Celebrating our customers’ success at the iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards 2022
Low-code helps councils unravel legacy spaghetti to supercharge digital transformation, with reduced total cost of ownership.
The evening of Wednesday 9th March saw the iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards 2022 take place. An opportunity to celebrate and share the most innovative practice in transforming local public services.
This year we are delighted to give a round of applause to three of our customers who were recognised for outstanding achievements at the awards – Cumbria County Council, South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council and Tewkesbury Borough Council – for their public sector transformation.
We take a look at each of the council’s success and how it can help other councils ‘rinse and repeat’ in their path to digital success.
South Hams District Council & West Devon Borough Council Gold Winner for the Best Transformation Team
This award recognises a team that has made an exceptional contribution and long-term positive impact in their organisation through digital transformation.
South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council took Gold for continuously innovating and pushing the boundaries of local public service deployment.
And the return on investment at South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council is impressive. Within 18 months they had transformed 90 processes including abandoned vehicles, business grants, hardship relief, planning enquiries and test and trace. Easy to use self-service has encouraged 75% of customers to self-serve. And they delivered +£450,000 savings over 12 months by freeing teams from costly broken processes and siloed data.
At every step, they work alongside stakeholders to recognise their needs and find new ways to eliminate hidden waste, working with and around legacy applications. This improves productivity and adds to daily effectiveness. They’ve been able to balance work across staff resources to reduce stress and improve job satisfaction.
And customers have a better experience. They can give feedback after every process, which allows the team to make fast process updates. Customer satisfaction continues to trend upwards, in January 2022 it measured 4.5 out of 5 stars.
South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council’s 2022 roadmap has big plans for back-office transformation – so watch this space. You can read more here.
Despite having a much smaller team, we are seeing rapid transformation in about a third of the time with the use of low-code, enabling us to push processes out at about six times the speed of the previous system.
Jim Davis, Customer Improvement Manager, South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council
Cumbria County Council Gold Winner for the Customer Focus Award
This team is known for its ground-breaking work. Last year they won a Gold award for the Best Transformation Team and this year they took a Gold award for Customer Focus. In 2020 they delivered the UK’s first integrated end-to-end Test and Trace system with a 96% contact success rate, amongst other COVID solutions. They continue with to set the benchmark for customer centred design of digitally enabled services in the county and on a national scale. They’ve broken away from the status quo of complex systems typical of areas such as Highways and Social Care Services. This massive improvement was achieved with no additional software licence costs. The in-house team deliver these results as part of daily work. And, importantly, are creating customer centred services that work well for the council too!
The impact and savings are impressive. Highways enquiries on fault reporting has saved in excess of 20 hours of management time per week, equating to 28 person weeks per year. Time back that can be spent on higher value tasks.
Their innovative solution “Targeted Short Breaks Activities” matches SEND child needs with available council funded support. Parents of SEND children self-serve to request short break activities. The end-to-end service uses online registration to facilitate activity booking and provides updates as needed.
Continuous improvement has become part of the team’s DNA at Cumbria. We want to provide digital services that are so good that people choose to use them.
Kate Hurr, Digital Manager, Cumbria County Council
You can read more on Cumbria County Council’s story here.
Tewkesbury Borough Council Bronze Winner for the Best Transformation Team
The senior executive and members at this small council (300th of 354) believe that this Business Transformation Team has had a profoundly positive impact on service management and delivery. At a Local Government Association meeting, the team was referred to as ‘flying the digital flag for district councils’. Receiving this Bronze award is a nod to that.
They have broken free of dysfunctional and unconnected systems, driving transformation with a flexible and innovative approach underpinned by the Liberty Platform.
Their savings are impressive. As a fully remote team, they’ve simplified systems and reduced officer admin time, resulting in quicker customer response times. They have significantly improved council finances – their actions in the first 18-months saved over £100,000 net of investment. They are also increasing the council’s capacity to drive service income including a 35% revenue growth (>£300k) from garden waste over 3 years.
Not only are we helping to create savings for the council, but we’re also simplifying back-office processes too.
Joe Cole, Lead Digital Officer, Tewkesbury Borough Council
You can read more on Tewkesbury Borough Council’s story here.
The key ingredients for success
The teams at South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council, Tewkesbury Borough Council and Cumbria County Council have worked tirelessly to transform services. What makes their digital journey so successful? They all understand that becoming a truly digital council requires digital leadership and investment in the right platforms and tools on which to build digital success.
Like lots of other councils, they discovered a fast way to build business apps for services, deliver more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional application implementations and, importantly, beat legacy gridlock to digitalise their council. Together low-code and our Citizen Hub Framework enable councils to build, share and collaborate. Tailored especially for local government, the framework brings all the tools to automate and digitalise critical processes, rapidly.
The good news is that councils who use our low-code are implementing these automated applications and processes 5 – 10 times faster than councils who don’t use low-code.
The business intelligence capability in the Liberty Platform means councils can monitor pinch points and bottlenecks providing performance data. And teams can then act quickly and adapt as required providing a virtuous cycle of customer service improvement
Whether you are driving digital already or you’ve not yet started. Or simply there’s something that’s holding you back, if you would like to see successes similar to South Hams District Council and West Devon Borough Council, Cumbria County Council and Tewkesbury Borough Council then get in touch or watch a webinar about Councils Driving Digital to learn more.
Well done to all the winners of the iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards 2022!
