that met user needs when searching for childcare, things to do, information for the SEND Local Offer and a multitude of advice and support. The product was launched as a ‘minimum viable product’ and will be developed over time, using feedback from users to identify improvements.
Benefits and what we learned
We had feedback from community users saying it was a lot easier to log in and to update information, and processes such as the password reset are better. We will continue to learn from feedback to identify the improvements we will want to make moving forwards and as more organisations adopt the Open Data standards we look forward to seeing the difference this can make.
Embracing the new - culture change
It’s bringing councils into the current digital world, instead of relying on trusted legacy providers. Whilst there is definitely a learning journey for organisations such as Buckinghamshire Council to embark upon when they adopt open data standards, we can see the long term benefits. The real benefit may well be the ‘what comes next’ as we start to really draw upon the benefits of repeatability that Open Referral UK gives us.
Value of open source
Open source is the future. There’s the opportunity for people to build on the code. Someone does a development and it benefits you - that wouldn’t happen with legacy systems.
A lot of councils are going through massive digital transformation.
Collaboration between local authorities, designers and technology providers on products and services such as Open Referral UK will be key for us to maximise the opportunities that we believe are inherent in Open Data Standards. There is a real sense of shared ownership when you adopt these types of standards.
And we don’t know what changes will result as an outcome of the pandemic. A lot of people worked face to face but are now understanding the value of digital, and looking to deliver services differently in the future embracing both traditional and digital means.