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Leeds City Council – IT Strategy (2016 – 2020)

1. IntroductionOur vision is for Leeds to be the best city in the UK - one that is compassionate with a strong economy that tackles poverty and reduces the inequalities that still exist. We want Leeds to be a city that is fair and sustainable, ambitious, fun and creative for all. The Council will continue to work with others to achieve better outcomes for the city at reduced cost with our values underpinning everything we do.

This document is the ICT Strategy 2016 – 2020 and it replaces the previous 2011 – 2015 version. In turn it forms part of the Council’s broader portfolio of strategies and is set within the overall context of the vision stated above and brought to life in the Council’s Business Plan 2015 – 2020. At the time of writing this Business Plan is currently undergoing a 2016/17 revision. The IT Strategy 2016 – 2020 will play its part in helping fulfil our Business Plan ambitions, outcomes and priorities.

This strategy outlines a range of capabilities that will be fundamental in helping to deliver the Council’s vision, wider strategies and the Business Plan outcomes. Delivering these outcomes requires a different approach to the traditional single service orientated approaches of the past. The significant change is that they will be delivered by multi-disciplinary teams across public, private and third sector organisations in partnership with citizens and this will require a different IT strategy, solutions and approach. There are increasingly diminishing boundaries across the organisations engaged in delivering these city outcomes. There will be a far greater emphasis on consumer or utility IT solutions in the communities and in the workplace e.g. the greater use of cloud based applications and services, ‘apps’, social media and some of the capabilities that come as basic services on smart phones e.g. maps, navigation or messaging.

2. Council Business Plan & Breakthrough ProjectsThe ambitions, outcomes and plans laid out in the Business Plan will be realised through a series of medium/long term major ‘Breakthrough Projects’ that will run for the duration of this IT strategy.

These projects are summarised below and in varying degrees will require the capabilities outlined in this strategy to help ensure their successful delivery. We have given some examples of how these capabilities will apply. Without these capabilities they will not succeed:

Making Leeds the best place to grow old in – this is the starting point for the integrated ‘City as a Platform’ approach outlined later in this document and is based for the main part on a smarter and more joined up health and social care system (people, process and technology). This also includes the opportunity for initiatives like smarter technology in the home to monitor health but also tackle basic issues like loneliness and access to transport.

Rethinking the City Centre – for example using web, social media and collaboration technologies to help engage our communities, the private and third sectors and other stakeholders in developing and promoting the city centre. We will also use smart city technologies to safely manage our streets, the environment (including air quality), transport, and signage.

Housing growth and jobs for young people – ensuring that the 70,000 new homes required across Leeds by 2028 are well designed and sustainable and include technologies that will help ensure smart, connected and efficient homes. We will also need to ensure the associated infrastructure e.g. the transport systems and utilities are future proofed. Web, social media and

D. Maidment Version: Draft 4.0

collaboration capabilities will be important in helping create and promote jobs and opportunities for young people.

Tackling domestic violence and abuse – giving multi-disciplinary teams from different organisations the joined up information, systems and collaboration capabilities i.e. ‘presence’, Instant Messaging (IM), video, voice conferencing and the ability to share and jointly work on cases (reports etc.) so enabling the reduction of instances of domestic violence and abuse.

Cutting carbon and improving air quality – this will require elements of our ‘City as a Platform’ approach and associated smart city capabilities to monitor air quality and generate open data that can be combined with other data to help monitor and target interventions and resources to priority areas.

Hosting world class events – for example, supporting open data based platforms and mobile applications for cultural tourism that will allow tourists to access reliable open data based information e.g. descriptions, locations, and pictures about the cultural sites in their area. Integrating cultural attractions with tourism services such as hotels, restaurants, transport, etc. that can be used when planning a journey or during the actual stay as a virtual guide.

More jobs, better jobs – digital inclusion strategies and greater access to free Wi-Fi will support our economic development and social inclusion ambitions. We will raise the digital literacy of all citizens, businesses, public services to a basic level of competence to succeed in the ‘Digital Age’. Technology will raise the skills levels and capabilities across the city’s businesses to enable them to compete globally. Early intervention and reducing health inequalities – we will develop a citizen driven health approach by providing people and their carers’ with the information and technology they need to enable the better coordination of their care and facilitate greater self-management of their personal goals and health conditions within the independent setting of their homes. Significant use of consumer technology solutions will figure here. The wider use of BI and Analytics will also be important.

Strong communities benefiting from a strong city - developing shareable technology enabled solutions that will facilitate communities in connecting and collaborating on local issues resulting in more resilient and sustainable local neighbourhoods.

There is also the fundamental aspiration to be an Efficient and Enterprising Organisation. To become the best council in the best city, we must continue to get the basics right. This means delivering good quality public services to deadlines and to budget; managing our assets efficiently and ensuring our internal processes are standardised and simplified. This also applies to our Information Technology design, development and deployment.

3. General Context This strategy is defined within the wider context of ongoing:

Austerity (LCC government grant settlement reduction of £100M over 2016/17 – 2019/20; Leeds health & social care funding gap - £680M over 5 years).

Policy Changes (local and national – population migration, increasing demands for services, potential EU constitution changes, devolution etc.).

Global Trends (population movement, financial stability, climate change etc.), public expectations (services immediately available, extended hours etc.).


Technology Advances (Internet of Things (IoT), ‘always on’, ubiquitous smart devices and apps, wearable technology, big data etc.). Against this backdrop there are national and local constraints e.g. 23% of the adult population don’t have the five basic digital skills (2015) and 75,000 of homes in Leeds have no fixed line broadband connection to the internet (2015).

4. General PrinciplesThe Council:

Is becoming smaller in size but aspires to be bigger in influence because it has a mandated democratically elected leadership of ‘place’ role. By ‘place’ we mean the City as a whole but it also applies to local areas and these have diverse needs. For example at both ends of the spectrum, life expectancy across different parts of Leeds can be on average 10 years lower for men and 8 years lower for women.

Is becoming increasingly a commissioner of services and is therefore correspondingly providing less direct services.

Needs to deliver strategic city outcomes in partnership with others across the City – public services, third sector, the private sector and citizens i.e. a ‘city first’ approach with diminishing emphasis on the old traditional vertical service delivery models.

Following on from the ‘Commission on the Future of Local Government’ report launched in 2012, is promoting the concept of civic enterprise which is essentially a new leadership style for local government where councils become more enterprising, businesses and other partners become more civic and citizens become more engaged. A simple example of this is local digital companies developing ‘citizen led’ products e.g. ‘Apps’ to help deliver our City Outcomes.

Needs to be an intelligence led organisation so that it can target its limited resources on the things that are most important.

5. City Context and a Platform ApproachAccording to industry analysts Gartner, as ‘digital’ (in the broad sense this is technology that connects people and machines with each other or with information) becomes more pervasive, it is becoming clearer that traditional business and operating models are no longer sufficient. New ‘platform’ based approaches and models that include the alignment of governance, leadership, business, resource, delivery and technology layers are required. Across these layers, multiple networks of stakeholders will bring value to each other by exploiting the synergies of the overall platform.

The concept of an ‘open’ standards based ‘City as a Platform’ (CaaP) in Leeds starts with the ‘Health and Wellbeing’ platform (see Appendix 1) underpinned by the City ‘Health and Wellbeing’ strategy; a model that can be applied equally with limited modifications to support other significant agendas e.g. improving transport or making Leeds the best place to grow old.

This platform approach increasingly constitutes a set of underpinning ‘open’ (not proprietary i.e. associated with any particular supplier) standards based technologies, processes, resources and governance that will facilitate and allow the flow of data across service providers enabling the integration of services that will support (very often) citizen led opportunities. This approach will enable diverse communities to use digital tools and services to solve their particular local problems or create new opportunities.

A specific example of this platform approach is the national Ripple project http://rippleosi.org/ which is a community effort towards an open integrated digital care record platform that all health


http://rippleosi.org/%20

practitioners and citizens can share and use based on an open approach to gathering common requirements, simple tools to support open information governance, open citizen engagement, an open source record viewer, open source tools to support integration and an open record architecture.

6. City Shared Strategy, Architecture & Commissioning Part of the CaaP capability is the formation of a City Shared ICT Strategy & Commissioning (SSAC) function for public services that looks to define a common shared ICT strategy and technical architecture for below the red line (see Fig 1. below) and commission joint services and solutions within a framework of agreed Design Principles (Appendix 2). This function will also define the roadmaps for convergence to these common services and solutions. Although informal at this stage, the ambition is to formalise the SSAC and increase the resources allocated over time, reducing the equivalent local presence in the respective organisations.

Fig 1

This means that as we collectively converge over time to these joint services and solutions, we will also combine and merge resources across the public service partners to support these technologies and solutions enabling economies of scale. The timeline for convergence to these shared capabilities will be different for the different public services involved and will depend on existing contracts, the state and maturity of existing local capabilities and the robustness of the corresponding joint business cases. Sufficiently compelling cases (taking a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) view) may in some instances expedite movement to these services and solutions ahead of normal local timescales.

Business applications and tools ‘above the line’ e.g. Finance, HR, Asset Management, GIS, BI/Analytics systems are also candidates for a common shared approach over time.

7. Smart CityOur ‘Smart Cities’ strategy recognises the need to adopt a ‘whole city’ approach and initially focusses on delivering the health and wellbeing outcomes. ‘Smart Cities’ is about the smarter use of technology services and data (see the example Smart City Ecosystem schematic below). This is important to the future success of any city and the greater use of joined up open data is vital to support new models of ‘Integrated Public Service Delivery’.


Integrated Local Public Services are fundamental in achieving our city outcomes and breakthrough projects. This is integration on a number of levels – systems, information, human resources, funding, governance etc. and manifests itself in the platform approach.

Advances in communications technology and components mean that connecting devices to the internet on a large scale is now a reality. The ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) will transform the lives of citizens, creating a step-change in the quality and nature of the public services they consume and the way that they access them.

In Leeds the first scalable pilots of this approach (2016) are targeted at the increasing elderly population with multiple health conditions. Sensors that can monitor the environment (temperature, movement etc.) combined with wearable sensors will enable a wide range of information to be gathered. This information will be shared with entitled users such as GP’s, family and health care professionals enabling new models of care to be developed.

In terms of the ‘Digital Economy’, in Leeds (2016) there are over 1350 digital companies, more than 350 software companies and 10,000+ digital experts. This presents significant opportunities to co-produce often ‘citizen led’ innovative solutions through the application of digital technology and ‘open data’ using a prototyping approach. For example, a new ‘Visitor app’ has been created by a company called Altrama. Using data from the Leeds Data Mill (open data platform), they have created a free interactive app which guides visitors around the city. In waste management, the publication of open bin collection data has enabled the co-creation of ‘apps’ that have improved collection and recycling rates. We will encourage these local digital experts to develop solutions in collaboration with citizens so that they can in turn sell them on. This approach will continue to be reinforced over the coming years.


8. Digital Inclusion Over the next 3 years we will deliver a digital inclusion programme that will get 40,000 excluded households (2016) using the internet and also make them proficient in the national five basic digital skills https://www.go-on.co.uk/issue/. Presently, one in five people are unable to do simple things like send a Facebook message, apply for a job online, pay bills with an app, or even check what day the bins are being collected on their local council website. For some, it means not knowing how to communicate with family and friends online which can lead to loneliness, isolation or ill-health.

We will capitalise on the work already undertaken to date to fulfil this ambitious target and drive a city wide digital inclusion strategy. We will look to work with partners with a desire to work with us not only on the delivery of connectivity and solutions but also on strategy, marketing, communications and engagement.

We will work with care providers to build a digital inclusion programme to deliver a step change in digital literacy for all health and social care practitioners across Leeds including the third sector over the next 3 years.

Finally, we will raise the digital literacy of Council and wider city staff so that they are better able to use technology in new ways e.g. mobile and using collaboration capabilities to deliver business outcomes. This will also enable them to be digital advocates to assist the wider public. We will use e-learning channels to help fulfil this and reuse appropriate materials in the public domain e.g. ‘You Tube’ rather than reinvent.

9. Enterprise ArchitectureEnterprise Architecture (EA) is about understanding all the different elements that go to make up the organisation (or enterprise) and how these elements join together. It is the process that interweaves business and IT and there are four fundamental layers – business, information, applications and technology. These layers need to interface seamlessly from top to bottom and each one needs to support and interface with the adjacent layer - they are not independent. Our Design Principles (Appendix 2) will be applied across all the layers and the key corporate principle of ‘simplify, standardise and share’ will particularly apply across all the layers.

In terms of a standard approach to the practical application of EA in LCC and potentially the wider city, we will look to potentially use relevant aspects of the international TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Forum) EA framework.


https://www.go-on.co.uk/issue/

Business - EA starts by defining the business layer using recognised approaches like Business Capability Modelling (BCM). This has recently been adopted by LCC but could equally be extended to the wider city. This defines ‘what we do’, ‘how we do it’ and then ‘what we should be doing’ and ‘how we should be doing it’. It looks to define our business architecture. This work has started (2015/16) with the LCC ‘Core Systems Review’ initiative which is looking to define a future roadmap for the systems (people, process, information and technology) that operate at the core of our organisation and that manage our human resources, money and assets. If this approach is successful then it should be broadened to help define our wider organisational business architectures.

Information – we are continuing to implement our recently agreed Information Strategy (2015), <insert link> which focusses on exploiting the value of information and protecting it from misuse. The capabilities for initial priority relate to governance with a full ‘Information Policy’ refresh scheduled in 2016. We will also introduce new aspects of compliance to reflect developments such as the introduction of the EU Data Protection Regulations, national changes on cyber security and resilience and other developments such as the introduction of the latest PSN (Public Services Network) code of connection.

We will also review and implement aspects of the pending report (2016) of the ‘national data guardians’ and the emphasis now being placed on the 10 basic security steps defined by CESG (the UK government's National Technical Authority for Information Assurance). This work will include the creation of a ‘conceptual data model’ which will help us define what our core and common data assets are with due consideration for the wider city and region. We will use this model in future procurements to articulate the corporate data integration requirements for any new third party systems. This will particularly apply to the corporate master data sets of addresses, organisations, assets and people. This will help avoid the local silos we have created in the past around these datasets. We will also define our Information Reference Architecture which will identify the various components that make up the Information layer.

We will extend our policies around ‘Disclosure’, ‘Risk’, ‘Quality’ and ‘Exploitation’. This aligns with the role our information architecture will need to play in supporting the ‘City as a Platform’ approach and is designed to enable the Council to significantly increase our ability to collaborate with partners.

Applications – the business applications need to be aligned with the business and information layers. There are two pieces of work that have started (2015/16) and need to be sustained over the next few years. The ‘Core Systems Review’ covered in the business architecture layer is the start of this process and subject to success this needs to be broadened beyond human resources, money and assets to cover wider line of business areas e.g. social care, children’s services, highways, planning and potentially wider city functions too. There is also a parallel piece of work to review the business applications across the whole organisation. We now (2016) have much better intelligence about these applications, their purpose, effectiveness, cost, contract expiry dates etc. The next phase is to look at the opportunities for application rationalisation and retirement based on a number of factors e.g. cost, effectiveness, contract expiry and most importantly duplication. There are definitely cases of duplication for historic reasons but the view is that 80/20 (one of our core design principles) should be good enough and therefore common rationalised solutions and corresponding application retirement should be possible. There may be valid cases for the 20% difference being sufficiently compelling to warrant a different solution, however this will be collectively challenged going forward. The Core Systems and the Application Portfolio reviews are connected because the applications underpin the business capabilities and so they need to be undertaken together.


Technology – Page 4 - Fig1., shows the Collaboration/Productivity and Infrastructure layers below the red line. These layers represent the core technologies or components that all users directly or indirectly use e.g. word processing, spreadsheets, collaboration tools, telephony, servers, storage, networks, firewalls etc. The approach to this historically has been for LCC and other public service organisations across the city and region to define their own reference architectures. The reference architecture typically shows the technical components and how they relate to one another. The approach to this however is changing and the City CIO forum and Shared Strategy, Architecture & Commissioning function are looking to determine shared strategies, architectures and commission shared solutions for these components. It is expected that a common shared future state technical architecture will be defined and agreed across Leeds public services during 2016/17.

10. The Digital WorkplaceGartner are of the view that mobile, cloud, social and data converge to define the ‘digital workplace’. These forces prevail in any modern public service or private sector organisation and are not unique to LCC and therefore apply across the city and the ‘city platform’.

Mobile - the digital workplace is a more mobile environment and this is reflected for example in our ongoing ‘Changing the Workplace’ initiative where increasing numbers of staff need to be enabled to work in more flexible ways from multiple locations. In short, ‘work is what we do, not where we go’ which traditionally has been a fixed location. This will affect our choice of devices and the applications operating on those devices. Increasingly these will be public domain cloud based utility/consumer applications or apps.

The reality is though that many of our people still need access to ‘line of business’ applications and these applications are slow to be architected in a way that practically lends them to operate on tablet devices for example that are touchscreen orientated. However there are practical things that can be done on these kinds of lighter and more convenient devices e.g. simple forms based information capture or presentation, and so the intention is to acquire a platform (one size fits many) to facilitate this mode of working that will allow integrated business solutions to be built on top. Wherever possible the approach will be ‘mobile by default’ and so this must be factored into our designs, developments and system procurements. There is more work to do here (2016) and it starts by building momentum on the externally commissioned ‘user profiling’ approach that has been developed but now needs to be deployed. A practical approach to this exercise will create the information we need to inform the devices, applications, processes and people considerations required in the future.

Cloud - Gartner are of the view that cloud services (made available on demand over the Internet from a cloud provider's infrastructure) whether ‘public’ e.g. Amazon, MS Azure, Office 365, Google Apps for Business or ‘private’ e.g. a local public service co-hosted datacentre facility, should be adopted one service at a time. Instead of trying to comprehensively define a strategy that covers all cloud adoption, the focus should be on establishing a set of guiding principles that can be applied to the business outcomes required.

In short, potential cloud services need to be considered one at a time. If our application development team needs a development service then that service and its source (cloud or otherwise) should be based on how well it supports the needs of the development team. If a business area requires a business application then the decision to go to the cloud should be based primarily on the business consumer and not on the application of a blanket technical strategy implemented across the board. The decision needs to be based on a pragmatic approach based


on a ‘whole system’ view of the business, technical and the consumer environment (because traditional enterprise level technology and consumer level technology are increasingly merging).

This may seem like it might create a chaotic environment, but in reality as each service is adopted, how well it meets the business needs and other requirements e.g. total cost of service, contract suitability, service levels, availability, ease of integration etc. can be assessed and ‘lessons learned’ can be applied when adopting the next service. Over time this will allow a set of cloud selection principles and best practice to make future cloud adoption more consistent.

This all said, the Council’s position on the adoption of cloud services is ‘Cloud First’ where it makes good business sense i.e. constitutes sufficient business value (benefits vs cost) and the overall risks have been considered and judged to be acceptable. To assist with this we have developed an initial set of criteria or principles (based on the Gartner approach outlined above - and these will be enhanced over time) that we will apply in each case to inform the decision.

Most of our 300+ applications run in virtual environments in our data centres and therefore could potentially run in due course from public cloud (Infrastructure as a Service - IAAS) environments like Amazon or MS Azure. We continue to work on the premise that we will exploit our existing infrastructure investments for as long as this is sustainable in our own datacentres or potentially in datacentres that will be shared with other public services in the city. There will be break points where we evaluate the public cloud IAAS option if it makes economic and business sense, in particular providing the business risk is judged to be viable. Cost, connectivity, security (IG), integration, funding models and service levels will be the key considerations in making these judgments.

We will still predominantly manage the applications and the supporting infrastructure servers, storage etc. Over time, the applications themselves will be provisioned from the cloud (SAAS) – some of this will be public cloud e.g. Office 365 or Google Applications for Business and others will be ‘line of business applications’ most probably hosted in private clouds.

Social – is digital collaboration within the workplace and beyond into other organisations (including citizens). These organisations will be engaging staff to jointly work on delivering our city outcomes. The effective use of unified communications (collaboration) solutions e.g. MS Skype for Business or other equivalent tools to enable effective collaboration is fundamental. These capabilities feature integrated multi-channel functionality i.e. voice and video with the ability to simultaneously present and control desktops – presentations, joint working on documents etc. This opens up not only opportunities for effective collaboration to enable multi-disciplinary teams working on joint projects but also presents significant opportunities for efficiencies because staff no longer need to travel to meetings.

From an external perspective we will continue to make broader use of social media tools to engage with and communicate with our citizens and gain their insight.

Data – in the modern workplace, decisions and actions will be driven by contextual and accessible data. The smart tools and systems that will allow access to data in context are currently predicated predominantly on the Microsoft analytics suite. Effective open data exchange across systems inside the organisation and across the ‘City Platform’ is a fundamental requirement for the whole system to work effectively. The key to this is a ‘standards’ based approach and effective Open Application Program Interfaces (API’s) and web services. New application procurements will build this Open API requirement in.


The Leeds Open Data strategy <insert link> supports the aspiration to be the best city for the publication of non-personal and non-commercially sensitive ‘Open Data’. The main driver for this approach is to use open data to create new and innovative solutions to help identify and address city problems as well as maximising business potential. The strategy will help to increase open data literacy across the city and will encourage people, such as developers, analysts and arm-chair auditors to unlock the value of open data. The strategy includes as a core principle an expectation that all data will be open by default and will be published in open formats to ensure it is available to the widest range of users and for the widest range of purposes.

11. Microsoft TechnologiesA significant amount of our estate is hosted on Microsoft technologies in line with the strategy we set out in 2008. In September 2016 we will look to sign a new Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft. Because we own perpetual licenses for most of the MS software we can continue to operate it with or without (in some cases) software assurance (depending on the particular software products used). Software assurance in general terms gives us maintenance and support and the rights to upgrade to new product versions. In the case of the MS Office suite we will continue to keep software assurance switched off (we did this in 2013) and we will use the software in the unsupported state. We have the rights still to upgrade the Office suite to v2013 and we will undertake that work in 2016. Operating Office in this way saves LCC approximately £250K annually. When the 2016 EA expires in 2019 we will be obliged to use many of the MS products out of the MS cloud i.e. Office 365/Azure because the “on premise” option will be more expensive. Alternatively we may elect to use similar products from other vendors. So for now we will stay predominantly ‘on premise’ in terms of MS software unless the case for using some of the potentially emerging shared city capabilities e.g. office/collaboration solutions becomes compelling.

There will be a major review point required in September 2017 to plan for what we need to do about the next potential Microsoft agreement in 2019 (this agreement will force cloud utilisation for many of the MS products - commercially prohibitive otherwise) and other core infrastructure components e.g. Windows server farms and our central storage array. This review will be undertaken in the context of the wider city initiatives.

12. Open Source & Open StandardsIn line with government strategy, we will progressively make greater use of open standards, technologies and open source. The Ripple project for example is applying ‘open’ to all aspects of the lifecycle of an integrated digital care record platform that can be used by everyone – practitioners, carers and patients. We will also look to develop software components and integration solutions in ‘open ways’ so that they can be consumed or used by others with minimal cost.

There are currently (2016) community of interest groups developing open platforms e.g. for ‘waste management’ or developing open services e.g. ‘Blue Badge’ that can be utilised and consumed by others. The challenge will be to make these supportable in the longer term and therefore we will be helping to encourage traditional vendors to help support these platforms and services.

The Apperta Foundation is a not-for-profit community interest company supported by NHS England led by clinicians and social care professionals to promote open systems and standards for digital health and social care. They want to make the data, information and knowledge in IT systems open, shareable and computable to facilitate the creation of innovative apps to transform the delivery of health and social care.


13. Business Intelligence & AnalyticsThe Council collects and processes a significant amount of data in the delivery of its services. However from a business intelligence and analytics perspective we very often focus on:

Descriptive Analytics i.e. what has happened, in order to evaluate and monitor our performance against key performance indicators (KPI's) and targets set both locally and by central government.

Diagnostic Analytics i.e. why did it happen, to try and identify areas for improvement.

These types of analytics are important but too often involve a significant amount of manual, inefficient, costly and time-consuming effort to deliver this type of 'reactive' analytics year-on-year. This leaves insufficient time and resource to analyse our data in a more 'proactive' way to generate insights, forecasts, and predictions to help influence the decisions we make. Consequently we are failing to unlock the potential in our data to help shape our future direction.

A key deliverable of the Council's strategy for BI and Analytics will be to use technology to automate the 'reactive' analytics that we are required to undertake. This will result in less time spent extracting and refining (cleaning, combining and transforming) data, and more time analysing it. Our information analysts and data scientists can then focus efforts on the more advanced analytics that will enable us to move towards:

Predictive Analytics i.e. what is likely to happen, using statistical models, trend analysis and forecasting techniques to analyse historic data and use this to predict future business outcomes.

Prescriptive Analytics i.e. what should we do about it, to advise on the best course of action the Council can take to achieve the most desired business outcomes.

To facilitate this new style of advanced analytics we need to utilise technology to make new sources of data quickly accessible to analysts and give them the skills and the tools that they need to make full use of this data. The traditional style of data warehousing currently implemented in many areas of the Council will not alone deliver this agility. These traditional solutions often require a large amount of work up-front to model the data warehouse and to develop automated routines to extract, transform, and load data into the data warehouse.

Whilst the traditional approach should be used to support the 'reactive' analytics we need to do e.g. KPI's, statutory returns, performance reports/dashboards where it is important to manage the flow of data and create a consistent, traceable and auditable 'single version of the truth', the more experimental style of analytics will require a different approach.

We will deploy desktop tools such as Microsoft Power Query add-in for Excel, Microsoft Power BI Desktop to allow analysts in the business areas to connect to a vast array of data sources, both internally and externally, link and model this data and analyse it quickly without the need for major ICT development. This approach is known as 'Self-Service Data Preparation' and will allow individuals within the business to quickly assess the usefulness of data sources and either discard them if they offer no useful insights, continue to use them on an ad-hoc basis, or request that they are brought into the centralised data warehouse in a more automated and managed way for use by other analytics consumers.

We also need to recognise the fact that the data we need to use for advanced analytics will not just be held within the Council. As well as data held within our internal line-of-business applications, we will need to consume, for example external partners data, open data, data generated by social media and data generated by the 'Internet of Things' – sensors etc. Our analytics tools and


platforms should facilitate the open flow of data inside the Council and across the 'City Platform'. Data sharing must be actively encouraged and data should be 'open by default' unless there is a justifiable reason not to make it so.

Whilst we will continue to develop our internal corporate business intelligence platform (based on Microsoft technologies) to deliver our more traditional data warehouse solutions, factors such as the volumes of data we may consume, the significant amounts of storage required, and the raw processing power needed to perform some of the more advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics may make an on premise solution too costly and unsustainable. This may require us to look to cloud-based platforms to support some of this analysis.

We will also look to progressively join up and contribute to the Leeds Data Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA). The vision for LIDA is to enable users of data analytics to come together from multiple disciplines and organisations to generate new insight and outcomes. It is designed to be secure, extendable and sustainable and the ambition is to use this facility to contribute to helping to deliver our city outcomes.

14. IT GovernanceThe LCC IT governance arrangements are mature and have been through a cycle of continuous improvement and refinement over a number of years. From the perspective of running and planning the service, the IT Service’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) is accountable and holds regular meetings to discuss and make decisions about operational and strategic matters. The strategic SLT meetings, separate from the operational meetings, also include the directorate Heads of Information Management & Technology (IM&T) to ensure that directorate plans and perspectives are factored in and considered. These arrangements will sustain for the foreseeable future.

For major business led programs of work that involve significant IT elements there is always senior IT representation on the respective boards. For initiatives ‘below the line’ (Page 4 - Fig 1.) that are owned and sponsored by ICT Services e.g. the IT Essential Services Program (ESP) then ICT Services will chair these boards. These arrangements will sustain for the foreseeable future.

The IT commissioning process in terms of how IT work is notified, justified and approved is also mature and has been through many iterations over the years. These arrangements will also sustain for the foreseeable future.

However there will be an important variation in terms of the governance arrangements as the city moves towards shared IT strategies, architectures and solutions. In the short term (next 2 years) this will be for the elements relating to IT components below the line that lie within the control of the IT departments. In the medium/long term, common business applications will also provide the potential to be commissioned and shared too. A City CIO group for public services has been established (2015) to consider and agree shared IT strategies and architectures and also agree business cases for shared ICT Services and solutions. The LCC CIO is a member of this group. The group is serviced by the City Shared Strategy Architecture and Commissioning (SSAC) function and LCC are heavily involved in the formation and direction of this. Although fairly informal arrangements presently apply in terms of resourcing and funding it is expected that as business cases and projects gather momentum the SSAC will be permanently funded and resourced.


15. Information GovernanceWe will deliver a robust but flexible Information Governance service that takes a ‘risk based’ approach for the Council but also considers the wider city by undertaking a comprehensive review of our Information Governance service and policies. This will focus on the six main functional areas of information governance: Information Security, Records Management, Information Sharing, Data Quality Information Legislation (FOIA/DPA) and Open Data.

We will implement against the ICO’s (Information Commissioners Office) recommendations for good data protection practice. Work is also being undertaken (2016) to understand the volume of electronic data stored across the organisation which in turn will inform a way forward to clean and manage this data and implement a generic out of the box Electronic Document and Records Management capability.

To ensure compliance with the Information Security policy and to meet new threats and risks to our information assets, we will implement an Information Security Management system and ensure resilience and protection against cyber threats. We will make sure that our staff are appropriately trained and understand that information is everybody’s business.

Work has started (2015) and will continue to establish a corporate Information Asset Register and this will be complemented by the appointment of Information Asset Owners who will be accountable for managing those assets and managing the associated risks.

We will establish new ways of working with our city/region partners which will require information to be considered. We will work across the Council to ensure that new statutory requirements and regulations are implemented where required such as the EU Public Sector Information Directive and the pending new General Data Protection Regulation which will replace the existing Data Protection Act 1998.

We will also proactively seek ways of publishing more data and information and we will embed the Council’s Open Data Manifesto, whilst reducing the requirement to conduct information requests by proactively publishing all non-personal and non-business sensitive data.

16. Business EngagementEach LCC Directorate has an Information Management and Technology (IM&T) team working as part of a wider federated corporate model. These teams understand the business vision, direction and operational delivery of their respective business areas. They will continue to work with their strategic business leaders to proactively develop the IM&T strategies and rolling three year plans that will enable what the Directorates require from an ICT perspective to deliver their priority outcomes.

IM&T will continue to be proactive in leading and enabling Directorates to access funds, develop business cases, secure IT resources and business change resources, define policy, establish appropriate governance arrangements and work with service areas to help them deliver change.

IM&T will continue to ensure closer synergies and effective planning with ICT Services colleagues to enable appropriately resourced delivery teams and the best overall utilisation of corporate shared applications and capabilities. In summary IM&T will bring together three critically linked competencies – Information Management, Technology (including Applications management) and Change and these will all work in parallel to deliver best value from our ICT investments.


17. SourcingWe will continue to use a multi-sourcing approach to providing ICT Services for the foreseeable future. This is a blended approach, delivering some services internally using our own staff and IT investments but complementing this where it represents ‘best value’ with third parties to deliver our total needs. For example at the time of writing, our service desk is provided using our own internal staff utilising a service desk system provided by an external provider with the system hosted in their data centre. The general principle is that we will target our increasingly scarce resources at important ‘value added’ services and therefore some elements such as laptop/desktop repair for example will be provided by a third party – this has been the case for some time. The rationale for this is that many suppliers specialise in these kinds of basic utility services, the market is competitive and we can leverage the associated economies of scale the third party brings.

Along with our partners in the wider city and Yorkshire and Humber region we will continue to look for greater efficiencies and seek closer collaboration. The multi-sourcing approach will have increasing importance over time in terms of how we deliver these common shared services together. This will manifest itself in two parts – acquiring external services or providing shared services together using our own resources. Current examples include the joint external procurement and provision of our PSN wide area network (WAN) under the Public Services Framework and the delivery of desktop services by Leeds City Council to the West Yorkshire Joint Services organisation. We will continue to consider what other services can be procured and delivered collaboratively across the partner community or by one or more of the partners on behalf of others where it makes good sense from a ‘best value’ perspective and leverages existing investments.

18. Application Development & SupportThe standard approach to application and system delivery will be to exploit native ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality within our platforms and products rather than to highly customise them to meet specific business needs. This will necessitate an 80/20 approach to meeting business requirements but it will result in less bespoke development, testing and support, so lowering overall costs. It will also free up scarce development resources so that they can be targeted where they will add most value.

Where bespoke development is necessary, the emphasis will be on exposing core business logic as self-contained, re-usable building blocks or components, based on common and where possible open standards. These building blocks will be available for Leeds City Council and our partners in the city to build new services and applications via open APIs (application program interfaces). Hence these will be capable of supporting multiple business processes. Components will be further reused by multiple end user device types including mobile devices, so providing consistent functionality for different user contexts.

By standardising our data structures and focussing on these reusable services we will further facilitate collaborative working with our partners and increase productivity through automation. The drive to reduce the time it takes to build functionality and bring it into production will mean we need to invest in automation as well as increase the need for different teams to work closely together inside and outside the organisation. The City as a Platform approach will help facilitate this.

Many of our development and support resources are utilised in supporting and upgrading LCC’s existing platforms and line of business applications or from time to time implementing major new applications from scratch. This is a significant and important task and will sustain for the duration of this strategy. We will continue to augment our own development and support resources with third parties either on a contract basis or through our supplier framework arrangements. Over time


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisourcing

there may be opportunities to consolidate resources with other city public service partners to develop and support solutions on potential cross cutting city platforms e.g. GIS or BI/Analytics.

There is also the potential for a development centre of excellence across the city where one of the public service partners takes the lead on developing ‘open’ solutions and resources from the other partners contribute.

19. Infrastructure Development & SupportWe will continue our multi-sourced approach for the planning, design and development of new and refreshed IT infrastructure (servers, storage, networks, telephony, firewalls ….etc.). This will continue to be standards based, flexible with interoperable solutions using consolidated technical components and standard configurations. We will see a progressive increase over time in the consumption of varying Cloud based models to provide economies of scale, enhanced availability and automation as well as a reduction in our maintenance overheads. To ensure strategic alignment across the four EA layers we will continue to operate an intelligent client function for infrastructure strategy, design and development.

There will be increased alignment with the wider City partnership agenda whilst in parallel addressing the need to support transformation across LCC in line with our own strategic and service priorities. In addition there will be a requirement for our Service Delivery and Support Services functions to adapt to more Cloud based solutions, supplier and contract management.

The Essential Services Programme (ESP) will sustain for the foreseeable future. This annual capital funded programme was established to ensure our core infrastructure (below the line) is refreshed and kept up to date. Increasingly this will focus more funding and resources on shared city initiatives and we will contribute our share towards this. These shared initiatives will increasingly be utility/cloud based services and solutions.

In terms of data centres, it is recognised that across public services in Leeds there are too many, and so this presents a significant opportunity for consolidation, sharing and collective cost savings. In the short to medium term (2016 – 2017) this will be pursued. Whatever the conclusion, for the foreseeable future we will continue to manage the infrastructure (patching, upgrades etc.) and the applications hosted on this infrastructure. However, progressively more services will be hosted in the cloud and so the datacentre footprint will reduce over time. Because of the nature of some of the public services partners involved, there will also be a requirement for any consolidated data centre capabilities to be 24/7.

20. Providing Services to Others


Outstanding (10/04/2016)

Providing services to others & bi-modal

Appendices

Incorporate IM&T Views & Comments


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