Sunderland City Council

The challenge

Sunderland City Council have led the way in Local Government in the creation of an Intelligence Hub for the City. The hub is intended to bring together multiple data sources from a range of public sector bodies, including the Police, the Clinical Commissioning Groups, Highways Agency and the Environmental Agency to gain a joined up view of the needs of the Citizens of Sunderland.

An intelligence hub is a virtual concept being a driver for change rather than just a collection of “Systems”. It provides the Council and its partners with the ability to analyse this data to make intelligence-based decisions. It helps Sunderland discover what data really matters and drive transformational change, rationalising systems and reducing processing costs as part of the Council’s Community Leadership programme.

What we did

The Council needed to develop more refined, quicker, cheaper ways of aggregating and analyzing data and this was an integral part of the Council’s refreshed 3 year change programme designed to achieve the estimated £100 m of budget reductions whilst developing new sustainable models for the delivery of public services.

Our team completed the specification of Sunderland’s requirements for an intelligence hub and assisted the council in preparing the PQQ and ITT documents. These documents have been used by the Council to select a strategic partner to implement the hub.

The development and delivery of an Intelligence Hub was primarily a business change project enabled by people, process and technology.

The tender documents had to set out the vision for a strategic partner. The requirements were scoped as a series of case studies or early adopters. We worked with the Council defined process models and case studies for these early adopters around Place and People situations that included:

• Community Clean-up;
• Flood Management;
• Admission to / Discharge from hospital;
• Family Focus.

What we achieved

The ITT documents were produced and a set of truly innovative early adaptor business models were created that will set the vision for the full use of an intelligence hub.