What types of insight do councils have to work with?

noelito
3 min readFeb 9, 2021

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4. How do councils currently deliver insight?

Councils broadly carry out the following insight tasks:

  • Get a better understanding of the people that use their services
  • Plan how to deliver outcomes they’re responsible for
  • Make decisions on how to allocate resources
  • Report and benchmark their performance to regulators and peers
  • Engage with communities and stakeholders
  • Evaluate how well they’ve delivered outcomes
  • Redesign or transform how they work
  • Develop policy on future demand

5. What works well?

In terms of best practices:

Governance:

  • Ensure there is a single senior sponsor to be accountable for the intelligence
  • Project manager clarifies accountabilities and expectations with a clear plan and structure
  • Agree accountabilities between different providers of data you need to produce the intelligence

Relationships

  • Build trust with people who need the intelligence and whose data you need
  • Help people define their requirements for the intelligence
  • Develop an awareness of who’s an intelligence expert on a particular issue or service

Resources

  • Use common data & insight models & standards to be able to share intelligence
  • Access and take part in networks with peers working on intelligence in your area
  • Speak to people you need or provide you with data before scoping new systems

Expertise

  • Understand the importance of data quality and how to assure it
  • Test and learn how to use relevant research systems and models
  • Develop specialist expertise over commissioning it

Why do people want to collaborate in sharing data or insight?

  • Understand how to contribute to strategic priorities and outcomes
  • Value the importance of their work or service area to the overall organisation
  • Ensure their work connects with other complementary research or intelligence
  • Identify what other information people have to get a better understanding of the issue
  • Share how other people can use intelligence they’ve provided to help their service
  • Enable isolated colleagues to get support from peers and be aware of strategic priorities
  • Share and access specialist expertise to carry out intelligence to anticipate and predict demand
  • Apply their expertise and knowledge to other service areas, in particular strategic priorities

What are the barriers in the way to people collaborating?

  • Lack of time to contribute to projects outside of their current intelligence responsibilities
  • Lack of need to access other people’s data or expertise to help deliver their outcomes
  • Reluctance of people to share data they’ve got with others due to lack of trust or security permissions
  • Reluctance of people to accept being quality assured on an area of their work
  • Lack of strategic projects to contribute loses people’s interest in it
  • Risk of overlap between insight activities, or people commissioning intelligence that has already been done before

How can insight support services to tackle issue from start to finish?

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noelito

Head of Policy Design, Scrutiny & Partnerships @newhamlondon #localgov Co-founder of #systemschange & #servicedesign progs. inspired by @cescaalbanese