Newham council to install new centralised database
admin 27 July 2012
Local authority hopes to transform service for children and young people by bringing information from a dozen different systems into a single database
Newham council is aiming to improve outcomes for children and young people, and make savings by installing a new centralised case management system.
The local authority, which has one of the highest populations of under-25s in England as well as areas of high dependency, has opted to implement technology firm CACI 's ChildView software. The technology will bring together different electronic systems used by different areas, such as school admissions and early intervention teams, into a single database.
Commenting on the difficulties of having 12 different systems in place, Brian Taylor, project manager at the local authority, told Government Computing that the set-up had caused a lot of duplication.
"One team were recording information on one system, and then another team would use a completely different system to maybe record the same information, or maybe slightly different data, so there was a lot of duplication of process," he said. "We were having to maintain core information about children across all 12 systems. Some of the systems weren't very developed ۉ'¬ they were quite old and didn't have a lot of functionality."
As part of a wider project at the council to re-align services with children's outcomes, and focus more on prevention rather than cure, Newham signed a seven-year deal with CACI, worth £400,000, with an extension option of three years.
"The basis of procuring the ChildView system was to allow us to decommission our 12 computer systems that are all just sat there not talking to each other, and to get people that aren't using computer systems at the moment and are still using paper files onto a computer system. We also wanted to try and link in with our partners the police, the health, and the schools," said Taylor.
He acknowledges that the 12-month implementation process is going to be challenging, as it will eventually involve 300-400 people from multiple agencies accessing the system, who will be given restricted access based on their roles. But he believes the positives will outweigh the negatives.
"The challenge is that there are so many different people working on this. What we're hoping is that ChildView will allow us to link all of our systems together. So we will know that a child in our social care system is the same as a child in the police system, and we will be able to cross-match between these systems and present it in a single view to these people working in our triage service," said Taylor.
"That means they're not having to log-in to lots of different systems to get information, and can actually be presented with all of the key information about that child in one go."
Newham estimates that it will save around £50,000 on licences alone, excluding hardware and other support arrangements.
According to Taylor, the council has procured a system to meet its service requirements, and not the other way around as some organisations have done in the past.
"We're not having to go back to suppliers all the time saying, 'Can you add a new field in here?'
or, 'Can you change the workflow?' we can actually do that ourselves. The way that the Childview system is delivered gives us the flexibility to manage and control the system ourselves," he said.
The council hopes to finish the project by next April, and has started by targeting its decommissioned systems first, which includes moving all of the information onto ChildView. It hopes this will eliminate the costs associated with the legacy systems.
Its second phase of implementation will involve moving people that are not using any system at all onto the new platform. Taylor said that this includes staff, such as education psychologists, some of whom in the past have preferred using paper files to carry out their work. The council hopes the value of the information will persuade them to use the new software.
The third and final part of the installation will be the migration of other systems, so that for example, child care providers that are part of the council's 'early years' service can access the system and update information.
"We're trying to enable people to do things for themselves, so the schools can log on and do things for themselves, like referrals, for example. It reduces the amount of telephone calls we have and also means we are getting better information because we can standardise it," said Taylor.
He estimates that other agencies will be on board by Christmas, but explained that there is no point sharing information until there is enough on the new system for it to be useful.
Taylor added: "Once we're providing information that's valuable to the police and to health and schools, then we will open it up. Rather than them phoning us up, we can just say, 'Log onto ChildView and see the information for yourselves.'"