Fluent Technology

SURREYi is the local information system that provides data, information and analysis about the people, places, environment and economy of Surrey. The vision for Surreyi was to create a single point of entry to a collection of information about Surrey the people, the places and the issues.

Requirements
The Surrey Partnership included Surrey County Council, local district councils, Police, NHS and the Local Community Action. The partnership wanted to introduce a greater level of automation to change the way they work and become efficient. They envisaged greater co-ordination and partnerships to produce strategic outputs with the ability to pool resources from various partners and government documents in a joint owned local information system and data observatory. The ability to create a web based Joint Strategic Needs Assessment in a timelier and more cost effective way was a vital requirement in order to save time and cost.

Solution
Using ORIGIN, Fluent Technology designed and developed the easy to use web portal that is available to the Council, all 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.

Surrey's JSNA
The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act require PCTs and local authorities to produce a Joint Strategic Needs Assessment of the health and well-being of the local community. This is usually a timely and costly exercise, ORIGIN allowed the NHS to manage the end-to-end JSNA production process, including raw data collection and storage, analysis and transformation of data into intelligence; report production and collaboration; and finally review and publishing to the public.

The Surrey JSNA is now a “live” report and can be viewed here.

Data Harvesting
Fluent Technology also partnered with Astun Technology utilising their award winning iShare platform for harvesting of data from information systems within the Council. The iShare GIS module was also deployed allowing expert users across the partnership to interrogate and query record level data, and include GIS data with data from ORIGIN. In simpler terms; it is a seamless way to bring powerful mapping capabilities to the Surrey-i project.

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 SURREYi 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 Surreyi 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.

Benefits
The Surrey-i project has achieved its strategic goal; to deliver a system that brings data together in one place to increase its added value. The system is designed to be used in partnership to help improve performance, reduce costs and increase public engagement.

The Surrey-i project aimed to deliver a comprehensive system that would enable delivery of the Surrey-i Programme objectives and fortunately these objectives have been met, they included:

• Building a joined up view of needs, demand and supply side data
• Developing a better understanding of Surrey, the people, the places and the issues
• Help to create a culture of using evidence to inform decision making
• Help to build a reputation for data transparency and democratic accountability

The advantages of Surrey-i are that the benefits could be realised quickly and within the first six months the following benefits were realised:

• Increased access to information: 15,000 visits in the past 6 months
• Reduction in staff officer time taken to access information (DCLG estimates 19 minutes saved per transaction): Equates to £40,000 efficiency savings in the past 6 months
• Increased quality and added value of information: e.g. JSNA for joint commissioning

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