‘It's never gone this well!’ – council service teams on building their own IT

Kate Hurr, Digital Manager at Cumbria County Council, describes colleagues’ enthusiasm for creating digital services in-house. The discussion makes it clear that the Council’s ‘low-code’ approach to building new digital services is not about replacing the large council systems that sit at the core of highways, planning or social care management. Rather its about redesigning the ‘bits around the edge’ (technical term), in order to create new or better online services for customers or staff, without having to procure these from the same source. Or to replace online systems – say Blue Badge applications – that might have previously been bought in from another third party IT supplier. Availability of a low-code platform means that Kate’s digital services team can work closely with service managers to co-design services and then build them in-house without the need for developers. Very short feedback loops speed up the development process – something that might have taken four months in the past can now be done in four weeks – and fine tuning once launched can be done really quickly because everything is done in-house. Although the council is committed to keeping other channels open, given Cumbria’s rural ‘not-spots’ and its ageing population, shift to online from recent projects on skips and scaffolding licensing and complaints have been impressive. -o0o- Netcall takes the pain out of big change projects, working with 1 in 4 councils to deliver better services for their citizens and within the NHS to help Trusts reduce DNAS by up to 40%, reduce postage costs for reminders by 50% and give patients choice over communication with their hospital. We help 600 UK organisations across all sectors to radically improve customer experience through collaborative CX. As a leading provider of low-code, contact centre and omnichannel messaging solutions, we enable customer-facing and IT talent to collaborate.  As described in the interview with Kate, our low-code allows you to make big changes fast – without creating work for IT, blowing the budget or replacing core systems. Prebuild applications are free to download bringing around 80% of standard process functionality. So, you don’t start from scratch. And, when you’re ready you’ll update and share unlimited services with other councils. Now it’s your turn. Talk to us about your business case today 0330 363 0300 www.netcall.com