Dynamics Matters Podcast Ep 45: Is County Council collaboration key to success?

Welcome everyone to episode 45 of the HSO Dynamics Matters podcast.

Your regular sonic dive into the world of Microsoft technology related matters and much more besides.

I’m your host Michael Lonnon and in this episode, I travelled up to what I thought was going to be beautiful tractor country in Suffolk County, only to learn that actually there’s more to Suffolk than fields and farms.

This was revealed to me during a chat with Suffolk County Council Deputy Chief Exec Chris Bally, who told me all about some of the wonderfully innovative ways they’re using technology to create efficiencies and make millions of pounds worth of savings in service delivery.

So, grab a brew, sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Michael Lonnon

How long have you been at Suffolk for then Chris?

Chris Bally

I’ve been at Suffolk coming up for 14 years but doing the current job of deputy chief exec for the last four years.

Michael Lonnon

What keeps you there? What do you like about it? Fourteen years is quite a stint.

Chris Bally

I’m a Suffolk boy that’s the first thing to say, I love the county it’s a great place to live with lots going on. I think that there is a bit of an image of Suffolk that is a bit sleepy and it’s a bit rural and that kind of thing and it’s not really like that. It’s got a lot of industry, a lot of opportunities for people, huge tech sector and BT’s Astral Park is in Suffolk zone and Astro Park is their global research base. We’re not talking just about Openreach the internet provider we’re talking about global research and is about approaching I think probably 150 companies now on the park, and Local Government companies that work alongside BT on all sorts of connectivity research. It’s a great place to live, great place to work, the people in Suffolk are lovely, and obviously it’s the home to the best football team Ipswich Town.

Michael Lonnon

Is there much collaboration that goes on between the council and the 150 organisations that you’ve highlighted there?

Chris Bally

We try to certainly. Collaboration is absolutely central I think to a lot of the work we do in Suffolk, we do quite a lot of collaboration with our partners like district councils or the NHS or police or voluntary sector businesses. Certainly, between the tech sector on the park and ourselves, we try and bring them public sector challenges and say, look we’re looking for a solution to this how can we work together to do that. We’ve done some really good stuff with local companies around the response to Corona virus and some stuff that we were doing around artificial intelligence at the moment for home to school transport, there’s a whole range of things that we’ve done with BT and with some of the companies on the park.

Michael Lonnon

Why is it important to be able to collaborate with other councils in the tech sector in particular?

Chris Bally

People bring different perspectives, and, this is a personal theory here, and something that I’ve observed, and I think is true. If you bring subject matter experts together from different disciplines, I think that is the recipe for innovation. If you take the stuff we’ve done on home to school transport, we’ve got some really good transport planners, they are absolutely passionate about transport. They understand bus routes, they know where low bridges are in Suffolk, they know all about moving people around Suffolk and we worked with the optimization team at Astral Park, and we said: ‘so how can we use IT to optimise transport routes? Could you build an algorithm that knows where the low bridges are?’ The subject matter expert from transport planners said that they were not sure that could be done, and the optimizers are, ‘I’m not really sure it works for transport’. But put them in a room together and somebody starts talking, then they go, ‘oh, you can do that, could you do this?’, and the output was a visualisation tool, which showed the transport routes. The first time we put our director of children’s services in a room with the visualisation tool the first thing he said was, ‘why does that line go from there to there?’, and somebody said, well, that’s because you’re taking a child from there to there and he said, ‘why?’ And immediately, you’re into a completely different discussion. So again, I think that’s why collaboration is so important.

Michael Lonnon

That’s a great example. When we tend to think about solving challenges, the challenges in our minds in the technology world tend to be really, really big, but actually, smaller, simpler problems, like the one you have just described there by the bus route is actually more pertinent.

Chris Bally

Yes, and bear in mind we spent over 20 million pounds a year getting children to school.

Michael Lonnon

Wow! Really? That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that statistic.

Chris Bally

Every county council in England will probably spend something similar. So, if you can come up with a way that saves 10% of your cost by optimising your routes that’s a 2-million-pound saving and I can say that I know that the optimization tool alone has allowed our transport planners to present routes to the market and say, could you provide that route for us and it has saved us money.

Michael Lonnon

Wow, that’s amazing. That is fantastic innovation. What about sharing with other councils?

Chris Bally

We’ve talked about sharing it with councils. We’ve been in conversation, particularly with our neighboring council Norfolk, because it would be quite good to test the product with another county council just to see whether they see the same value in it as we’ve seen.

Michael Lonnon

Do you think that’s quite important, that different councils have come up with different types of initiatives like this, using advanced technology, artificial intelligence in this particular case, do you think it’s important to share the wisdom that’s been learned so other councils could perhaps learn, save, and benefit?

Chris Bally

Definitely. It has to be. There is no doubt that different parts of the UK have different challenges and different approaches to things, but for County Council’s, for example, all of us are governed by the same statutory requirements and we’ll be delivering the same services in a slightly different way. The more we know about how we are doing in our places and are able to share a bit of understanding about that, the better we can be. For example, through the digital network we’ve got with county councils, we have formed a couple of groups where we’re all using the same supplier and we’re designing maybe a web form and so one council will say, ‘I’m going to do a web form around application processes for blue badges’ and so the rest of us can say, okay we’re not going to do that, then but what we’re going to do is design a form for free school meals. And in the end, we design one form each and then share it. We might need to adapt for local circumstances but basically, if you’re applying for a blue parking badge, or disabled parking badge, it’s pretty much the same process wherever you do it.

Michael Lonnon

So, taking the learnings from each thing, even if it’s not specifically solving a challenge within the council. In your opinion, do you think councils are generally pretty good at collaboration or do you think they are still a bit too siloed in their thinking.

Chris Bally

I still think we’re too siloed in our thinking. That’s not necessarily a product of not wanting to, its sometimes a product of time and capacity and the fact that the focus for Suffolk will be serving the residents of Suffolk, the focus for Oxfordshire will be servicing the residents of Oxfordshire, Somerset the same. Sometimes it is not through lack of desire, it’s just capacity, time, and resources.

Michael Lonnon

This is going to sound like an odd question, but do you think covid has helped improve collaboration between councils? Has it necessitated the need to collaborate with other councils and solve similar challenges?

Chris Bally

It’s probably accelerated it and again, it sounds really odd, doesn’t it when you think about this and when you go back to a pre covid world and you think about how the county councils may have operated, the kind of collaboration that we do, we probably would have all met in London. We probably would have all gone into a room at the LGA in London and been there for a day and done some stuff, whereas now teams zoom, whatever platform you use, you can get online with somebody really quickly, and you share experiences. I think it’s accelerated that collaboration and learning definitely.

Michael Lonnon

There’s a lot of noise at the moment about the topic of devolution. Do you think it’s the right thing that more power is given, or more decision-making capabilities is given to the Councils away from central government? Do you think that’s a positive change as we move forward away from covid?

Chris Bally

Definitely 100%. Suffolk was one of the nine areas that was announced as a potential pilot, and we were negotiating a devolution deal in 2016, with the last round. And I definitely think that, again, this is about unblocking barriers and powers but also, it’s not just about giving stuff from central government to local government, it’s about building different relationships between central government and local government. It might not be that we want a specific power from central government, but we want central government around the table with us when we have a conversation. If I give you a practical example, in Suffolk, we are coastal, we have a huge amount of wind farm technology off the coast we’re also in the process of going through an inquiry around the site of a nuclear power station and the potential next nuclear build. That means there’s a huge amount of energy, electricity coming through Suffolk, but we have to deal individually, with government departments, the suppliers, whether that’s Scottish Power renewables, whether that’s EDF, whether that’s National Grid. We don’t want to change who makes the decisions, or where the power sits, but we quite like a power to convene all of those people in the room to say all this is happening in the same place in the same residence so if you’re planning to build a substation, or you’re planning to build pylons, it doesn’t really matter it’s the same residence so why are we dealing with them individually for each planning application? Why aren’t we treating Suffolk as a place, so that’s the kind of thing that we want to talk to government about.

Michael Lonnon

How important is technology to the decisions that you’ll be making as part of the devolution pilot or perhaps as part of coming out of covid and using technology that you’ve put in place now to help serve citizens? Is technology an important factor in your future?

Chris Bally

Absolutely, fundamentally important. It underpins everything we do. We had a committee meeting yesterday where they were talking about the future of IT and our systems, and it was a much more technology-based discussion. One of the learnings is, I’d probably say that pre covid, when you used to talk about IT systems in local government, somebody would always come up with, ‘we have to remember, not everybody is online, and not everybody accesses IT’, and that’s still true but, now, there’s so much more done online as a result of the pandemic, that if you’re not connected, and you’re not accessing systems online, you’re more likely to be excluded in some way from a service, whether that’s booking a doctor’s appointment and having an online consultation, whether that’s being able to pay your bills online, there’s a whole range of things now that people have to be online to be able to do and the most efficiently and the most effectively and allow them to get on with their life. So, I think you’re more likely to be excluded if you can’t get online, which is why technology is so important. It’s really important that we design intuitive technology where we can and not be too clunky. We know sometimes we don’t get it right but certainly it’s on our minds.

Michael Lonnon

It’s about making it easy, making it accessible, bringing people in and not yet so that people are less excluded because of that.

Summary
COVID forced councils to adopt the latest collaboration technology, such as Microsoft Teams, in order to maintain service as usual within the unusual. But the challenge of adoption has been achieved in remarkably quick time, and then used to accelerate innovation more broadly.

And this momentum is continuing, as shown by Suffolk County Council in their use of Artificial Intelligence to find efficiencies that are saving them millions. And it’s activities like this, done in collaboration with technology partners and other councils, that may well see those in local government become leaders in the of technology. Which is quite some turnaround.

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