How low-code helps local authorities
deal with the budget crunch

00:00:02:10 – 00:00:20:07
Speaker 1
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this session, which is about how low code can help councils deal with the budget crunch. Today we’re going to cover some introductions in a second. Will tell you a little bit about why local authorities trust net coal. And then we’ll focus on the challenges facing local governments, which many of you here will already be well aware of.

00:00:20:08 – 00:00:43:14
Speaker 1
Then we’ll talk about how local can help local authorities to innovate and how low code can help local authorities to cut costs at a time when both of those things are really, really important. And then hopefully we’ll have some time at the end for questions in the chat. So, some introductions first. My name is Mark Gannon and I am director of Client Solutions for the Public Sector here at Nat Cole.

00:00:43:15 – 00:01:11:13
Speaker 1
Prior to joining that call about a year ago, I worked for Sheffield City Council as CIO and Director of Transformation, and I’ve had a long career in local government for over 20 years, much of which has been frustration at legacy suppliers unable to help me deliver the transformation I needed. So, it’s great for me to be working for Nat call a company who are helping councils day in, day out overcome those legacy barriers Richard.

00:01:12:13 – 00:01:36:00
Speaker 2
Thanks, Mark. Hello, I’m Richard Boddington. So, I’m an account director here at NEC Co and I’ve been working with local government and water public sector for 4 to 23 years now. I think so all of the time on the vendor side. But certainly, the first half of the career, very much on the, you know, as Mark talked about, of typical vendor applications, but then for the last ten, 15 years has been moving into the more transformative side of things.

00:01:36:00 – 00:01:46:12
Speaker 2
So, you know, we can be talking about like today hyper automation, AI driven technologies that help to take councils out of the kind of the legacy Malaysia currently in.

00:01:46:21 – 00:02:04:15
Speaker 1
Place, Richard. So, we’ll do a little bit know about who Nat Cole is. We won’t do too much of that because we want to get into the meat of the conversation, which is really about how our products are helping councils to innovate, save costs and as Richard says, get over the legacy malaise that many are finding themselves in.

00:02:05:04 – 00:02:07:12
Speaker 1
So, Richard.

00:02:07:12 – 00:02:24:03
Speaker 2
Yes, so just very briefly on who we are, really. So, I hope most of the people in this certainly have heard of us. But we’ve got, again, 20 plus years working with local authorities. And that’s not you know, that’s across a broad range of local authorities from your county council’s 30 unitary duty districts and your citizen assemblies, like I show.

00:02:24:03 – 00:02:46:00
Speaker 2
And it’s quite a significant footprint. You know, 100 plus 24 councils work within that core, but across the wider public sector as well. We’re working with, I think about 75% of NHS trusts as well as experience across the private sector and housing associations. So, a really broad range of experience helping organizations transform how they deliver services internally and for that and for their customers.

00:02:46:09 – 00:03:01:18
Speaker 2
And I think probably the bottom left number is the most important one from our perspective. And 99% see, that’s from our own clients. And you know, when you’ve been around for 20 odd years, it’s easy to get complacent about how you how you engage with your clients. And I think that’s a real testament to how we continue to support our clients.

00:03:02:19 – 00:03:31:04
Speaker 2
So just briefly a bit about what we were going to be focusing today on the Liberty Craig, of things on the left-hand side there. But liberty is a platform is not just that technology been there. So as a number of products that sit within liberty creates and as a platform, it’s about engaging, not only engaging your citizens in that in that front office, but also how that front office joins to the back office and allows you to digitize the end to end of a service rather than just kind of the posh front door if you excuse it.

00:03:31:04 – 00:03:56:07
Speaker 2
So, on the right-hand side you’ve got liberty, converse and liberty connect which are all really nice. It’s an engagement. So, the converse being that the omni channel contact centre tools allow you your sits, your customer service agents to engage with their technology when they’re engaging with their citizens and liberty connect being the omnichannel capability that allows you to engage your citizens through you know, whether it’s webchat, whether it’s through WhatsApp, whether it’s through Facebook Messenger, bringing over those channels to one.

00:03:56:07 – 00:04:15:24
Speaker 2
So, you know, engagement in independent silos and your contacts and our agents have got I’ve got all of the information available to them when they’re engaging your citizens. And that obviously joined seamlessly in with Liberty Crate and Liberty API. So, API being robotic process automation software that allows you to interact with your business applications, you train the software and it does that.

00:04:15:24 – 00:04:34:08
Speaker 2
What I thought was kind of hot up for you and Liberty creates as well, which is what we’re going to be spending most of our time talking about now, about that low code capability that allows you to build your own applications. And, you know, at the moment when we talk some of the things that we’re doing now, we’re on mode of our licensing, some of the really kind of relevant topics right now.

00:04:34:14 – 00:04:43:14
Speaker 2
You have to really spin out those applications and interact with and integrate with other of the other technologies. So, you know, operating silos to solve some real challenging business challenges.

00:04:43:17 – 00:05:04:12
Speaker 1
Thanks, Richard. And obviously, we’ll hear in a second some specific examples from some of our customers and how they’re applying, particularly the liberty created to drive some real tangible improvements. So, we’ll come on to that second. But before we do that, we thought it was worth just talking about the challenges so that this is a bit of context testing really.

00:05:04:20 – 00:05:37:05
Speaker 1
Many of you will be already well aware of these challenges and actually will be living this day and night. Obviously, budgets and staffing. So, between what was it, 1999 and 2001, the number of employees in local government fell from 2.74 million to just around 2 million. And a massive loss of staffing numbers from the sector now has an obvious impact on just the number of people who are available to help service citizen’s needs.

00:05:37:16 – 00:06:00:15
Speaker 1
But also, you know, often you’re losing really, really talented people to other sectors, and particularly during COVID where remote and agile working became a real possibility. I know that the sector has really struggled with the loss of really talented and bright employees, but equally budgets, as we know, started with austerity. Some people probably would agree that austerity hasn’t actually finished.

00:06:00:15 – 00:06:25:15
Speaker 1
And it’s a new normal in a way. But, you know, budgets have fallen since 2010 by 37%. If you look at core grants from central government, which is a massive reduction. And obviously during that same period, citizen expectations haven’t decreased and nor should they. Citizens rightly expect the same kinds of services and the same quality of services that they get in their kind of everyday lives from.

00:06:25:19 – 00:06:50:08
Speaker 1
It’s a tired cliché, but the kind of Amazon style services that just work, easy to use, well delivered, simple, accessible. And those expectations are similarly put-upon local authorities. But then it’s just no longer possible, I think, to just do more with less. Councils are now faced with having to do much more, with much less.

00:06:50:08 – 00:07:12:15
Speaker 1
And that’s a real challenge. And, you know, I know from having worked in the sector and from colleagues who still work there, that they are absolutely focused on helping to give citizens a good experience. But that’s a real struggle at the minute when budgets and staffing numbers are just seem like they are. A big area is around data and insights and you know how local authorities can use that data?

00:07:12:16 – 00:07:44:19
Speaker 1
No, the big problem for local authorities is that data is often trapped in those legacy, siloed applications, particularly the big chunky applications, whether it’s social care, revenues in benefits, housing, etc., that all local authorities have and are probably need delivered by three or four suppliers and not marketplace. And often those suppliers, unfortunately are not particularly open or helpful in allowing or enabling those local authorities to extract data from those systems.

00:07:44:22 – 00:08:17:21
Speaker 1
So, you know, we think that often that data is being held hostage in legacy applications, but you can derive good quality citizen experiences, good quality digital citizen experiences if you don’t have access to the data and you can’t move that data seamlessly around between different applications and, you know, local authorities have, I don’t know, anywhere between 509 hundred applications from big applications like the ones I’ve just mentioned to, you know, spreadsheets, databases, running single things.

00:08:17:21 – 00:08:44:24
Speaker 1
But a really important trend this whole lot together with having access to data that smoothly flows across those processes, you get really clunky citizen services and incredibly high costs for trying to get all that stuff together. And that’s why we think legacy data on an unresponsive supplier market is stifling digital transformation and innovation. And it’s costing local government a lot of money.

00:08:45:09 – 00:09:14:20
Speaker 1
And we don’t think that’s right. We don’t think that’s a sustainable position. And we think that local authorities deserve better. So, from our perspective, this is the kind of key point for us. Legacy technology is stifling digital transformation. Data is trapped in silos. Integration is hard, costly, sometimes not available at all. Councils have to rely on those legacy vendors to do those integrations for them at their pace, not the pace that the council wants.

00:09:15:07 – 00:09:43:02
Speaker 1
And this just takes a long time and it’s really, really slow and that’s why we’ve developed a manifesto for local government, which is about putting the power of digital transformation back into the hands of local authorities and enabling their digital autonomy. And we really, really believe that this is an important way that we as a supplier can help the sector to continue to innovate and save costs at a really crucial time in local government.

00:09:43:06 – 00:10:03:03
Speaker 1
The Web address is here. Please go and have a look and have a read of the manifesto for local government. We hope and think that it will resonate with you if you work in local government and are trying to navigate that legacy. Spaghetti we know our customers are trying to do every day. So that’s a little bit about the context and kind of what we’re trying to do as a supplier.

00:10:03:05 – 00:10:19:20
Speaker 1
This is the kind of meat of the session, really. So, Richard and I are going to going to walk through some examples. We’ve got multiple examples for all of these. But because of the time we’ve got for this session, we’re going to focus in on three examples on each of the next two slides. So, this this slide is around.

00:10:19:21 – 00:10:40:17
Speaker 1
How does low code help local authorities to innovate? And, you know, at a time when budgets are reducing staff numbers are reducing, it’s really, really difficult for those who own the budgets, who are looking at the global figures within those local authorities to think, actually we need to reduce spending in some of these areas, we need to cut costs in I.T.

00:10:40:17 – 00:11:02:19
Speaker 1
We need to stop investing in, you know, modern technology and just kind of try and sweat the assets we’ve got. And it’s quite an enticing proposition, I think. But actually, you know, our perspective is we think that’s the wrong thing to do and actually you don’t need to make a choice between innovating and saving money because we think you can innovate and save money at the same time.

00:11:02:19 – 00:11:11:02
Speaker 1
We’re going to tell you, hey, so I’m going to have hundreds of Richard who’s going to talk through the first of these and give you some examples to Mark.

00:11:11:02 – 00:11:23:19
Speaker 2
So, yes, the first one, there’s the reduced cost of sleep. The next slide is where we go into much more detail about how the low code side of things can help you reduce costs. So, I won’t say too much here, but one of the things I think it’s probably relevant that the one we picked up is about cost of failure.

00:11:24:09 – 00:11:46:17
Speaker 2
One of the things that often prevents innovation and transformation is, is that fear of failure because it’s usually a big rip out and replace or it’s a big project. It’s, you know, say so revolution was actually the low code and the ability to spin up things to fail fast. If you have to learn that lesson very quickly to be able to just kind of strike out those options is a really important walk to a life.

00:11:46:21 – 00:11:59:03
Speaker 2
Enable you to innovate and give you the confidence to do innovative things because it’s not just more about an evolution or big spin up quick MVP rather than just jumping in with both. So that’s a really important point.

00:11:59:10 – 00:12:18:03
Speaker 1
Just sorry, just on that point, Richard. So that’s a really, really good point. We’ve got to mention Croydon on the next slide, but that’s a good example of what they did. So, they had a very large Microsoft Dynamics implementation, which obviously they were in the process of trying to reduce and replace. Now you couldn’t just do that in one go.

00:12:18:12 – 00:12:36:01
Speaker 1
So, the approach that they took was to incrementally build your solution up and reduce that solution. So over time they were seeing the benefits of the cost reduction without having to have the risk and the and the concerns about the kind of one hit replacement, the rip and replace. So, yeah, it isn’t an either or.

00:12:36:02 – 00:12:44:07
Speaker 1
You can slowly decommission existing infrastructure and existing applications which de-risk it, but you can see the cost benefit as well.

00:12:44:22 – 00:13:10:05
Speaker 2
And in fact, you’ve been you mentioned earlier about maintaining the life of legacy applications isn’t necessarily the way to go is I think some in some time if the plan is to decommission them, it’s not about, you know, keep, you know, really squeezing the sweat and the asset because it’s not the end band. Back to you. But if you can actually maintain that for a little bit longer and then decommissioning at the right time, it’s not an all or nothing approach, which is a really important capability and, and kind of that kicks into the second point around foster development.

00:13:10:05 – 00:13:39:20
Speaker 2
You know, low code is kind of what it says on the table. It’s about enabling you and your teams to spin up new applications significantly quicker. So, you know, we’ve got South Hams in there as a great example and, you know, some lovely numbers out of them. You know, they spun the first application up in a week, you know, taking a week to build an application and get that out to the services is a massive improvement in where things where you know, they talk about and I’ve been able to transform three times quicker build up processes six times the speed.

00:13:39:20 – 00:13:56:15
Speaker 2
So, you know, there’s lots of numbers there but you know testament to them how many applications are building out. But it’s not just about what they’re building themselves internally. Also, what they can share from other authorities within the apps. Yes. So, to be able to, again, do things a lot quicker and also, you know, you mentioned the point around losing really skilled resources.

00:13:56:23 – 00:14:17:24
Speaker 2
You know, you’re not necessarily asking for top net developers with ten years’ experience. This is that it’s low code. It allows you to scale up internal resources and engage with those internal teams. So again, enable you to develop things much quicker, which again is a nice segue into that increased collaboration. The collaboration isn’t just about external collaboration, but also internal collaboration.

00:14:17:24 – 00:14:40:21
Speaker 2
When you are in you, you know, as the next CIO, when you’re looking to engage with your, you know, your customers, your internal customers, it’s not just keeping the lights on, it’s changing, engaging them in solving that business problems. And the very nature of low code enables you to engage with that. You know, sometimes that shadow, I’d say those skills that sit within the business areas that could be pulled into the project rather than left outside of it.

00:14:41:04 – 00:15:11:21
Speaker 2
So, engage internally and again be able to spin up things pretty quickly so that challenges in that way, but also engage externally. And I’ve mentioned the share already where 500 plus applications are sat just ready to use. So, it’s not it’s not 100 councils doing things 100 times in 100 different ways. You know, you’re able to share what somebody else has already done, make your own tweaks again, because you own the capability, you own the, you know, the autonomy to be able to do that.

00:15:12:05 – 00:15:15:18
Speaker 2
But let’s not start from scratch. Let’s there’s not that kind of collegial approach.

00:15:16:02 – 00:15:36:24
Speaker 1
Yeah, not collaboration. I mean, I’m a you know, in my look, government career I was I was always searching for that kind of opportunity to not reinvent the wheel and see what other countries have done and local governments getting a lot better at that. But, you know, there’s still there’s still quite a lot of kind of, you know, reinventing the wheel.

00:15:37:07 – 00:16:07:10
Speaker 1
We’re slightly different. So, we need a specific thing for us. But actually, in a lot of instances, you know, whether it’s sort of like websites, you know, local government websites or local government websites, which is why, you know, the local gov Drupal initiative is so powerful. I think there are up to 30 plus councils know how to use and using the blogs, you know, open source web platform that we’re in the process of, of helping to integrate our platform to serve out greater value for our customers.

00:16:07:10 – 00:16:31:08
Speaker 1
But that reduces the cost for the sector. And it’s just it’s great to be able to share knowledge with, with people in other councils and use the work that they’ve done. And our customers are absolutely phenomenal at this. We have an incredibly vibrant user group who do show Intel’s share developments that they’ve done, put them in the app, share for others to download.

00:16:31:08 – 00:16:46:02
Speaker 1
And the key thing you know is that that’s all free for any of our customers. So, we’re not, you know, we don’t charge for people to download from the app show because, you know, we want them to see the benefits of using our platform and the work that others have developed.

00:16:46:22 – 00:17:06:01
Speaker 2
It’s a godsend from my perspective, because pretty much every conversation is met with that Will, where else are you doing it? Who else is doing this? Which is then followed by it? Yeah, but we’re not like them. And actually, you can. It’s easy yet. They’ve already done that. Here you go. But you know, that’s fine because you’ve got the ability to change that as well.

00:17:06:01 – 00:17:08:17
Speaker 2
So, it’s, it’s, it’s the best of both worlds from my perspective.

00:17:08:17 – 00:17:30:16
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So then obviously streamline processes is a, is a massive area. I mean, Low-Code enables you to build processes exactly how you want them and to take feedback from users and citizens in real time and to change and improve those processes in a way that you just can’t do with off the shelf products or even hand coded products.

00:17:30:16 – 00:17:51:00
Speaker 1
You know, you can make changes to local solutions instantaneously. I was talking to one of our customers recently who was talking about how they were sat down with service, talking about a process, and the service wanted it to be slightly different and the services expectation was that, well, they would have to go away and it would take weeks to come back and our customers just changed it there.

00:17:51:00 – 00:18:14:15
Speaker 1
And then for them and, you know, they couldn’t, they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Tewkesbury Council’s a really good example on this one, where Tewkesbury have just been nominated actually for several awards around their low code implementation, and they’ve done amazing stuff around streamlining that process. Is one of the areas that they focused on was with services in redesigning, recycling and waste services.

00:18:15:06 – 00:18:41:22
Speaker 1
So, they’ve been able to make the user experience the citizen experience much better. So instead of having lots of interventions requiring manual interventions from staff and linking to other applications and other providers, that is now a seamless, streamlined process that has saved, I think, somewhere in the region of 100 K for Tewkesbury, net of the investment of the platform, which is the key thing.

00:18:42:05 – 00:19:03:21
Speaker 1
So, the platform, single license and fee, you can build as much as you want. You can develop as many applications as you want. You can have as many users as you want. Once you pay back the investment on that, anything you build over and above that, any improvements you make, any applications that you decommission, that’s just net savings on top of your investment.

00:19:03:21 – 00:19:26:07
Speaker 1
But yeah. Tewkesbury on our website there is a case study which is, which is well worth a look. Increased citizen engagement is another area. And this is one where, again, because we can unleash data from, from all of those legacy applications and create those streamlined processes and make changes really, really quickly. We can take feedback from citizens and councils are doing this.

00:19:26:07 – 00:19:51:12
Speaker 1
So, you know, they are designing services with citizens actually making changes. The that just increase the engagement because we are able to deploy those services on mobile devices and replicate them in our contact centre environment, then it just massively creates a kind of omni channel approach, which is really important because not everybody wants to, you know, do self-service online.

00:19:51:21 – 00:20:18:07
Speaker 1
Some people like to ring up, so people like to do it in person. Our platform allows that same experience across all aspects of contact, and that’s really crucial. I think, you know, there are still a number of people who are digitally excluded. So, having a platform that designs for everybody and creates inclusion and doesn’t exclude people from that, that process is really, really fundamental.

00:20:18:20 – 00:20:38:24
Speaker 2
Is absolutely fundamental because local authorities are the one organization that kind of doesn’t want more customers in a in a perverse kind of way, unlike other organizations do. But the challenge is you have to be able to engage across multiple channels. You can’t just switch off a channel to your citizens. So how do you make sure that regardless and not I’ll do it, you know, I’ll do something online.

00:20:38:24 – 00:20:58:21
Speaker 2
If it’s not urgent. If it’s urgent, I want to speak to someone really quickly, but I expect my person I speak to have exactly the same information available to them than if I had just submitted an email of our full being up to. You know, your point earlier on, joining up the data within those sites is fundamental to how services delivered, because citizens don’t see the council as lots of different departments I see as the council.

00:20:59:08 – 00:21:03:12
Speaker 2
So, we need to be able to present the face of it to the citizen.

00:21:03:15 – 00:21:17:10
Speaker 1
Exactly. And, and often, you know, people don’t like using online processes because they’re often not very good and they’re very difficult to navigate and they’re very clunky. And you think people just give up because the process is not good.

00:21:17:10 – 00:21:35:19
Speaker 2
So, working with working with a well-known broadband provider, I can testify to that. And being online is seen as a way to arm’s length to your clients, not to solve a problem. For them, it is a cheaper solution. So actually, if you want people to use those which are cheaper solution, you need to make it. You need to make positive outcomes in delivering those positive outcomes.

00:21:35:19 – 00:22:23:04
Speaker 1
And the last point on here is, is around better data management. So, I’ve mentioned quite a few times the importance of data of what local authorities do and need to do, and that’s both from the perspective of service management but also in terms of planning and insights. You know, the amount of data that is contained within local authority systems is absolutely vast and actually using that data in a smarter way to identify trends, to identify hotspots, to identify, you know, predictive analytics, to help make better informed decisions, whether that’s around social care or whether that’s the range, you know, income management, where we’ve got a solution which helps housing providers, including local authority, housing providers

00:22:23:13 – 00:22:42:19
Speaker 1
to understand the risk of non-payment of rent, for example, and use that data to drive a conversation, which is which isn’t about sending the bailiffs in, but is more of a have you got a problem? Do you need assistance? Well, let’s focus on helping the people who need the help in a cost of living crisis, in an energy cost crisis.

00:22:43:03 – 00:23:10:02
Speaker 1
So, using data in lots of different ways is important. And there’s a great example, Cumbria County Council, who are one of our long-term users and do amazing stuff. They did some brilliant during the pandemic. They were one of the first, I think probably the first council in the country to develop a test and trace application using our platform, which actually was more accurate than the nationally developed platform and featured on the Andrew Marr Show.

00:23:10:02 – 00:23:48:21
Speaker 1
It was amazing. And because of the up share that we mentioned, that capability was shared across all of our customer base and anybody could use it. It wanted to use it, but the one I’ll mention is it’s called Viper and it’s a vulnerable person’s application. So, Cumbria, you might be aware, sometimes prone to floods because obviously select district and one of the problems that local authorities in the area have is where there is an emergency event, whether it’s flooding or something else, is identifying vulnerable people in the area as quickly as possible and getting support to them as quickly as possible or removing them from the area if it’s really bad incident.

00:23:49:06 – 00:24:16:02
Speaker 1
So what Cumbria have done using our platform is built this very, very simple application actually which takes data feeds from adult social care, fire and rescue, health and other kinds of services, aggregates that data in a in a totally GDPR anonymized way and then helps identify where a property contains a vulnerable individual or there is a vulnerable household.

00:24:16:13 – 00:24:40:12
Speaker 1
And then in an emergency scenario, can I put a map with a list of properties that the emergency services or social care or the council need to get to really, really quickly? And it’s a really, really smart solution that they’ve developed themselves using our platform, pulling data from lots of different sources, and they’ve just entered into the local digital funds to try and to grow that further.

00:24:40:24 – 00:24:42:12
Speaker 1
But that’s it’s a brilliant example.

00:24:43:12 – 00:24:57:06
Speaker 2
And great example of not just with council specific engaging with other agencies as well. So, it’s not just about Cumbria’s business case and our ally. How do we deliver best services for citizens and vulnerable by engaging with other agencies as well?

00:24:57:15 – 00:25:22:07
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So, you’ll see the, you know, using our Low-Code platform and our other tools. There are lots of ways that councils can, you know, continue to innovate even when budgets are difficult, even when staff numbers are reducing and you can’t find the kind of skilled employees that you think you need. But the other side of that is it also helps to cut costs.

00:25:22:07 – 00:25:29:19
Speaker 1
And we’ll just go through a similar process of explaining how that happens. So again, Richard, you want to start?

00:25:30:04 – 00:25:52:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. Yes. And I mean, we’ve touched on quite a little bit in the previous slide around reduced development costs, and that’s kind of one of the foundations of low code, ultimately enabling you to do things much more quickly without necessarily having the, you know, again, the dot net developers with ten years’ experience, you cost a lot of money and are not being poached at such an increasing rate by the private sector.

00:25:52:18 – 00:26:12:01
Speaker 2
So, engage with your internal resources, scale up your internal resources to reduce that cost of development. And you mentioned Croydon earlier as a really good example of that. You know, that delivers the locations really quickly to apps in ten days. I think I started with, which is really rapid. But your point earlier again about continue delivery of an ROI?

00:26:12:06 – 00:26:43:24
Speaker 2
No, there’s a single license fee for unlimited users. I mean it’s limited applications, so you’re not penalised by doing more, which you often are. And one of the applications, you know, the code has replaced within their CRM licensing erm system and that’s saving them a significant amount of money and the more they build, the more they’re going to save and then there’s going to be no penalty for that as they start external services to, to increasing users in the community but also that are delivering more efficient services, the freeing internal resources from the delivery of those services.

00:26:43:24 – 00:27:02:23
Speaker 2
You know, if you can automate, digitize those processes, then you’re then you’re saving money from the set, from your internal resources, not just from the development costs. In that way, improve collaboration is again, what we’ve touched on, but it’s a really important one as well. You know, we’re very proud of how we engage with our with our clients and how our clients, more importantly, engage with each other.

00:27:02:24 – 00:27:24:09
Speaker 2
They’re often, you know, if they’re one of the user groups recently that was a that was almost a working group with, I think, four or five different authorities that got together to solve a specific challenge that they were all facing. And that wasn’t us that was engaged, that was organizing that, that was them doing themselves. So, we’ve got really good community that helps inform each other and inform us of what they’re doing and then feeds into that app share.

00:27:24:12 – 00:27:41:04
Speaker 2
You know, if got hundred plus now, next year will be 200 plus. So, it’s again, it’s about continually adding value over time rather than kind of the traditional legacy technology model where actually the longer you have a technology, it becomes a sunk investment in that way.

00:27:41:12 – 00:28:03:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, Yeah. If you if you compare that with, you know, your legacy vendors, you know, the number of times where piece of legislation changed and vendor X would come to me as you know, director of I.T and say, Oh, well we need to charge you for this piece of development. Well, they’d be charging every council in the country for that piece of development, even though they were only doing it once.

00:28:03:14 – 00:28:27:12
Speaker 1
So, you know, we just say that’s wrong, we think that’s a poor approach to, to business the up share if something changes and Council X produces a component or a module not immediately available to any other councils that wants it free of charge, we think that’s a better way to build customer loyalty, to be honest, which is why we have a 99% satisfaction rating.

00:28:27:20 – 00:28:51:09
Speaker 2
And then talking legacy vendors, you know, the integrations with legacy applications, again coming from a long time ago, I would make Mark from Alexi vendor. You know I’ve been that you know I’ve been in that situation where actually from a vendor’s perspective it was a significant opportunity in integration. You know, you know, you had a line of business application and you know, and the journey doesn’t sit with a single system and, you know, it maps across multiple systems.

00:28:51:15 – 00:29:10:18
Speaker 2
So that was always an opportunity and a really great example you took what was I. I really complicate Katie fragmented disjointed waste process which I will share a slide the other day it was it was all over the place it was again legacy spaghetti. It was a great it was a great fries and redesign that from scratch.

00:29:11:06 – 00:29:43:02
Speaker 2
But you know, taking out the you can’t replace all of those other technologies but with the low co capability you’re able to build in your own integrations, you know you’re not beholden to a vendor for those integrations. You can do it yourself. So, they were able to build in integrations to the guest tiers, the contractor systems. So again, not just internal out to an external contractor into the payment systems to really streamline that process and, and the before and after these really starts to be how where you go from a London tube map to a really simple linear process with all of those integrations built out for them.

00:29:43:08 – 00:29:52:12
Speaker 2
But that does not improve the service for the citizens, but it’s reducing the cost for Harborough because they’re able to deliver services much more quickly without people getting involved to them.

00:29:52:16 – 00:30:16:11
Speaker 1
And you know, we have a massive library of integrations. We are approaches. We try and play nicely with anybody who wants to integrate with our product and where a console comes to us and says we want to integrate with this product, we’ve probably already got it. We have a slide that we use when we talk to customers, which is a list of all of the kind of key local government integration we’ve already achieved.

00:30:16:11 – 00:30:41:10
Speaker 1
And again, they’re all they’re all available to any customers who need them. And that’s not always the case with legacy vendors. And you and your point, Richard, about people being able to build their own integrations. You know, you can actually build your own APIs within our product if a vendor really won’t let you integrate. Our customers are using RPA as a pseudo API to basically integrate with some of those more unfriendly legacy applications.

00:30:41:20 – 00:31:00:06
Speaker 2
And there does seem to be a new wave of vendors now as well. I mean, I mentioned in my was mentioned the RSA stuff where actually other vendors are, are actively looking to engage about how can we join up our services. You know, we’ve got and as you may have, but understanding that that’s not just that doesn’t help the solution.

00:31:00:06 – 00:31:06:18
Speaker 2
It becomes a silo. So how can we work with other people within sector to create solutions that are much more seamless and much more joined up?

00:31:06:20 – 00:31:32:19
Speaker 1
Yeah, I it is a good example actually, because, you know, you could very quickly get this scenario if you’ve got multiple devices from multiple vendors and you’re using all of their gateways and platforms, you’re having to manage multiple applications with data spread across those multiple applications, whereas. All right, the capability and because it’s agnostic of device or manufacturer, they all come into one place and you can manage that in a single place.

00:31:32:19 – 00:32:14:13
Speaker 1
All of those data feeds. But yeah, I think integrations is is crucial to enabling councils to cut costs and get greater value from existing investments that they’ve made. But also create new ways of driving value. So another area that’s really important and I think we touched on this a little bit earlier around employees and local governments and you know, is it’s difficult to find some of the kind of, you know, really, really hard to finds high skilled technical people because, as Richard says, they they’re often, you know, snapped up by some vendors actually who do take those people who’ve been trained up to use the systems.

00:32:14:13 – 00:32:48:05
Speaker 1
And then they take that take them over the hands of local government, who then stuck with the problem of how to fight to fill that gap. So that’s a big area where Low-Code can help. But the other aspect of that is just user adoption within councils. You know, anybody who’s worked in the council has used multiple line of business applications, knows how frustrating that can be, particularly if you’re trying to serve customers and citizens and trying to navigate really horribly designed, really clunky, really systems that don’t integrate very well make it hard for you as an employee.

00:32:48:05 – 00:33:10:09
Speaker 1
You’re not going to be, you know, particularly if you work in a contact centre where there’s a high, you know, high touchpoint with citizen engagement. That can be really frustrating for you as a as an employee, we find that our customers are finding that their employees love the solutions that they are building on our platform. There are some quotes on our website which go and have a look, particularly Cumbria.

00:33:10:09 – 00:33:36:01
Speaker 1
There’s a great one where one of the service leaders said This platform is brilliant, is the actual quote, because they’re used to stuff that isn’t brilliant actually. So improved user adoption, if you can get people to use your applications, that saves you money because you’re not then having to work with workarounds and failure, demand and calls to your I.T service desk that you can’t, you know, deal with because there’s so much of it.

00:33:36:01 – 00:33:54:06
Speaker 2
So yeah it’s a good little use case for RPA as well joining up RPA. I mean tell us once these great example every council has a tell us once policy but they never tell us once you know five, 678, nine, ten times maybe. And actually, you know skinning up applications that your offices are engaging with, but they might be five, six, seven, eight others that need to be updated.

00:33:54:06 – 00:34:09:06
Speaker 2
With an API you can do. The RPA doesn’t give a monkey’s that. It has to navigate through 15 different screens to put an X in a field. You don’t use anymore. But semantically failed and actually joining up those technologies to create that seamless service, really to improve that user adoption and massive cost saving and the time saving.

00:34:09:13 – 00:34:32:00
Speaker 1
Another area that I think is pretty enormous, actually, in terms of its ability to save costs for local authorities is application rationalization. For as long as I worked in local government, the call was always, yeah, we should rationalize applications. And that’s the kind of the magic bullet that will save us money. But the problem there was the word the solutions available to enable that.

00:34:32:01 – 00:34:47:03
Speaker 1
So, you were going through elongated processes of trying to procure a single platform that could meet the needs of four or five platforms and when you’ve got users who have particular needs from those platforms or those applications, getting a single application to meet all those needs was often really difficult.

00:34:47:03 – 00:34:50:08
Speaker 2
So low as low common denominator, isn’t it?

00:34:50:08 – 00:35:17:07
Speaker 1
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. So, so low code genuinely is providing a route for councils to be able to meet those needs. And Newcastle City Council, one of our customers has got a really ambitious business case around this which actually pays for their investment again in low code. So great return on investment, but also saves them money over the period and reduces complexity because they’re reducing their application count.

00:35:17:19 – 00:35:43:20
Speaker 1
They’re better joined up when they’re built at low codes, they’re, you know, integrated much better because of our integration capability. So yeah, I’m really excited to see what Newcastle can do with that. But we’re talking to several councils currently around how, how they can use our platform to kind of rationalise their estates. You know, most councils have, I know, anywhere between 307 hundred applications.

00:35:43:20 – 00:36:04:21
Speaker 1
I mean I’ve worked with councils where, where I manage more than that, trying to make sense of that, you know, alone is difficult. But then when you cost it all up and all the cost, the maintenance and management and failure, demand and integration and upgrades and etc., etc., etc., if you can rationalize that onto a platform where you can build what you actually need, the cost savings are potentially phenomenal there.

00:36:05:01 – 00:36:32:14
Speaker 1
And kind of leads into the last point really, which is just IT dependence. If you can use a platform that allows internal staff to be able to develop things themselves, it just takes pressure off the it service. So, the demands on the I.T service can reduce, you can more quickly deliver things and then obviously in partnership with I.T reducing that application bloat that a lot of authorities have, it just creates a massive opportunity.

00:36:33:13 – 00:36:58:14
Speaker 1
So, there are a number of ways that we know that low codes can help local authorities to cut costs. These are not, you know, esoteric suggestions. These are real ways that our customers right now are helping to save costs for their local authority use in our platform. So, in summary, what that means is we know that councils are under pressure.

00:36:58:14 – 00:37:19:16
Speaker 1
We’ve talked about that. In terms of the context, I think we all accept that like Sea-Tac is holding them back, stopping them being able to innovate, stopping them from getting the data that they need, those systems, stopping them from integrating and creating those really lovely, seamless end to end digital transformations and really stopping them achieving what they want to achieve.

00:37:19:16 – 00:37:43:07
Speaker 1
I certainly experienced that when I was a CIO in local government. Low code can really help councils to innovate. Hopefully we’ve shown you enough examples there to demonstrate that a local can really help councils to cut costs. And again, we know that that’s happening because we are talking to customers every day who are telling us what money, not potential money or efficiency type savings, actual cost savings every single day.

00:37:43:07 – 00:38:04:16
Speaker 1
So, we think it isn’t a should we innovate or should we save money? We think using our platform you can do both. So hopefully that resonated with you. Hopefully you find that a useful introduction, not call a no code if you’ve not heard of us before. If you want to find out more, then we’d love to hear from you.

00:38:04:17 – 00:38:36:03
Speaker 1
Please get in touch either at Hello@Netcall.com or if you want to speak to myself or Richard directly. Our email address is there. So, from Richard, and I’d just like to say thanks for your attention and hopefully we’ll be able to address some questions in the chat. Thank you very much. Thank.