Local authorities

Forward-looking local authorities are turning to the new generation of management information systems to monitor their performance against government indicators and improve their responsiveness to customers’ and communities’ needs.

With as many as 100 performance indicators (PIs) to co-ordinate, local authorities are now using tools such as ‘digital dashboards’ to help them focus on the decisions they need to take today. With many years’ experience as a specialist information systems consultancy, Blueprint understands how to customise and adapt them to deal with the challenges that local authorities face.

Many local authorities find backward-looking government PIs of little help when it comes to thinking about the way they should use their resources to best effect, the quality of the services they provide and the right response to demographic and political change. We can devise custom measures or adapt familiar frameworks such as Golden Thread and Balanced Scorecard. We help them to link their government PIs to internal measures that relate directly to their situation. These reports are then designed to show managers and front line staff what changes are needed and how they can contribute.

Local authority finance managers who deal with hundreds of separate budget holders using incompatible spreadsheet-based systems know how difficult it can be to pull information together across directorates. Blueprint can cure this logistical headache. Our financial planning and consolidation systems streamline and speed up complex budgeting and planning processes.

The issues we are most often asked to assist with by our local authority customers include: 

1. Performance monitoring and management: ‘Can you show me in detail what’s going on behind my PIs? Can I have all my PIs on one screen that the whole team can access? Is it possible to create alerts, so we can deal with the things that need fixing quickly?’

2. Financial planning and consolidation: ‘How can we speed up the reporting process? I’d like a single, consistent view of budgets right across the directorates. I want to run scenarios so I can see what happens to services if budgets change, and vice-versa.’

3. Strategic planning: ‘We’d like to explore what changing patterns of need in our communities and political change at national level could mean for us.’

4. Adults’ and children’s services: ‘I’d like to track needs on a life-cycle basis, looking at how they change over time. We’re under pressure to do more for less, so we want to improve our understanding of the link between investment and outcomes.’ Read more

5. Housing: ‘We need alerts to help us spot a rent arrears problem before it happens. I’d like to measure how promptly our teams are dealing with repairs. Can we have an ‘intelligent map’ that will show us how we’re doing across the borough?’ Read more

6. Customer services, complaints and member inquiries: ‘We have performance issues at our new call centre – we need to understand what’s going wrong and how we can improve. We’d like to create a unified system for dealing with member inquiries.’

7. Environmental services: ‘I need to know how our contractors are performing against their SLAs. We’d like to improve our responsiveness to customers’ complaints.’