To be able to create better outcomes for communities, protect vulnerable people and improve the lives of individuals and families, local authorities need to be able connect and visualise data. With joined-up data, employees can see the ‘bigger picture’ and make better-informed decisions.
However, there can be many factors that prevent local authorities from making better use of the data they have. These can range from legal hurdles and siloed working to rigid, legacy IT infrastructures.
Through our Single View software, we’ve helped local authorities to overcome these challenges. It brings people, processes and technology together to combine data from multiple sources and presents it in intuitive real-time dashboards, charts and maps. By having this information at the touch of a button, local authority teams can easily understand and share information across departments and agencies, which enables deeper collaboration and creates better outcomes.
Providing support to families faster
The Supporting Families team at Milton Keynes City Council has been using Single View since 2015 to seamlessly share education, social care and youth data. Prior to this, they relied on disparate spreadsheets and case management systems, which meant it could take two weeks or more to get a full picture of a family. Now, with customisable, flexible reporting and connected datasets, Single View has cut down this investigation time to just half a day.
In 2020, Milton Keynes Council put 1,600 families through their family support programme. By the end of 2022, this figure reached over 2,300 and counting. In their words this is “all down to having the right information at the click of a button.”
Making data security a priority
Providing local services and supporting citizens generates a huge amount of personal data that needs to be safeguarded and protected. When integrating data from other systems, Single View takes permissions from the source systems, which means there’s no risk of the data becoming compromised or corrupted, and additional permissions can be applied to prevent sensitive data from being seen by front-end teams. The inbuilt auditing tool also enables leaders to track who has been accessing client records, which can be crucial in the wake of a safeguarding issue.
Empowering teams with self-service reporting
To be able to understand what your data is telling you, it’s important that teams can easily create, edit and share reports. With Single View, teams can self-serve and filter information from multiple sources, and the intuitive data dashboards can help them to spot trends and pick-up on any issues that require escalation or early intervention. This is enhanced by features such as the relationship wheel, which highlights how citizens are connected to one another, while the built-in client mapping system is particularly helpful for social care case workers to find addresses, local transport links and school routes.
Food poverty teams in Plymouth have been using ‘heat maps’ within Singe View to pinpoint vulnerable citizens and highlight available foodbanks, participant schools and supermarkets to combat food poverty more effectively. You can read about how we’re helping Plymouth City Council and its partners tackle child poverty using data and innovative technology here.
Our Single View solution can be deployed in as little as four weeks – enabling you to develop your organisation’s data literacy and transform citizens’ lives for the better:
