Delivering a Modernised Data Platform and Technical Delivery Services for Solihull MBC

Background

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council partnered with leading digital transformation provider and data and AI specialist, ANS, to implement a modern data platform in Microsoft Azure and mature its data and analytics capabilities. This will enable Solihull to better harness the power of data and insights, and provide them with evidence-based decision making, identification of emerging trends and optimised service delivery to meet the needs of citizens.

Solihull Council, situated in the West Midlands, employs around 3,000 people, and provides a wide range of services including education, housing, social services, planning and environmental services amongst many more.

The Challenge

Solihull Council, like many other local authorities, faces challenges around demographic shifts, budgets and rising citizen expectations, and is striving to deliver more sustainable services to tackle this. This all formed part of the council’s 2022-2027 digital strategy, which highlighted the need for an investment into systems, processes and people to deliver the outcomes in the data strategy.

Solihull had a variety of data sources and a good ability to work with data – a significant part of the Council’s data activities centre around social care reporting. A critical missing piece that was preventing them from more advanced data analysis was the lack of a centralised corporate data warehouse. It made it harder to integrate data, especially in urgent situations where quick access was crucial. It also meant manual effort was needed for data integration and this resulted in individuals within the organisation building their own data solutions, meaning Solihull had no full picture of what data was being extracted from systems, how that data was being stored and managed, what conclusions were being drawn from it, and how much inconsistency and error may be being introduced.

One of the key challenges in introducing better technology to combat this was not having skills within the latest Microsoft technologies to deliver against the outcomes the Council was focused on achieving.

The Solution

Following a data navigator assessment, ANS understood the technical, operational, and business requirements for implementing a modernised data architecture and operating model at the Council. ANS deployed Synapse as a new, modern data platform for the council and then supported the existing team through the Data Centre of Excellence Service (CoE).

The Data CoE provided the Council with mature data and AI skillsets to work alongside the in-house team and support them in delivering their first use case in Children’s Social Care. The ANS team worked closely with Solihull to ensure that technical knowledge transfer was completed throughout the term of the contract, and the internal team now feels competent enough with the new technologies to continue their journey in-house.

The Future

Solihull’s Head of Corporate Policy, Insight and Improvement (Sarah Barnes) said: “The desire to gain further insight from the data held within a council to improve the delivery of Children’s Social Care is a common driver we see across the sector. Local Authorities are typically ‘data-rich but insight-poor’, and Solihull will now be able to go on to leverage their data to achieve their objectives in their 2022-2027 digital strategy. We have really valued the ANS service, their support has been critical to give us the skills and confidence to deliver future valuable use cases.”