Following digital principles to implement the standard
Tim Taylor, product owner at Connected Kingston, talks about how they implemented the standard at Kingston and Sutton councils.
“We didn’t expect the product to be as popular as it was. This has been really big for us.”
Process
When we were building, we needed to make lots of decisions. At the time, the standard was a pretty small decision as part of a number of huge things. The process of choosing and implementing this specific standard was on the whole quick and easy. The research showed that the standard met our needs - we took 30 of our services and tested if they could be represented according to the standard.
Looking back, we knew very little about what we were getting into and what would be involved. But we knew if we needed to change something later we would have the flexibility to do that, but we didn’t need to.
Challenges
“Stakeholders need to understand the benefits of the shared data structure. Right now, we still find that non techies do not understand the benefits. So helping them understand the benefits of adopting the standard is key.”
There were a lot of issues raised by stakeholders especially around open sourcing - why are we not selling this on? If we put all this money into it, why don’t we sell it?
We needed to help them understand that we can’t compete as a private enterprise, and that we would benefit most from it being open source - that meant others could make improvements to the code on GitHub and there would be benefits that way. Now Leeds are using a copy of our platform and so is a charity. Surrey and Hounslow council are looking into it.
Our work started before the UK extension to Open Referral so the Americanisation of the Open Referral standard was a barrier - there were parts that were health focussed that weren't relevant to us. The standard had more detail than we needed in some places, and a lack of coverage in sports and fitness in others.
We had to add to it. These challenges were unsurprising as it was an older standard and developed for the US context.
Benefits
Well-organised services
Adopting the standard meant that, right from the beginning, we had effective and well-organised categorised services. Search and categories on the platform work very well. It’s been a major benefit that searching for information and the categorisation of that information has never been an issue for us.
Quicker and easier to add services
It made the job of adding services to the platform easier for the admin people - they could just pick the right category from a list.
Enhanced the organisation’s reputation
Another benefit was reputational - it’s good that we get referenced often in the context of service directory projects and Open Referral UK. People reach out to us regularly to learn more.
Open source
There is a project planned to roll out an equivalent platform in Sutton. So we’ll be able to quickly share what we’ve done with the neighbouring borough because it’s open source. Kingston and Sutton have shared services like IT. We do the same thing for council websites - their information and advice hubs. They are going through procurement and will decide whether to use our open source project or not.
In terms of the open source benefit, we do need to do more groundwork. We have people branching our code from Github - so that’s a benefit to them - but then not much gets committed back and updated in the code. We have a challenge in terms of managing live products. We pay a lot of attention when they’re being built, but less attention to finding the time to get the right people to link up, have shared codebases, work out the intricacies of sharing and managing that codebase together.
Next steps
We’re looking to adopt the UK version of Open Referral - we want to make sure our platform is open and conforms to the standard. We built an API endpoint and people can put it into whatever system they choose.
There are benefits to moving to the UK version, but there are challenges too. We tend to just think about our own council and do work that benefits us in the short term. To put money into changing the standard and recategorising all of our services for a potential long-term benefit is a difficult argument to have. The intentions and principles are there - we completely agree with it in principle.
Impact
When we built the thing, we spent a lot of time on it. We followed the GDS digital principles - we felt we did it right. We didn’t expect the product to be as popular as it was. Lots of people approach us about it - for an organisation it’s a good thing.