The public sector has masses of data and almost as many conflicts of interest, the press exacerbates these problems, hounding a mixture of genuine mistakes and stupid errors, such as having laptops stolen or left on trains with confidential information in them, with neither security protection nor encryption to prevent open information.

It’s generally the case that ICT security issues have become more important than saving lives, leading to incredibly stupid situations where an organisation won’t share information between its own departments, let alone between separate organisations. We’ve seen internal security so rigorous that the organisation is losing over £1M a year needlessly and can only get useful information to solve that from the DWP! Of course the new British fascination with litigation aspect also impacts this, such that a care worker may spend 30% of their time caring, 15% travelling and 55% creating records to prove that adequate care has been provided for the circumstances at the time. Invariably these records are in notes fields, involving ‘free-type’ which are not readily accessible to create collective information. (See later blog on Deep-dives for social care)

If all incidents were shared in this way by multiple departments and multiple agencies, you will see that things are happening all over the whole area. GIS is an extremely powerful database with in-built maps, able to carry enormous amounts of information, with an ability to select different information at different scales of mapping, with the ability to zoom-in where-ever there is something of interest.

At a multi-agency level, each agency could have a unique shape (symbol) and or colour for an event, thus six agencies could all share events across their areas, these agencies could include: Police, Fire, PCT’s, Councils, GP’s, Ambulance and larger RSL’s. The amazing thing that will happen at this ‘something happened’ level is that clusters will start to show at certain addresses and locations.

For each agency and department on its own, these clusters may be quite small in number, however, taken together they may suddenly show sixty or seventy issues at, or very close to, a single address. This is still not information, but it is very easy to obtain intelligence which will enable two or more agencies to discuss what is happening at a few key addresses, which in some cases will enable joined up insight to be obtained. The dots on a map do not solve issues, but they will enable better questions within an organisation and across several organisations.

These maps are based on real incidents within a small area of a city (top above) for all environmental issues , which shows quite clearly that many streets and addresses have no issues at all, then there are increasing clusterings around certain estates and more particularly around certain roads and specific addresses. The power of assigning colours and shapes to types of incidents or for each agency also allows a rapid assimilation of what is important in a wide context and for your agency. 

This ‘something happened’ data doesn’t need to be entirely accurate, an aspect which a Police force initially was worried about by taking data straight off their CRM rather than waiting six weeks for it to be evaluated and combined with other clean data. The information to the right depicts a mainly night-time issue of rowdy / inconsiderate behaviour near a night club. GIS filters can be used to isolate prime periods of time, such that Friday and Saturday nights from 20:00 to 2:00 could be displayed separate from the rest of the information.

We were able to show them dozens of multiple issue addresses in their county, not only showing 50+ issues at a single address, but also several properties with 30+ issues either side, simply using and sharing this data sensibly was a big part of their 20% immediate reduction in ASB across the whole county.

At another authority the council’s CCT unit were producing 800 possible police leads a month, which had to be passed onto the 999 system one at a time. We found that by deploying light-duty PC’s in the unit, the immediate engagement of other police officers became simple, with a rapid decrease in minor crime and a 60% reduction in all complaints.

This form of multiple agency mapping and data sharing could be achieved between you and your other agencies in under a week! There will be virtually no cost, there will be savings, not only of lives, but also of time, effort and considerable costs that follow a failure to create and share great information.

The final simple diagram shows how collectives of data from Social Care, the ASB unit, Environmental Health noise complaints, fly-tipping, the PCT and the Police, all can have only a dozen or so issues each at an address, but between them have over fifty issues, when even worrying households will have less than twenty. Data shared simply on the basis that ‘something is happening’ may just be a life-saver.

·         Isn’t this sharing of data preferable to the next Baby P or Pilkington case being in your area?

·         Wouldn’t you prefer different departments to share information rather than add £1M a year to your costs?

NOTE Visualising Transformation is a way of working that maximises the information to all people within the system, so as to be useful for their purposes. Enabling people to see what is happening and have knowledge as to how to use that information is at the heart of Lean and Systems Thinking.

VT acknowledges that everything is connected, no one idea is unique or independent of others, this is the first of many planned ‘blogs’ to be released over the next couple of years. We would love to hear your thoughts, or to deal with requests via daveg@supportservicesdirect.co.uk