Digital Innovation and ICT

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.

 

I attended the first Local Government Innovation Hackathon hosted by Government Digital Service (GDS) and the 

My background

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.

As co-chair of the Netcall Liberty platform for Local Government User Group, I'm thrilled to share a review of our first in-person Netcall User Group event held right here in Cumberland Council's Carlisle Civic Centre, on Wednesday 26th February. 

Local authorities must manage numerous notifications and documents efficiently and accurately. One of the significant challenges we faced was handling building control competent person scheme notifications submitted as XML attachments via email. To streamline this process, we utilised Blue Prism, our in-house Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool. Our solution parses these XML attachments and splits them into separate XML files for the three sovereign councils within our organisation, ensuring each notification is accurately distributed.