Aberdeen’s digital services transformation starts with social care

Aberdeen in Scotland has a goal to create a single ‘customer record’ for all residents and for this to be built on a common technology foundation.

The aim is to reduce reliance on multiple business systems and streamline the experience for residents, whether they’re registering a birth, seeking housing support, enrolling a child for school, or paying council tax.

Internally, the approach will help to ensure the “right services have access to the right data at the right time to make the right decisions,” explains Steve Roud, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Aberdeen City Council.

The council took what Roud calls a “bold” move to start with one of its most complex services: social care. It is using the Microsoft Dynamics suite of solutions designed for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management.

The city has a social work case load of around 20,000 people, across a population of 213,000, looked after by 950 different employees.

“I believe we are one of the first councils in the UK that has shifted all of our social work services on to Dynamics,” says Roud. “That’s been an interesting journey for us.”

Co-designed

He says a key foundation of the project was that the system was designed and implemented in collaboration with social workers.

Social care is a frontline service and often a key pressure point for many councils. Aberdeen’s project aims to ultimately free up social workers’ time through standardising processes and reporting, streamlining the capture of incoming referrals, and providing better visibility of cases.

For example, the system provides case chronologies, automated document management, business process flows for workloads and the ability for social workers to manage their case load through a single view.

“We’ve shifted away from some of the more traditional approaches to social casework, so now the team has a shared workload which is then allocated out to individuals,” says Roud. “The team leader always has a view of where each case is.”

Following its inception in 2020, Aberdeen’s Dynamics for Social Work went live in October 2022.

“I would say that given the complexity of social work, we are probably around 60 percent into what will be a very big journey with them,” says Roud. “Their world changes constantly. Our focus is on being able to adapt with them so that we have a platform that will flex to meet their needs.”

People and processes

Cultural issues and getting staff on board with working in new ways are often the most challenging aspects of major IT transformation projects.

In Aberdeen, three social workers acted as product owners to help drive the project forward. The city also used regular sentiment analysis to understand how staff felt about the new system. Building on the success of ‘digital champions’ who already work across the council, 90 coaches were appointed to help train their social work colleagues on the new system and drive changes in working practices.

Roud sees this as a key success factor of the project.

“It’s a shift in understanding, that [staff] have ownership of what they need,” he says.

The council now plans to expand the approach to more areas beyond social care, and £9 million (US$11.25 million) was allocated in the latest budget for investment over the next four years.

Roud says the platform-based approach across the city is key, explaining: “If you did it on a single use case, you would pretty soon run out of money.”

“At the moment citizen experience is very transactional,” he adds. “The intention is to look at how we integrate all of the work we’re doing in the back-end to have something that feels more like a ‘life events’ approach to things so understanding the steps on those journeys.

“Being a new tenant isn’t a single point; it’s the starting point in their journey, whether that’s looking at schools or registering with a GP.”

Data collaboration

The new system ensures structured data and uses modern APIs, which also supports wider data innovation.

The city’s data and insights team and others will increasingly use data to monitor and act on health trends in Aberdeen.

The council is also looking at how its initiative could support the Digital Health Institute’s work around personal ‘data vaults’ where people can manage their own data and access to it.

Ultimately, as more services are added, the system can underpin a more place-based approach to a wide range of challenges, says Roud. This means that multiple agencies – within the city and external organisations – can tackle pressing issues that affect them all in a co-ordinated way.