Fluent Technology

Essex Partnership is made up from Essex Police Service, Essex Fire Service, Essex Probation Trust, PCTs (West Essex, North Essex, South-West Essex, Mid-Essex, South-East Essex), North Essex Partnership trust and South Essex Partnership Trust plus 12 local authorities and departments within Essex County Council.

Requirements
The overall aim of the project was to provide a web-based solution that provides benefits to the range of partners across Essex in the analysis of different data sets from different sources. Essex wanted to enable effective sharing of data in order to inform analysis, action planning, strategic planning and the targeting of resources to provide a more effective and efficient service to Essex residents

Essex County Council wanted a system that would allow data that had already been collected and analysed to be saved within the system to save time and reduce the inefficiency of duplicated work across the partnership. With the emphasis from the coalition government on “big society” and greater data transparency a the partnership realised that a local information system could be an invaluable tool for partners, 3rd sector groups and the general public to acquire previously unavailable data much more easily.

The vision for the completed project is it will allow partners to share not just data but also analysis and interpretation of that data, facilitating more partnership working, reducing repetition and improving the quality of, and access to, a wealth of useful information to improve service delivery.

Solution
The local information system for Essex was put out to tender in 2010 and Fluent impressed them with their personal approach and expert consultancy team that would work directly on the project. Fluent was able to demonstrate their Origin product and Essex were impressed by the product that already met their requirements and was ready to be implemented.

Using ORIGIN, Fluent Technology designed and developed the easy to use web portal that is available to the Council, partners and the public. The solution includes statistics on population, community safety, fire, health, education and economic data. This information actively helps with performance assessments, planning service improvements and measuring the efficiency and impact of public service delivery. Users are able to analyse and compare information at a range of geographical levels with facilities to export, chart and map the data.

The challenges imposed by this project led us to partner with Astun Technology. Astun’s Award winning iShare platform is integrated within the Local Information System to enable data sharing, resulting in a wealth of available information. We implemented the iShare Intranet GIS module into Essex Online allowing expert users across the partnership to interrogate and query the point data store within ORIGIN, bring in GIS vector and background layers and overlay them with thematic polygon layers. In simpler terms; it is a seamless way to bring powerful mapping capabilities to the Essex project.

Value
The solution has provided invaluable resources to researches, statisticians and people involved in policy making, it is a more effective way of managing datasets. As well as providing the resources with the council and their partners it has provided an important tool for the public, who can easily access vital statistics about their local area. The system has unique features and benefits including;

• Increased consistency of data definitions across all partners and stakeholders
• Increased volume of ‘self service’ for information requests by the public
• More timely publishing of information to the public
• Integration with NESS (neighbourhood statistics) in order to continually update the data
• Integration with iShare to upload data
• Decreases the time spent on JSNA and other reports by storing live data and reports.

Essex Partnership also appreciated the responsiveness and personal approach that Fluent Technology took to the project.
"In terms of experience, other companies sell themselves by saying they have a lot of ‘similar clients’. That to our way of thinking is not necessarily better. Also if that company has to support more and more clients then our support is likely to suffer."
Ellie Sapsed (Essex County Council)

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