Andrew Taylor, Information Architect at City of York Council (CYC), tells us how a Single Citizen View underpins services improvement across Local Government, and gives his advice for successful digital transformation in the Public Sector.
Tell us a bit about your team’s role at the City of York Council.
Andrew: Our team manages the flow of data and information at City of York Council, which includes performance indicators, and evidence-based decision making. We’re responsible for the operational and management reporting that allows staff from all levels to see what’s going on with their data.
We’re heavily involved in ensuring the council meets transparency legislation around public data, supporting with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and running our open data platform that allows the public to see our data.
We’re also responsible for the statutory returns, which have evolved over the last few years from aggregated returns to individual item level return, dealing with data on individual clients, customers, and citizens.
We’re always stressing the importance of a solid data foundation to use data strategically, and you’ve created that foundation at City of York Council with ClearCore. Can you tell us about some of the practical applications of ClearCore, and how you’ve used it to achieve your business objectives?
Andrew: Data quality and consistency is a constant topic in all our projects. It’s only with good quality data that you can really establish and rely on those customer connections between systems. ClearCore helps us by identifying poor quality or inconsistent data – it’s like magnet for pulling out all those data items at a customer level that you’d want to address.
In our Crisis and Emergency Planning process the ClearCore MDM is key, as it joins together data for our most vulnerable customers across the City. As a city with two rivers, and a changing environment, we’re facing flooding with increasing regularity. When a flooding event is predicted, and because we have data on our most vulnerable customers matched, we know which customers are in the flood regions, who will be affected, and whether they’re vulnerable; this helps us target support appropriately and in a timely way ahead of the flooding event occurring.
The Crisis and Emergency Planning process was crucial for our response to the COVID pandemic. In the early days of the pandemic, central Government was sending us updated daily lists of newly registered vulnerable people within our region, and we were able to rapidly run those lists against our existing view of vulnerable citizens. We were able to identify those who weren’t engaged with our services who might require support and prioritise contact with them. Hours and hours of manually matching the government data with our own information was reduced to rapid real time automation with ClearCore, so we could get on with supporting vulnerable people; this would have been impossible without ClearCore; we just wouldn’t have had the resource to manage that whole process manually.
ClearCore also underpins our staff warning register, that records our interactions with customers and highlights where an interaction could pose a risk to other employees. For instance, is there a dangerous dog on the premises, or has the customer been violent previously; this helps in planning for future visits, so we can adequately protect our employees. The staff warning register, our case management system, and our social care products are all linked through ClearCore, so everyone is armed with all the information they need to safely provide the best service.
The biggest application of ClearCore though is underpinning our Single Customer View product. It takes the single customer view that ClearCore creates, with its connections between customers, and uses it to power interdepartmental data sharing. So, for instance, social workers can access education data or housing data on their clients seamlessly within one product. We couldn’t do this without ClearCore – the single view is the connection between it all that has helped us have all customers connected in real time across our different systems and departments.
Having a consolidated single customer view has replaced the need for lots of data transfers between different departments. Instead of one-to-one sharing requests every time information is needed, it’s one-to-many instant access to relevant and appropriate data to better protect citizens. All the data sharing agreements are contained in an auditable, self-serve product, where people can access all the information they need, when they need it.
What’s next for how you want to use ClearCore across the City of York Council?
Andrew: We’ve got several system replacements or changes coming up in the next year or two, such as our CRM and HR products, so ClearCore will be crucial to cleanse systems and keep all systems interconnected during the data migrations.
And we’ve begun talking with you about using ClearCore for two more uses cases that may have the potential to identify fraud.
Also, we’re pragmatic in our focus and the quality of our data is always key. One of the beauties of ClearCore is its use of the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) for consistent address matching – an area where data quality can easily slip. Using the LLPG is unusual across the suppliers in the market, which is why we love ClearCore; it can handle the UPRNs from the LLPG which is the gold standard for address data.
In an ideal world, if money, resource, and time were no object, how would you use ClearCore (our Single View master data management technology)?
Andrew: Oh, there’s so much we’d love to use ClearCore to deliver. We use it for our internal customer-level master data management solution, our Citizen Single View. But we’ve had ambitions for a while now to do an internal version for our employees, that would unlock the ability to do so many things that would improve productivity and reduce costs and create joined up, digital governance. For instance, we could manage user accounts more effectively, by smoothly and quickly changing account access when people move roles or leave the organisation. We’d have a more accurate understanding of licensing requirements, so we’d be able to save money by only purchasing the number of licenses we need, and cancelling in a timely way when a user leaves.
And, perhaps the biggest advantage would be linking up our HR system with other systems, such as our absence management system, and our Microsoft Active Directory. Having them interconnected would automate and expediate the standard manual process that happens when someone leaves the organisation and allow us to immediately loop in security considerations.
We’ve been working together for quite a few years now, but what made you choose Infoshare to begin with?
Andrew: We recognised the need for Enterprise level Master Data Management within our core architecture and we brought you in to deliver this. Against competitors in the market, Infoshare scored the highest and really stood out as a company we could work with and trust.
That only improved once we started working together, because then we got to work with your incredible support and delivery teams. Terry, Matthew are great in the support term, and Chris in particular was really impressive – his knowledge of the software meant that we could quickly learn from him and develop how we used ClearCore ourselves. That’s helped us really get the most out of the software and it’s why we’ve been able to embed ClearCore into so many of the projects we do: because you helped us understand it quickly and thoroughly.
What advice would you have for someone who wants to use the data and is maybe at the early stages of their data transformation or digital transformation journey?
Andrew: The key for us in York, has been about creating firm foundations. Firstly, a strong team; consolidating data roles and staff from across different directorates and departments helped us bring together experience and knowledge in a way that hadn’t been done before. With everyone on the same team, we were then able to work towards the same goals consistently, and it makes achieving those goals much easier.
We’ve worked hard to keep that team together; over the past 10 years we’ve been lucky to have a low turnover of staff. This is largely down to the leadership and vision of Ian Cunningham – Head of Business Intelligence – who has created a culture that offers opportunities for people to grow and progress and keeps everyone working towards the same mission statement.
Secondly, it’s about creating a firm foundation of consistent technology. We chose to adopt Enterprise level technology and stick with it. If we had chosen to go down the reporting services route and then in a few years changed to Tableau, then in another few years changed to PowerBI, we’d have been chasing our tails. Creating that solid foundation of data architecture means that we can create products consistently and