When people visit a website, they usually only see the finished product. What they don't see is the work that happens behind the scenes to make it accessible, responsive, on-brand and ready for launch.
In this Digital Show and Tell, I walked the team through how we delivered Cumberland Council's new Tour de France subsite in an extremely short timeframe. We were asked on a Friday to create a minimum viable product (MVP) by the following Thursday, giving us less than a week to design, build and launch something that residents, visitors and event organisers could use.
One of the less visible challenges of Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) was what to do about customer telephony and contact centres.
On paper, consolidating contact centres into a single operation might sound like the obvious answer. In reality, it wasn't a day one requirement, and the operational services themselves hadn't yet been harmonised. Different teams were still working in different ways, supporting different processes, and in some cases delivering services differently across the legacy authorities.
In our latest Intelligent Automation team Show and Tell, Ian walked through something most teams will recognise straight away, the reality of managing a shared inbox. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s critical, and when it doesn’t work well it slows everything else down.
What we wanted to show wasn’t a concept or a future state. This is something practical we’ve been building and testing: a simple, repeatable way to use AI to help teams triage and route emails without adding more complexity.
How we brought content, service design and housing expertise together to create a simpler, more joined-up experience for residents seeking housing support.
In the last few days I’ve seen some encouraging posts about collaboration and sharing across local government, and Will Callaghan who is an expert in this area is pulling together a register of 'Software Partnerships'. The latest addition is VIPER, which has prompted a bit of reflection.
Over the last two days, the Digital team has hosted nine T Level students from Carlisle College, marking the end of their first week on placement with us. The students are studying Digital Support Services: with Cyber Security, and earlier in the week they spent time with colleagues across our Cyber and Information Security, and our Infrastructure teams, gaining first-hand experience of the operational side of council technology.
Over the past few months, we've been working closely with Waste Services to deliver a series of digital solutions that are making a big impact on the customer journey whilst improving efficiency across the service. Here's a look at our journey so far.
I have spent the past few years working mainly with public sector organisations across the UK. This involved supporting local government teams in digital transformation. Most commonly in content design, creating accessible services, and generally helping to improve how departments use digital tools and data.
