Technology Strategy Board
Final Report
FINAL REPORT
ORGANISATION: Birmingham City Council
PROJECT TITLE: Birmingham Citi-Sense
TSB File Reference No: 130965
Date: 14/11/2012
Ref:Vs: 1.0
Responsible Author: Birmingham City Council
Circulation: Technology Strategy Board
CONTENT
CONTENT ................................................................................................................................................. 2
1.
Summary ......................................................................................................................................... 3
2.
Background and Context................................................................................................................. 5
3.
Our Vision for Future Birmingham .................................................................................................. 6
3.1
Ambitions for the City ............................................................................................................. 6
3.2
Relevant strategies.................................................................................................................. 6
3.3
Challenges and opportunities ................................................................................................. 8
3.4
Addressing the challenges for Birmingham through integration ......................................... 11
4.
Our approach to integrating city systems ..................................................................................... 12
4.1.
Prioritising which city systems to integrate .............................................................................. 12
4.2.
How we will achieve the integration of our city systems ......................................................... 13
4.2.1.
Overview ............................................................................................................................... 14
4.2.2.
A standards-based approach to implementation ................................................................. 16
4.2.3.
Adding value to existing infrastructure and recently commissioned projects ..................... 17
5.
Our integration challenges described ........................................................................................... 18
5.1.
Challenge 1: SMEs ..................................................................................................................... 18
5.2.
Challenge 2: People travelling in Birmingham .......................................................................... 19
5.3.
Challenge 3: Young People with Complex Needs ..................................................................... 21
6.
Benefits ......................................................................................................................................... 23
6.1.
Benefits to the City Economy.................................................................................................... 23
6.2.
Benefits to the quality of life of the citizens ............................................................................. 25
6.3.
Benefits in reducing environmental impact? ............................................................................ 26
6.4.
“Future-proofing” – ensuring benefits for the long term, not just the short term .................. 26
7.
Barriers .......................................................................................................................................... 27
8.
Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 30
Appendix A: Strategic objectives for Birmingham ................................................................................ 31
Appendix B: Birmingham’s journey towards best practice Information Management ........................ 32
Appendix C: Background on Customer Franchises ............................................................................... 33
2
1. Summary
This document sets out the results of a Feasibility Study conducted by Birmingham City Council,
looking at the potential to develop a Large Scale Future City Demonstrator in Birmingham, with
funding from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). Following an earlier Expression of Interest by the
city, Birmingham along with 29 other cities was invited by TSB to undertake a Feasibility Study and
prepare a detailed proposal for delivering the Future City Demonstrator.
Our study has shown that Birmingham is well-suited to deliver a Large Scale Demonstrator; it has
access to a large ethnic population of wide socio-economic diversity, surrounded by a rich pool of
academics, researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs that have the appetite to exploit the
commercial and public sector opportunities of the Birmingham ‘Citi-Sense’ Demonstrator.
Birmingham is a future-facing city. It is the youngest, most ethnically diverse city in the UK; its
innovators in public sector, private sector and social enterprise have already created a unique
public-private partnership to operate Birmingham’s road infrastructure; a local energy trading
company; a Big Society Award-winning programme of community innovation through social media;
and a Smartphone-based local currency. Its transport infrastructure, breadth of economic capability
across technology, manufacturing, creative media and healthcare, and cultural diversity contribute
to the national and international export potential of service and product innovations from the city.
Looking ahead, an unprecedented programme of over £6 billion in public and private regenerative
investments is underway to secure Birmingham’s future as a leading global city. Within the next few
years we will complete the transformation of our built environment, build world-leading transport
and sustainable energy systems, radically improve our public services, deploy a world-class superfast
digital infrastructure, and establish the city as a global leader in innovation and knowledge-based
enterprise. By 2020, we aim to have grown the Birmingham economy by 30%, or £8.25 billion pa.
Birmingham’s Future Cities Demonstrator will build on this foundation of existing innovation and
substantial future investment. Our proposal to the TSB – which we have developed in close
consultation with city stakeholders – is transformative. Its aim is to turn Birmingham from a city
which responds to challenges to one which is systemically able to anticipate and tackle challenges in
advance in an agile and sustainable way.
Our demonstrator project (which has the working title ‘Citi-Sense’) will put the city’s data - and the
means to exploit it - in the hands of Birmingham’s citizens, entrepreneurs, public service providers,
social enterprises, planners and businesses. Our ambitions go far beyond the traditional ‘city data
platform’. Citi-Sense will provide a distributed market infrastructure for Birmingham’s data which
will:
•
Enable and incentivise data owners and providers to make data available openly (or with
associated terms depending on its sensitivity)
•
Allow any organisation in the city to access data regardless of where it is held; and to access
tools and expertise to exploit that data
•
Be accompanied by a programme of transformation engaging all actors in the city’s ecosystem,
including the communities, entrepreneurs and social enterprises who are already demonstrating
their ability to create innovative city services.
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Our aim through that transformation is not to achieve a one-off change, but to permanently embed
a capability for smart and sustainable re-invention into the way the city is organised and in the
way new business is being created.
While the Citi-Sense approach will roll out over time to embrace all the city’s systems, in the first
two years we will demonstrate this transformational approach in three specific pilot communities:
•
Working with the city’s 40,000+ SMEs and our universities to build a new data-driven business
sector worth £126 million pa by 2020
•
Better meeting the information needs of the 33 million people who travel to and work in
Birmingham each year –targeting a 3% reduction in city congestion by 2015, with significant
economic and environmental benefits
•
Joining up the fragmented services for our young people with special educational/ behavioural
needs or disabilities – achieving better integration of these young people into our economy,
ending the downward economic spiral for their families and achieving a £50 million boost to the
economy through reduced lifetime costs to the public sector.
These pilots will demonstrate sustainable models to support rapid expansion to other communities.
To achieve this, Citi-Sense will be based on and contribute to open, global standards at both the
technical and business levels. This will also help ensure that it can be replicated by other cities; and
that the UK SMEs who develop offerings through it can exploit them nationally and internationally.
Citi-Sense will be a collaborative cross-sector initiative. Co-investment by partners already working
with us in delivering the demonstrator will give us resources worth £105 million. The £24 million
investment by TSB will allow us to add over proportionately additional value through integrating
these systems. Conservative modelling of the projected benefits indicates that Citi-Sense will add
more than £300 million pa of additional GVA to our economy by 2020. The projected Return on
Investment for the total TSB/Birmingham investment is 720% by 2020.
Particularly, there is the opportunity to look at how we can leverage and unlock the added value
across the different systems currently managing separate investments (e.g. Birmingham Energy
Savers and the Telecare programme). We recognise that significant interrelationships exist across
service delivery teams and project areas that would benefit from an integrated approach to reduce
the constraints of silo working as well as understand the impact of useful data, technology and web
based tools to accelerate collective aims and deliver new services and innovation. And if we can
open up our different systems to the city’s SMEs and social entrepreneurs, there is a major
opportunity to tap into their innovation in order to create new forms of public value, new service
models, and new business growth.
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2. Background and Context
Birmingham is the West Midlands regional capital and the UK’s second largest city, outside of
London. It is a driver of the regional economy, with an economic output approaching £20 billion a
year, set to grow by 30% by 2020, or £8.25 billion. Covering some 27k hectares it encompasses the
local government entities of Birmingham City Council (the largest UK local authority) and the Greater
Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).
Birmingham is a diverse and constantly changing city home to just over one million residents, which
is estimated to grow by almost 0.2 million by 2028. Almost half of the population are aged under 35,
which makes it one of the youngest cities in Europe and by 2035 it is expected to get younger, with
above national average growth in the number of people from all age groups below 65.
It is also a city that is getting more diverse. Between 2007 and 2010, people moved to Birmingham
from 187 different countries, adding to the city’s rich, varied faith and cultural heritage. It has
though some of the most deprived areas in the country, with some of the highest rates of
unemployment nationally and significant health issues associated with this deprivation.
Historically, Birmingham’s economic reputation was built on the range and creativity of its
manufacturing base. Whilst Birmingham still maintains some of this heritage with large employers
like Jaguar Land Rover and Cadbury still located here, it has dealt with the decline in manufacturing
by reshaping its approach towards a service and knowledge-based economy, with a rapid growth in
sectors like business and professional services. It has developed competitive sector strengths and
fostered its entrepreneurial spirit with a thriving gaming and digital media industry, seen a renewed
growth in advanced manufacturing and has world class universities and high tech research and
business parks attracting leading research and SME innovation in advanced materials, low carbon
technologies, innovative healthcare and translational medicine; this will be further exploited through
the development of six economic zones to enable clusters of high growth markets. Alongside this, a
massive physical transformation of the city landscape has boosted the city’s cultural, leisure and
retail offer to develop into an international business and visitor destination.
As a forward-thinking city, its extensive, advanced transport and communications network, already
positions it at the centre of the country and of the motorway network, maximising access to the
supply chain, customers and labour force. Over 90% of the UK market – customers and businesses –
are within a four hour drive of the city. Its far reaching £1bn investment programme includes the
award winning Birmingham Energy Savers housing retrofit, one of the largest telecare programmes
in the UK set to benefit 25,000 people and an underpinning physical and digital connectivity, which
will provide world class access for business to global markets as well as ease of movement for
residents and visitors to enhance their experience of city life.
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3. Our Vision for Future Birmingham
3.1
Ambitions for the City
Birmingham 2026 is the long-term sustainable community strategy shaping Birmingham’s future to
secure economic, social and environmental well-being for our people. It was developed through
extensive public consultation, and represents the shared ambitions for the city agreed between all
local agencies and endorsed by cross-party consensus.
The overarching strategic outcome for Birmingham and its citizens is to be able to Enjoy a High
Quality of Life. To deliver this, our focus is on:
• Achieving three key outcomes which together deliver on this commitment:
‒ Succeed economically
‒ Stay safe in green clean neighbourhoods
‒ Be healthy
• Ensuring that we deliver these outcomes in a socially inclusive way, closing the very
significant disparities that currently exist across the city.
• Pursuing the City’s growth in the most sustainable way (economic, social and environmental)
Details of these priorities for Birmingham 2026, and of the measures we are using to track success
against them, are set out at Appendix A.
3.2
Relevant strategies
This is a vision which requires transformation across all aspects of city life. Our ambition for
Birmingham is huge - and represents the single biggest period of change in the city since we grew to
become the “workshop of the world” in the nineteenth century. Over the last ten years or so, many
of the key foundations have been put in place through urban regeneration and by starting to
supplement our traditional strengths in manufacturing with new strengths in knowledge-intensive
growth sectors. Building on these foundations, we now aim to become one of the pre-eminent
global cities of the 21st century: an agile city, that is able to work effectively in the new regime of a
resource constrained world and increasing population and move towards a new role, which will use
our strengths in digital and social collaboration to drive our future economy and ensure sustainable
growth and prosperity.
Our recently established Smart City Commission, led by the Leader of the City Council, provides the
vision and leadership that is defining our strategic smart roadmap to look at how we invest in and
use digital technologies across our many communities and with our city partners to find new ways to
make best use of our resources and data that will deliver better services and way of life, in an open,
collaborative and inclusive way.
We have put in place a £6 billion programme of public and private partnership investment over the
next few years to achieve our future vision and this is supported by a number of strategies
highlighted in Figure 3.1.
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Figure 3.1 Key city strategies and plans
• Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership Strategy for Growth (White
Paper): Provides an ambitious vision for change, identifying five priority areas to unlock the
growth potential of the region in key sectors focused on skills, connectivity (physical and digital);
and use of the physical assets within the environment.
• Big City Plan: One of the UK’s most far reaching spatial and population development plans to
build a world class city central to the city’s future economic and social vitality. This is
complemented by over £1 billion of public investment in the city centre including major
prestigious developments such as the New Street Gateway, Midland Metro Extension Line and
one of the largest public libraries in Europe.
• Draft Development Strategy 2030: provides the statutory planning framework to guide how &
where the homes, jobs, services and infrastructure will be delivered and the type of places and
environment the city wants to create
• Digital Strategy: This encompasses a world leading digital connectivity programme, covering both
super-fast fibre optic broadband across all the key areas of the city for business growth,
innovation and learning and a high speed city-wide next generation wireless network by 2015.
• Economic Zones - Investing in Birmingham: Builds clusters of high growth sectors across six
economic zones, in which knowledge-based and digital businesses start, grow and flourish with
the support of our universities, a dynamic business support and business finance community and
a world-class talent pool.
• Business Transformation Programme: A 10 year plan (on target to yield £1.5 billion) to
transform business processes and increase quality of services to customers. It has integrated
customer service delivery into a one-stop, multi-channel platform allowing integrated responses
to customer needs, easy tracking of service requests and better service standards.
• Joint Health and Well-Being Strategy: Aims to improve health and well-being outcomes for local
communities by addressing the needs identified in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment. It is
focused on the most pressing priorities, which cause high levels of avoidable ill health, death or
disability and/or where there is a significant opportunity to improve outcomes for people and
the efficiency of services.
• Birmingham Low Carbon Transport Strategy 2011+: Addresses the City’s overarching target to
reduce CO2 emissions per capita by 60% from 1990 to 2026. The vision is to reduce the
environmental impact of the city’s mobility needs by providing an efficient, safe, easy to use low
carbon transport system, which will stimulate economic growth by providing high quality
transport choices for the people of Birmingham
• Climate Change Adaptation Action Plan 2012: This outlines a framework to ensure Birmingham
continues to prepare for Climate Change to minimise risk, maximise opportunities and deliver
socio economic sustainability.
A high-level view of this Future Birmingham partnership investment programme is given in Figure 3.2
below, and the costs and benefits associated with the programme are summarised in Figure 3.3.
Headline figures on the intended impact of this existing investment programme are:
•
•
•
•
7
Total investment of £6 billion delivering a 30% increase in GVA, worth £8.25 billion pa by 2020
Net Present Value of additional economic activity between now and 2020 of £22.5 billion
100,000 additional private sector jobs created by 2020
A CO2 reduction of 2.9 million tonnes pa by 2020 - a 42% reduction on the city’s 2005 baseline.
Figure 3.2: Investing to deliver the strategic outcomes for Future Birmingham
Figure 3.3: costs and benefits of Future Birmingham
3.3
Challenges and opportunities
Like most great cities, Birmingham is experiencing unprecedented change brought about by global
economic forces, the banking and Eurozone crisis, and the government’s resulting deficit
management policies have combined to cause a major threat to Birmingham’s economic well-being
and social cohesion.
8
Likewise the different regeneration and economic approaches that various institutions and public
bodies have adopted over recent decades have not succeeded in addressing some of the city’s
serious challenges around its economic underperformance and health inequalities. Whilst the city
has many significant strengths and investments upon which to build the Future Birmingham, it also
has some persistent and significant underlying weaknesses.
Strengths and Opportunities
Birmingham’s ambition is to be the enterprise capital of the UK. As an engine of regional growth, it is
at the heart of £94 billion regional economy, home to 42,000 diverse companies, of which around
900 are international firms. The investment of £1.5bn in six economic zones, as beacons of
innovation focused on high value added sectors, reaffirms our competitive lead for example as one
of the largest clusters of Med-tech and Life Science companies in the UK and home to 25% of the
UK’s digital gaming industry. The new £35 million Digital Plaza, at the heart of our city centre
Enterprise Zone, will create a specialist high tech environment to attract further investment
incorporating an international living lab showcase for state of the art collaborative technologies
The City has established a strong infrastructure base upon which to grow our economy. A £1 billion
investment in transport infrastructure will provide improved access for business as well as ease of
movement for residents and visitors and includes the £600 million investment in New Street Station
transport hub and the proposed development of HS2, will provide long term employment
opportunities. A world class ultrafast digital connectivity programme will ensure access to global
markets.
On our doorstep, we have ready access to people and skills; a ready supply of graduates, through 5
major universities and 18 leading universities within 1 hour drive that provide skills in engineering
and science to meet the future needs of investors. Birmingham has the largest proportion of young
people (38% under 25), with a diverse population, including a large ethnic community, a wide socioeconomic diversity and distinct communities that provides an unrivalled and valuable test bed for
market and product development.
We have a strong track record of collaborative working across our universities, public, private and
third sector; city partnerships such as Birmingham Science City and Digital Birmingham, along with
forums such as Science Capital drive innovation as well as exploitation of digital technologies to
ensure Birmingham sustainable economic growth and well-being.
Weaknesses and Threats
Like most great cities we are challenged on a number of fronts. As a city, we are underperforming
economically, and have been for some time even during times of relative prosperity. Unemployment
currently stands at 12.5% with a quarter of young people unemployed as well as lower levels of selfemployment with lower than average business survival rates (after 5 years of set up). The city has a
significant skills deficit amongst the resident population demonstrated by 25% highly skilled
residents compared to national average of 31% attracting almost 84,000 in-commuters. In addition
there are relatively low levels of self-employment with lower than average business survival rates
(after 5 years of set up).
Birmingham ranks as the 9th most deprived local authority in the UK, with significant pockets in the
top 1% most deprived areas nationally and 35% of children are classed as living in child poverty and
in some wards this is as high as 52%. Associated with this deprivation are unequal social outcomes,
exhibited by a 10 year life expectancy gap across the city and socio economic factors contribute 40%
9
to overall health outcomes. In addressing these challenges the scale of the problem is heightened
by the social care and health budget, which by 2020 will take up the council’s entire available budget
except for education.
Birmingham is also known for its ‘urban diseconomies’ - communities and places that become
isolated and difficult to access, creating logistical and mobility problems for business and citizens.
This in cases has resulted in an out migration of businesses into the wider region; and residents, who
live on outlying deprived areas of the city feeling disconnected from opportunities.
Challenges
These present a series of broader challenges for the delivery of Future Birmingham, which we
believe are multi-faceted and will require a "whole systems approach" to optimise efficiencies and
resources and deliver maximum benefit in the future:
•The economic challenge. One of the biggest challenges facing Birmingham, therefore, is to create
the conditions for employment growth. We need to deliver this programme in the face of a global
economic crisis and UK fiscal retrenchment. Our top priority is to boost economic recovery, finding
new ways to leverage the city’s financial strength and develop new ways to help business to flourish.
•The well-being challenge. Birmingham has a very mixed social-economic demographic and is, like
many cities around the world, challenged with improving the general environmental issues that
include, but are not limited to, the deprivation in some parts of the city and the effect on the health
and well-being of its citizens. The load this places on general health, care in the community and
other related services is not sustainable going forward. Costs for health and social care will rise from
57% to nearly 100% of council budget over the next 15 years.
•The mobility challenge. This encompasses a range of connectivity issues both physical and virtual.
The city is challenged by the transport network, the inter-connectivity within the city and the ability
to provide sufficiently affordable options for many of its citizens to be easily connected to work,
leisure and healthy recreation – and to make more environmentally sustainable choices as they do
so.
•The environmental challenge. This is an international challenge due to the density and increasing
city population projections (Birmingham’s population is set to grow by 0.2 million by 2028) and,
therefore, consumption needs of the city. The future viability of the city requires access to resilient
and secure energy supplies, while ensuring affordable energy for all at the same time meeting the
obligations to satisfy the clean green agenda with an increasing demand and an ageing physical
infrastructure is a major concern to the city. Gaps in low carbon energy and mobility provision
means that there is a net import of energy resulting in an energy bill for Birmingham of more than
£1.5 billion per annum. Exacting targets require a carbon reduction of 42% by 2020 across transport,
domestic and non-domestic areas.
•The integration challenge. The city as a whole is investing over £6bn until 2020 in changing the
built environment. These investments are a wide range of local, national, European and commercial
funding streams, each with its own particular requirements. While we have a holistic city vision and
strategy (Birmingham 2026), the inevitable reality is that the detailed plans for delivering it are not
fully integrated since the strategy is not being delivered by one but multiple organisations, across
many projects: organisations which seek to work in partnership, but in reality face a range of barriers
to “joining-up”. Like all cities, Birmingham faces a series of policy, process, technical, contractual and
cultural challenges that due to historic reasons have entrenched functional service delivery silos and
10
hampered the development of system-wide collaboration, exacerbated further by inflexible legacy
systems and long term contracts.
•The data challenge. A key underlying driver of the broader integration challenge, this relates to
how different public and private entities collect, maintain and use data mainly for their own
productivity and internal future planning. This silo-based approach to data management, coupled
with concerns over data security, privacy, contractual and commercial issues, has significantly
hampered the city’s ability to respond effectively to all the other challenges listed above.
3.4
Addressing the challenges for Birmingham through integration
We believe that there is an opportunity to use digital technologies and best practice business
processes and enabling tools, in order to significantly resolve the challenges around integration and
data described above and by doing so to deliver a step-change in Birmingham’s capability to solve
the core economic, well-being, mobility and environmental challenges we face and deliver the
overarching strategic outcomes for Birmingham 2026.
Particularly, there is the opportunity to look at how we can leverage and unlock the added value
across the different systems currently managing separate investments (e.g. Birmingham Energy
Savers and the Telecare programme). We recognise that significant interrelationships exist across
service delivery teams and project areas that would benefit from an integrated approach to reduce
the constraints of silo working as well as understand the impact of useful data, technology and web
based tools to accelerate collective aims and deliver new services and innovation. And if we can
open up our different systems to the city’s SMEs and social entrepreneurs, there is a major
opportunity to tap into their innovation in order to create new forms of public value, new service
models, and new business growth.
The opportunities to be gained through an integrated approach are far reaching:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
11
Stimulate market growth and enablement in the provision of smart city services, technologies
and applications.
Commercial engagement with public sector service delivery driving new business models and
services.
Drive innovation and new value creation through the use of commercial and public data assets.
Greater visibility that will enable early intervention across a range of services, with less
duplication and more focus on continuity of intervention.
More effective use of resources across multiple agencies, minimising waste and increasing value
adding activity; improving public sector productivity and procedures.
Better predictive analysis and timely decision making to improve service outcomes that will
address quality of life for citizens.
Provide more personalised and responsive services to meet increased citizen expectations and
24/7 service provision.
4. Our Approach to Integrating City Systems
As this is a feasibility study for a ‘systems integration project’ it seems sensible to define what we
mean by a ‘system’.
A city is by nature a ‘system of systems’, where physical infrastructure systems link to natural
habitats (eco-systems), and digital infrastructure and ICT systems link to service delivery – with each
service itself being another system (e.g. ‘the Health System’). Organisations within the city are yet
another set of systems. For the purpose of this report, we mostly focus on digital / ICT systems and
service delivery. We will be looking predominantly at the integration of data and applications and at
business process integration.
The core idea behind Citi-Sense is to unlock significant additional benefits from the existing £6 billion
investments in developing “Future Birmingham”, by enabling much greater data-sharing, joining-up
and innovation across the individual silos which are currently managing those investments.
To achieve this, Citi-Sense will free up the data which is currently locked away within vertical silos
within the Council and the other major service providers in the city, and also provide the market
enablers and change management processes needed to exploit this data effectively. The aim is to
create a new market for data and self-sustaining business models for Citi-Sense
4.1.
Prioritising which city systems to integrate
We intend to use the Citi-Sense Platform as an engine to drive transformation over time across all
city systems: both within the Council, and also across the wider set of public, private and voluntary
organisations involved in delivering our energy, waste, water, telecoms, policing, emergency
response, education, training, transport and health systems.
However, we will take a responsible, phased and incremental approach to integration of systems via
the Citi-Sense Platform and have used the following criteria to identify the initial city systems for
integration:
•
•
•
Systems must significantly contribute to addressing one of the three priority areas i.e.
stimulate economic and entrepreneurial activity, improve well-being and improve mobility.
Systems must be technically available and allow us to harvest significant data output.
System integration will add value to existing investments.
Our starting point for addressing systems is to ensure they are ‘customer-centric’; that is, we should
focus on how different systems could combine more effectively to better meet the needs of specific
communities or segments of the city’s residents and businesses. The selection is evidence based
developed from completed studies by reputable consultants over the last three years such as ‘West
Midlands Data Integration and Exchange’ by Mott MacDonald Dec 2011; analysis and prioritisation
of Birmingham City Council’s key information assets and new stakeholder engagement involving:
•
In-depth focus groups with key stakeholder groups that would be pivotal early adopters of CitiSense, potential beneficiaries and / or involved in the pilot communities.
•
This has included workshops with SMEs, Open Data community, third sector partners as well as
building on existing work through the City’s Partnership team encompassing a strong family of
partnerships - faith groups, schools, youth, charities, cultural, third sector and neighbourhoods.
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•
In addition we have worked closely with Birmingham’s Smart City Commission. This was
established by the Leader of the Council, Sir Albert Bore, to provide leadership at the highest
level to drive transformational change and guide the development and delivery of a Smart City
strategy for Birmingham. The Commission, formed of 17 members representing key Birmingham
stakeholders (universities, health, transport, SMEs and the Council), and additionally include
members that bring national and international expertise in the field, has been integral to shaping
thinking on our approach.
Based on stakeholder feedback, research and addressing issues pertinent to Birmingham around
economic growth, health and well-being and mobility we have selected three pilot communities
which will form the initial focus for our Citi-Sense system integration approach:
1. SMEs ‘Unleashed’ Economic Challenge. SMEs during our research stressed the informational
market failures which restrict their ability to create new value through data. This challenge will
hone in on the support, enablement tools and explore new and emerging business models that
will help address our economic challenges to drive recovery.
2. Commercial and public & third sector focused mobility challenge: People Travelling in
Birmingham. This will include systems such as UTCMS, Birmingham NHS data).This will work
closely with SMEs and large corporates to address a range of challenges that are hindering travel
across the city. To date innovation has been affected by limited availability of transport data and
particularly the opportunity to map it onto other areas such as health. For example NHS related
business (hospital and patient transport and supply of goods and services) accounts for 30% of
all the traffic on the roads at any one time and presents a plethora of logistical and resource
issues. Citi-Sense provides the marketplace to bring together the data producers and consumers
to deliver new applications and citizen facing services.
3. A public sector focused data and service reorganisation health and well-being challenge
targeting a specific customer service group: Young People with Complex Needs. This will
integrate areas of social care, health, housing, energy, education and benefit systems (e.g.
Carefirst, Northgate, Impulse, Adult Learning, DWP Customer Information Service, and
Birmingham Energy Savers) and address a group of young people that account for a
disproportionate share of public service expenditure and face significant barriers to effective
engagement in the Birmingham economy. The opportunity here is to demonstrate the validity of
this approach so that it can be readily adopted into other business critical areas such as Children
Safeguarding services that map against the same datasets. Whilst a public sector focused service
challenge, it will use SMEs to innovate the delivery of new service models and applications.
What we will do to address these challenge areas is described in more detail in Section 5.
4.2.
How we will achieve the integration of our city systems
To achieve the integration of any of our city systems requires a multi-faceted approach; taking into
account the various stakeholder groups and mixing a strategic top-down approach with dynamic
bottom up change as outlined below:
•
•
•
•
•
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Strategic direction and leadership (through Smart City Commission)
A technical infrastructure and marketplace for data integration and exchange
A framework to enable market driven innovation that will create the conditions to exploit new
market opportunities and develop new business models
Support mechanisms for innovation
City regulation (through innovative procurement)
•
•
A framework for organisation internal change
Extensive stakeholder programme to drive delivery and build future skills capacity
4.2.1.
Overview
Citi-Sense will provide a new horizontal “joining-up” capability across existing city systems. That
capability will be much more than a set of technical enablers. Our approach has been designed to
reflect the lessons learned from other cities and governments around the world, which show that
while an data integration platform has the potential to unleash significant amounts of internally and
externally driven innovation, on its own it will not do so. Business change is critical, and our
approach is designed to drive market enablement and business change at two levels:
•
•
First, we will drive change upstream of the data platform: that is, we will work with data owners
across the city to ensure a willingness and capability to provide data, and to tackle barriers to
opening up data.
Second, we will drive change downstream of the data platform: that is, we will establish proactive and proven measures to ensure that the open data made available through the platform
will be used in practice to drive cross-system innovation. This will involve using two key levers:
o Enabling externally-driven innovation through a series of steps to stimulate a thriving
market in public value creation by private and voluntary sector intermediaries – and
directly by citizens
o Deploying proven and detailed citizen-centric change management techniques to help
Figure 4.1 below illustrates the change that Citi-Sense will deliver.
Figure 4.1: overview of the Birmingham Citi-Sense Platform
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As numbered in Figure 4.1, there are five key elements within the Citi-Sense Platform:
1. The Birmingham Smart Data Owners Community: This will be a “coalition of the willing”,
bringing together major service delivery organisations across the city, including the City Council,
utility companies, telecoms providers, universities, transport businesses, health organisations
etc. We have already established the initial core of the Birmingham Smart Data Owners
Community (BSDOC).
2. The Birmingham Data Platform: This will be a middleware platform enabling the sharing and
publishing of data produced by both members and non-members of the Birmingham Smart Data
Owners Community, based on open data standards, web APIs and common taxonomies to
facilitate search. The Platform will not require all data from every location to be integrated into
one big data warehouse – which would be expensive and high maintenance in terms of ensuring
data integrity and that data is up to date. Specific data that is demanded will be accessed from
the disparate systems of data owners, and supplied to end users in near real time.
3. The Citi-Sense Market Enablement Framework: Citi-Sense will invest in enabling a new, thriving
and competitive market place in development of new services and applications based on city
data provided by members of the Birmingham Smart Data Owners Community. We will work
with the business community to encourage uptake, create a framework of data experts to advise
less experienced businesses and use the Council’s procurement to support application
development. The project will develop the legal and commercial framework that needs to be in
place to enable data transactions in a public open as well as commercial or confidential manner.
4. Service Integration and Customer Franchises: While third party innovation, facilitated by the
Market Enablement Framework described above, will be a powerful force for externally-driven
change, Birmingham City Council and its major service delivery partners also have an obligation
to use joined-up city data to improve services directly themselves. To act as best practice
“retailers” of data-rich services, not just as “wholesalers” facilitating innovation by others. Yet it
is difficult to do so from within the existing silo-based organisational structure of the city. The
Citi-Sense project will address this lack of innovation capacity by:
•
Establishing new ‘Customer Franchise’ teams, focused on using city-wide data to create
new value for specific customer groups of the public sector in Birmingham. This
approach has been tested during the DWP Community Based Budgets pilot in
Birmingham, where we focused on delivering integrated services to ‘Troubled Families’
as a specific customer segment. It is recommended as a global best practice approach in
the international ‘TGF’ standard for joined-up service delivery, and is already deployed
effectively in e.g. Hong Kong, Queensland, South Australia1.
•
Deployment of leading-edge semantic web technologies to assist the Customer
Franchise teams in identifying opportunities for user-centric, cross-silo service
transformation, and in rapidly re-designing services in an agile and low cost way.
5. Stakeholder and impact management system: Finally, the Citi-Sense Platform will include a
light-touch, browser-accessed, Cloud-based stakeholder collaboration, programme management
and impact tracking system, which will enable us to maintain full visibility of programme
activities, progress, costs, risks and impacts – even though delivery of the programme will be
1
Transformation Government Framework: see https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tgf/
15
spread across a “virtual” business structure spanning multiple stakeholder organisations within
Birmingham City Council and its public, private and voluntary sector partners.
4.2.2.
A standards-based approach to implementation
In delivering each of these elements of Citi-Sense, we will follow an approach rooted in the use of
open, international standards – at both the technical and the business change level to ensure that
the project’s outcomes are replicable, scalable and interoperable.
At the technical level, the use of service oriented architecture (SOA) and open standards will
determine the Citi-Sense Platform Architecture. The Citi-Sense philosophy about data, technology
and standards is as follows:
•
Citi-Sense will separate the provision of data from the interface with which data is viewed;
and from the analytics and tolls used to manipulate it. Data and services will be exposed via
web-service interfaces (using standards such as SOAP, REST, JSON etc.). Data-viewers hosted
on the Citi-Sense platform will use standard JSR-268 portlets to render data-views to
platform users.
•
The original data owners retain ownership of all data accessible via Citi-Sense.
•
Data owners expose the data and meta-data, which they wish to make available to endusers by implementing web-services hosted on their systems. Data owners are responsible
for the data made available to Citi-Sense users via their web-services.
•
The data web services provided by the data owners are accessed via the Citi-Sense platform,
which provides the necessary use-authentication and any “helper” web-services required to
transform data provided by the data-owners web-services.
•
A Cloud computing infrastructure will be used to offer data users on-demand capacity for
temporarily storing data, running analyses and developing prototype applications to use
data. This platform will also be available for data owners to use, to enrich the data offered to
consumers or as a staging and buffering area.
•
The Citi-Sense platform will be responsible for controlling and monitoring the access to data
web-services by Citi-Sense users and for implementing the necessary permissions and
licensing models by which users will consume data.
The non-exclusive approach ensures that maximum re-use of data can be made by any organisation,
business or citizen, supporting an open and competitive market. For example SME#1 could be
developing a large-screen application that will run on a PC or tablet via a standard browser and
SME#2 could be developing a mobile application, both of which consume the same data by calling
the same data provider web service from Citi-Sense.
The use of a Cloud computing platform allows SMEs to access computing capacity, enabling them to
develop prototypes and explore innovative applications without investing up-front in infrastructure;
and can also be used by data owners to provide a “buffering” service to protect their own systems
from high demand for data.
At the business level, Citi-Sense will also draw on relevant business change and governance
standards. In particular, as we implement organisational change and cross-sector cooperation, in
particular for public sector organisations, we will draw on global standards on management of ITenabled change programmes published by OASIS, the international not-for-profit standards
16
consortium for e-business and e-government, known as “the TGF” (Transformation Government
Framework: see https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tgf/). The aim of the TGF standard is to
bring together best practices on citizen-centric, cross-sectoral, multi-channel, IT-enabled service
transformation and to embed these in a practical framework for action. The TGF content is part of
a range of inputs from established and emerging international frameworks such as the City Protocol
- a new initiative aiming to develop an open, global, and progressive working framework for cities
worldwide to improve environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness and quality of life.
This standards-based approach brings two major benefits:
•
•
First, it de-risks the Citi-Sense project, by ensuring we deploy proven technologies and business
change models and processes which have been demonstrated to succeed and which have been
subject to rigorous testing and due diligence by the international community.
Second, it will guarantee the scalability and transferability of learning from the Birmingham
demonstrator to other cities, because we will operate in a structured, documented and
standardised way.
We have built into our delivery plan for Citi-Sense a stream of work aimed at collaborating with the
Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the BSI British Standards Institute to ensure
that our experience of applying the ’future city’ standards, including TGF, is captured and fed in to
the emerging BSI specification, as well as into the work of the Future Cities Catapult.
4.2.3.
Adding value to existing infrastructure and recently
commissioned projects
Our demonstrator proposal is designed to integrate – over time – with all major systems across the
city. It will therefore add value to all of our existing investment programmes in Future Birmingham,
as demonstrated in Figure 3.3 above. However, a number of those existing programmes and
projects are particularly critical, because they are essential for successful delivery and exploitation of
the Citi-Sense Platform: These “in-flight” projects, which we plan to integrate into the broader CitiSense programme described in this Feasibility Study, represent co-investment by Birmingham worth
£105 million between 2012/13 and 2017/18. These include:
•
Investment aimed at helping innovative, digital SMEs to grow new businesses and added value
on the back of city data opened up through Citi-Sense. This includes provision of equity and loan
finance, and provision of dedicated incubator space on the Science Park. Between 2012-18,
Birmingham will provide a £5 million package of training, advice, consultancy and support to
businesses in our City-Centre Enterprise Zone, bringing significant additionality to Citi-Sense.
•
A wide range of investments in real-time, smart data. We are spending £2.8 billion over the next
few years on projects which will significantly increase the volume and value of the data, which
we will be able to make available to digital entrepreneurs and city innovators via Citi-Sense: for
example through Birmingham Energy Savers, through one of the UK’s largest telecare
programme and through upgrades to our transport information systems. Splitting out the data
stream elements from the wider infrastructure elements of these projects, we estimate this to
represent a smart data investment of some £96 million.
•
Investment in Information Management best practices. Finally, Citi-Sense will leverage the
average £0.5 million pa investment, which Birmingham City Council has made in recent years –
and will continue to make – in ensuring that all of its own information is managed effectively as
a corporate asset to drive customer insight. Birmingham is a national leader in terms of progress
towards full implementation of the Cabinet Office “Information Principles for the UK Public
17
Sector” , including opening up city data for use by citizens and businesses. Details of the work
we have already undertaken to establish the city as a leading implementer of these best practice
implementation principles is at Appendix B. This includes an additional £250,000 investment in
2012 from IBM under its Smarter Cities Challenge, which is helping the Council refine a set of
maps that relate citywide inputs, process and outcomes.
5. Our Integration Challenges
This section describes the three specific challenge areas that our Citi-Sense Demonstrator will focus
on in the first two years to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of our approach. In doing this
it will show the ability to scale up this approach and apply it to other city areas as well as wider
deployment nationally.
5.1.
Challenge 1: SMEs unleashed
The challenge and opportunity
Data is quickly emerging as a key value driver for new and old business. The potential benefits to be
reaped from better understanding the swaths of analytical and system data is limited only by the
imagination we apply to understanding it. Whilst organisations are now starting to understand the
value buried in all their internal data, understanding how that data impacts and is impacted by, the
environment in which they operate can still be an unclear area.
During our consultation, SMEs stressed the following pain points and market failures which restrict
their ability to create value through data:
•
Data mining usually requires the input of the organisation’s (already stretched) IT department,
this usually takes time and far too much effort, not to mention expense.
•
Access to additional data sets which exist outside of the organisation can be very difficult to
obtain.
•
Should an organisation manage to get their hands on the data, it is usually formatted in a
completely different way to their own, trying to marry the two usually then requires further
involvement from IT.
•
SMEs lack access to tools allowing non-IT/technical professionals to quickly run analytical datamash-ups to explore new opportunities.
•
The value of an organisation’s data is limited to the number of applications its staff can unearth
and create, and SMEs in particular face informational market failures in understanding what
public sector, utility and university data could create additional value and innovation if mashedup with the SME’s own data.
What Citi-Sense will do to address this opportunity
Citi-Sense will address these market failures through an offering to Birmingham’s SMEs which will
include:
18
•
Allowing organisations to upload their data to a central DataDen in its raw format.
•
Creating a unified data standard.
•
Allowing organisations to freely browse and access the data sets of other organisations.
•
Allowing organisations to download datasets on the proviso they re-upload a sanitised
version of the raw data in accordance with the unified standard.
•
Creating a visual data mining tool that allows non-technical staff to run complex filters,
searches and data queries based on a visual toolset (PowerPoint for data mining) allowing
them to quickly test and experiment without the need to involve IT.
•
Creating an open marketplace for anyone to be able easily to access the datasets.
•
Establishing a competition for funding to develop new applications in the required service
areas for public service delivery, and hence incentivising innovative entrepreneurs to use the
data available via the Data Den to create new value.
•
Utilising iCentrum and other physical meeting resources to stimulate cross fertilisation
across different sectors for SMEs in Birmingham to take advantage of new infrastructure to
reach-out globally.
•
The Citi-Sense Platform will allow leveraged activity between each of chosen demonstrator
areas to develop new SME activity by out-sourcing innovation in a crowd-sourced manner to
take advantage of all of the various new media channels (social media, app development,
etc.) as part of the Citi-Sense Platform’s ability to liberate data on demand.
Outputs that SMEs Unleashed will deliver
•
Existing SMEs using the Data Den to create new value and new applications, and exploiting
them at city, national and international levels.
•
Additional/new SME start-ups using the Citi-Sense to create new value in their business and
providing solutions to the city challenges outlined in this Feasibility Study.
5.2.
Challenge 2: People travelling in Birmingham
The challenge and opportunity
Over the last decade, Birmingham has developed a number of transport-related data and real-time
information services across all modes of transport, providing these to the end user either directly
from the data owner or via a third party service. Key current projects in this area include:
•
UTCMS - West Midlands Urban Traffic Control Major Scheme: A £26.7 million investment to
provide real-time traffic management data across the seven West Midlands metropolitan
authorities.
•
Multi-modal transport information system: as part of the UTCMS investment, we are
developing the long established MATTISSE system into an open data platform for presenting real
time web information from all transport systems in a way which can be exploited for both
operational and public use and that encourages third parties such as SMEs to create new,
innovative services and applications.
•
“Smarter network, Smarter choices”: a £54 million partnership investment scheme to
encourage smarter travel choices and reduce road congestion across ten strategic corridors into
Birmingham.
19
However, much of the data generated by such investments remains firmly within the transport
sector and very little innovation has been seen in combining transport data with data from other
sectors to create greater added value. In the majority of cases the end users have needed actively to
seek out the data themselves – rather than have the data presented to them through relevant
channels as and when they need it. Also, transport related systems and services largely deal with
incidents and events in a reactive mode, dealing with the aftermath of an incident or event rather
than being ahead of the problem.
Citi-Sense provides the opportunity to deliver a step change in how data, in all its forms, can be used
in an intelligent, effective, manner that engages the end user in a proactive mode that enhances the
efficient use of mobility services for all users whilst delivering tangible benefits to the city. By their
very nature transport systems generate huge volumes of data on a daily basis: the vast majority of
this data is under-utilised or discarded because the city does not have the capacity to exploit the
value of this data, to disaggregate the really useful data or to integrate it with other data sources to
provide enhanced data sets.
In Citi-Sense, the existing and developing transport data and information systems and services
available within Birmingham will be exploited as an integral service platform within the new digital
eco-system. This allows data that is currently confined to transport use on an operational basis, with
some limited information published in the public domain, to be widely used by other service
providers and for transport data itself to be fused with, and enhanced by, other relevant data
sources. This approach locks in the benefit of existing investment and contributes to long term
sustainability by engaging with a wider audience and exploiting new business streams that will
benefit from improved mobility services and open data structures.
What Citi-Sense will do to address this opportunity
With the UTMC and Matisse investments, Birmingham’s transport data is already structured to be
open and interoperable, providing an immediate ability to build new applications and services that
deliver Citi-Sense objectives. The primary focus of the Citi-Sense Franchise for ‘People Travelling in
Birmingham’ is not therefore to reinvent these technical structures, but to focus on user needs and
how these can best be met by stimulating innovative applications delivered from enhanced,
integrated data.
The role of the Customer Franchise will be to:
•
Take the lead on understanding the needs of this customer group and its major sub-segments
(e.g. commuters, new arrivals in Birmingham, freight distributors in Birmingham etc.).
•
Engage the SME community through open data sources that enable new business and revenue
streams.
•
Engage existing business communities in their day to day transport related activities to improve
their efficiency and performance.
•
Engage with major users of the transport network such as the NHS and emergency services to
drive transport efficiency and accessibility to core services.
•
Provide mobility services to the public by efficient multi modal journey planning services that
provides proactive end to end journey management.
•
Contribute to the city environment through improved efficiency of the transport system and
bring together data from transport, health and environment for better planning.
20
Outputs that the ‘People Travelling in Birmingham’ Franchise will deliver
Further work to define detailed priorities will take place in the project initiation phase for Citi-Sense,
informed by detailed customer research. But based on our initial stakeholder engagement, potential
outputs from this Customer Franchise include:
•
Dynamic City Routing: A service utilising in-vehicle/mobile/satnav and home-start web tools for
directions to city centre car parks with spaces near a requested point of interest in minimum
time; dynamically based on changing car park occupancy, current location and congestion, with
the facility to prioritise on additional factors such as cost for expected parking duration,
accessibility and personal safety. Driven by a multi-modal journey time engine, and applicable to
all transport users.
•
Transport Demand: a transport request system that automatically links transport demands with
transport providers and enables eligible individuals to input journey needs and receive the
lowest price, and quality assured transport operators to instantly bid for work.
•
City well-being: development of localised air quality zones based on real time monitoring (and
display) using existing infrastructure with links to network management mitigation actions
including vehicle diversions.
•
Health Service Logistics: the use of traffic flow and congestion data, existing roadworks and
unplanned incident information to route and inform non-emergency patient transport drivers,
facilities and/or patients waiting for pickup of ETA or likely delays providing a new, focused,
information service for regular users of health related services and the supply logistics of health
services.
•
Transport Logistics: the provision of optimal routing for deliveries to large and SME factories,
businesses and retail outlets taking into account just in time delivery schedules and critical path
deliveries. Key to this is the integration of Citi-Sense data sources into routing and scheduling
software packages used by logistics companies and hauliers. This will be delivered as a mutual
benefit service and in return we get their vehicle tracking data back to contribute to the overall
picture of the state of the network. Focus will be to allow SMEs to develop applications that
utilise space on ‘blue-chip’ lorries passing their doors that promotes greater efficiency of small,
owner/operator logistic companies in terms of protecting their revenue streams and maximising
profitability.
5.3.
Challenge 3: Young people with complex needs
Birmingham is a young city. 146,900 of our citizens – or 14.2 % of the population – are aged 16 – 25
years (compared with 11.5% across the UK). 2.3% of this group have complex needs (including
learning difficulties, behavioural problems, and mental or physical disabilities). This group of young
people, though small, accounts for a disproportionate share of public service expenditure in the city,
and faces significant barriers to effective engagement in the Birmingham economy.
Hundreds of organisations play a significant role in delivering services and support to this group of
young people in Birmingham. At present, these organisations largely sit within separate sectoral
silos, with little systematic information sharing and service integration. Significant disconnects exist
within the Council between Children and Adult Services, and also between the Council and the
education, social care and health systems. Data about these young people and their needs is locked
up in vertically integrated delivery systems, with little opportunity either to join up between those
systems or to open them up to innovators and entrepreneurs from outside the systems.
21
Significant work is already in hand to improve coordination and coherence of services to these young
people and their families, for example via: cooperation between the City Council and Health services
to address disconnects through the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, and through a cross-sector
Stakeholders Group established to shape a new Education Strategy for Special Provision. However,
current efforts are hindered because of failures in information management across the system, and
also a lack of a single focus of ownership within the city for this customer group.
What Citi-Sense will do to address this opportunity
Via the Citi-Sense demonstrator, we will develop a smart system that supports working across
organisational boundaries in order better to meet the needs of some of the city’s most vulnerable
young people - reversing a downward spiral for those children and their families with the
consequential further drain on city resources throughout their lives.
At the heart of this will be a new ‘Customer Franchise’ for Young People with Complex Needs. (See
Appendix C for further background on this Customer Franchise model). The role of the Customer
Franchise will be to take the lead on understanding the needs of this customer group, to work across
all city systems to develop as complete a picture as possible of how those systems interact with
these young people, to champion integration of those systems to deliver better outcomes, and to
seek out innovators in the SME and social enterprise communities who can help deliver that
integration.
As a result of the community engagement that has been carried out for the Feasibility Study, we
have already received written statements of support for this work from a wide range of public,
private and voluntary sector organisations which engage with this group of young people and their
families, including: the NHS, colleges, post-16 networks, learning providers, the Birmingham
Voluntary Community, Marketing Birmingham and the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.
Outputs that the ‘Young People with Complex Needs’ Franchise will deliver
•
Integration of key data systems affecting this group. Based on our initial audit, these will
include: X3/Northgate, Carefirst, RBIS, Impulse, Insight, Youth Zone, RAISE, Adult Learning
Database, Vertex (Call Centre), BCC Single Customer Record, NOMIS, DWP Customer Information
Service.
•
A “single view of the customer” for all professionals engaged with this group, with
comprehensive data established, adherence to data-sharing protocols and individual and
organisational confidence.
•
Sign-up to consistent data descriptors, enabling improved provision, commissioning and data
analysis.
•
Comprehensive tracking of all young people, including those with complex needs, on their 16-25
journeys: a single record for every young person of engagement, progression and destinations,
which enables improved safeguarding, participation, marketing opportunities and live baseline
data to further improve the strategic development and targeting of services.
•
Targeted and early intervention across a range of services, with less duplication and more focus
on continuity of intervention i.e. seeing the young person through into adulthood with
appropriate support rather than bouncing between services in ever-decreasing circles.
•
Budgets that are delegated to the hands of users as part of the national Single Plan reforms.
22
•
Roles, responsibilities and clear processes are defined among key services to make available to
all young people and their families a Local Offer, with appropriate provision to meet all complex
needs and enable the city to respond effectively to user choice under the Single Plan.
•
Social entrepreneurs and SMEs have open access to non-personal data, enabling them to add
value to city services.
6. Benefits
Currently, many of our activities are happening in silos, thus missing the chance to combine impact
and create efficiencies. A lack of intelligence due to disparate and insufficient data makes it difficult
to measure progress and make timely decisions, for example on the wider determinants of health
i.e. housing, crime. This conclusion is supported by the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment of the
Health & Well-Being Partnership.
The only sustainable way forward is to change the way we work and maximise the use of digital
technology for generating intelligence and service delivery. This will address targeted intervention,
better resource allocation, improved impact through better alignment and reduced duplication. The
digital ecosystem will be offered to businesses to stimulate economic growth.
Evaluating the full quantitative and qualitative benefits that such an approach will create is a
significant task. If our Citi-Sense proposal to the TSB is successful, then we will work in partnership
with Aston University and the University of Birmingham to conduct a full assessment of the gamechanging nature of Citi-Sense across the social, economic, and environmental elements of
sustainability.
The two universities will undertake this assessment, deploying their complementary strengths in a
single team and developing new methodologies as necessary. In particular:
•
Aston University will investigate (i) economic impacts including incremental value added and (ii)
employment, business response including innovation and new enterprise creation and evolution.
•
The University of Birmingham will investigate (iii) behavioural change related to data availability,
(iv) sustainable infrastructure and utility delivery, and (v) direct and indirect environmental
impacts.
That said, we have made a start on mapping out and quantifying some of the benefits Citi-Sense will
achieve, as discussed below.
6.1.
Benefits to the city economy
We have worked with business case experts and with economists at the universities to quantify the
value of the additionality that the Citi-Sense Platform will bring by accelerating and de-risking our
overall strategy for developing ‘Future Birmingham’. The results of this are shown in the graph at
Figure 6.1 below. The stacked bars in this chart show the total costs of the Citi-Sense investment,
covering both the TSB’s £24 million and those elements of our existing broader programme which
we will integrate directly with the Citi-Sense Programme (as listed in Section 5.3 above); the stacked
area behind the bars shows the phasing of the anticipated impacts on Birmingham’s GVA from here
to 2020.
This analysis shows the Net Present Value of Citi-Sense as £930 million, with a Return on
Investment by 2020 of 719%.
23
The initial business case we have developed needs further refinement, and we will do this in
partnership with Aston University and the University of Birmingham as part of the evaluation work
stream for the Citi-Sense programme. However, we are confident that the results are robust in
terms of identifying some of the key direct drivers of economic value from Citi-Sense and in terms of
relative magnitude. As we develop this into a more dynamic model, we will factor in also the
additional economic benefits that will flow indirectly, from Citi-Sense’s impact on the city’s wellbeing and social inclusion objectives (which have not yet been captured in the initial analysis shown
at Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1: costs and additional benefits of the Citi-Sense Platform
In addition to this broad business case for the Citi-Sense programme as a whole, we have also
started to quantify the narrower impacts we expect to achieve just from the three specific customer
communities being piloted during the initial two years of the demonstrator:
• SMEs unleashed: application of the economic model2 used by the Cabinet Office and the European
Commission to calculate the economic value of genuinely open public sector information, shows
the potential to create additional Birmingham GVA worth £126 million pa through growth in this
sector enabled by Citi-Sense
•
2
People Travelling in Birmingham: Current projects target a 3% reduction in congestion on
strategic corridors and routes in Birmingham; the Citi-Sense mobility package will roll out this
benefit to the broader urban / inter-urban road network:
‒ Citi-Sense impact on strategic corridors and routes is targeted to deliver an additional
3% reduction in congestion.
‒ Citi-Sense mobility and congestion will be an enabling factor in delivering reliable bus
services operating consistently at a typical average commercial speed for local bus
services; and contributing to our target of generating an increase in bus use.
‒ Provide a significant contribution to the evidence base for determining the actions
necessary to reach Government targets for reducing CO2, Air Quality and Noise
emissions thereby identifying and where possible implementing the means to improve
quality of life.
Source: analysis by CS Transform Limited, based on modelling by Pollock, R. (2011), “Welfare gains from opening up
Public Sector Information in the UK”
24
‒
Based upon the transport economic efficiency benefit being delivered by the current
UTC Major scheme the People Travelling in Birmingham franchise will deliver a further,
comparable, economic benefit of £11.2 M.
• Young People with Complex Needs: this group is more than twice as likely as their peers not to be
in employment, education or training – and the preventable knock on effects in terms of stress and
lost income for their families is significant. By targeting a 25% improvement in integration of these
young people into economic activity and a 25% reduction in negative family impacts, the impact of
this Customer Franchise will be3:
‒ £17.1 million savings in public finance (based on avoided costs of health care, social care,
criminal justice etc., benefits savings and lost tax and NI contributions).
‒ £31.7 million boost to the Birmingham economy through the increased lifetime economic
contribution of these young people.
‒ £14.0 million economic and well-being benefit for the families of disabled young people in
Birmingham.
6.2.
Benefits to the quality of life of the citizens
Evidence suggests that more equal societies display greater well-being among their citizens and
foster confidence and greater participation in civic and economic life. By achieving better outcomes,
people, families and communities become more resilient, rely less on the state for assistance and
are able to shape their own futures. Factors such as congestion and mobility, place a significant cost
on regions like Birmingham - both financially and socially and these costs are set to escalate
substantially over the next decade. The Centre for Environmental Change at Lancaster University4
found that most studies of mobility have massively underestimated the social disadvantages related
to Britain’s method of moving around in cars, which lead to other sorts of social decay.
Improvements to mobility increases access to employment, skills training and leisure / retail
opportunities, whilst giving employers access to larger labour markets. Birmingham City Council’s
recent Green Paper “Giving Hope, Changing Lives”5, has highlighted the isolation and disconnect that
residents feel in parts of the city as well as wider research, which reports the impact on mental
health due to reduced accessibility to opportunities, services and social networks and obesity,
particularly significant given recent stats from the Association of Public Health Observatories have
shown the West Midlands as having some of the highest levels of obesity as well as more direct
impact of respiratory conditions from air quality and pollution.
Citi-Sense aims to integrate a diverse range of city systems and processes that impact and deal
directly with our customers, for example housing, health, social care, transport and DWP. By
unlocking the data from these previously disparate systems, and changing the way that we work
together to deliver services, it provides a huge opportunity to radically step change and innovate our
approach to delivering more targeted and personalised customer-centric services both by the public
sector and increasingly the private sector; and crucially connect them to social and economic
opportunities that will improve their quality of life.
3
Source: CS Transform analysis, based on demographic data from Birmingham City Council, and applying assumptions
derived from research done for the Audit Commission in 2010 (“Estimating the life-time cost of NEETs”, Coles, Godfrey,
Keung, Parrott and Bradshaw), and analysis of the family costs of disability published in the DfE March 2011 White Paper,
“Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability.”
4
5
Congestion Charging, Transport Improvements and Manchester (Dr Leif Jerram), University of Manchester
Giving Hope, Changing Lives, Green Paper, Birmingham City Council, October 2012
25
The pilot area for Citi-Sense – Young People with Complex Needs has the potential to be a powerful
exemplar in the first two years of the Demonstrator programme. It has the potential for upscale and
adoption into other areas. For example enabling a better understanding of the interrelationships
that exist between different projects that share common ‘quality of life’ outcomes such as
Birmingham Energy Savers, Universal Credit pilot and Telecare/Telehealth programme. And it has
the potential to effect a step change in achieving a better quality of life for our citizens.
A report by the New Economics Foundation (nef)6, commissioned by Catch 22, has attempted to
measure and value how greater coherence and responsiveness in young people’s services would
contribute to potentially better outcomes through a Social Return on Investment (SROI)
Methodology. SROI provides a method for measuring the social, environmental and economic value
created by an activity and intervention and builds on and also challenges traditional financial and
economic tools such as cost-benefit analysis. For example the total return on investment, with the
value of inputs (i.e. time) estimated at £140 million per year for increased one-to-one support plus
reinvestment of the cost savings from better coordination, has given a return on investment of £5.65
for every £1 invested.
6.3.
Benefits in reducing environmental impact
Modelling the environmental impacts of an enabling infrastructure such as Citi-Sense is extremely
difficult, given the dynamic interplay between city systems and behaviours of system users that are
involved. A university will be take the lead on developing an environmental impact assessment
framework for Citi-Sense, baselining our position and evaluating impact.
On a smaller scale, though, the mobility work programme enables us to focus on the potential of a
number of enabling interventions, services and applications to address congestion issues to optimise
when and how we travel through a multi modal approach and to effect a behaviour change and shift
across the supply chain. As cited earlier in the report, it has been estimated that 30% of all traffic on
the roads at any one time is related to NHS business – hospital and patient transport through to
goods and services. The potential of Citi-Sense to influence and improve logistics in this area is
significant in terms of fuel consumption and carbon emissions, as well as the softer impact on areas
such as safety and minimising accidents through a more controlled flow of traffic. This area will
provide a significant contribution to the evidence base for determining the actions necessary to
reach Government targets for reducing CO2, air quality and noise emissions thereby identifying and
where possible implementing the means to improve quality of life.
6.4.
“Future-proofing” – ensuring benefits for the long term, not just
the short term
We will tap into the expertise of our universities, not simply to evaluate the impacts of Citi-Sense
after they have been delivered (as described in Section 5 above), but also to ensure that “futureproofing” is built into our work from the outset. That is, we will ensure that all major interventions
developed through Citi-Sense are fit for purpose not just against immediate needs, but are also fitfor-purpose in terms of a range of longer term scenarios for the city. Plans will be checked for
future-proofing at an early stage using the "Urban Futures" methodology developed by the
University of Birmingham and partners. This:
Identifies all intended benefits of the intervention
•
6
Improving Services for Young People – An economic perspective, new economics foundation (April 2011)
26
•
For each benefit identifies all necessary conditions (those that that must be in place for the
benefit to be delivered), establishes whether the conditions are in place now (so the
intervention will be successful immediately).
•
Establishes whether they would be present in four extreme, yet plausible, futures that cover the
likely directions in which the world might develop.
7. Barriers
Like all cities, Birmingham faces a series of policy, process, technical, contractual and cultural
challenges that due to historic reasons have entrenched functional service delivery silos and
hampered the development of system-wide collaboration and prevented organisations from joinedup delivery. The main barriers we need to overcome are:
27
•
Strategic Barriers: Although we have a holistic vision and strategy, the inevitable reality is
that the detailed plans for delivering it are not fully integrated. And – critically – our strategy
is not being delivered by one organisation, but many organisations from the public, private
and community and voluntary sector. Each organisation has their aims and priorities. During
implementation of Citi-Sense this could lead to partners withdrawing their involvement due
to changed priorities or integration of systems and release of data that is particularly
important to the organisation internally but without greater value to the wider community.
In response Birmingham City Council has set up a Smart City Commission with cross sector
membership representing key Birmingham stakeholders. This Commission will direct the
Future Cities Demonstrator implementation.
•
Process Barriers: Joining up services between organisations or departments will require
people to work together in new ways and processes to change. As processes are
organisation specific and can be steeped in tradition and organisational culture they are not
only likely to encounter change resistance by staff but could also be incompatible on a
business level. This will impact on the speed with which Citi-Sense can be implemented and
what organisations we can work with in the first instance.
Citi-Sense plans to address this barrier through an incremental approach. The initial partners
are open to change and process improvement and represent major organisations that
deliver citywide services. The creation of ‘customer franchise’ teams to promote cross-silo
working, following the TGF methodology for customer centric service development, provides
a strong framework to achieve change. The teams will be formed of self-selected change
champions that, over time, will bring on board more change resistant players.
•
Data barriers: Many ICT systems and databases in the Council, the transport field and the
NHS are de facto legacy systems. They operate on different standards, use different security
protocols, are structured differently etc. Data output from these systems can be in any
number of formats, which makes data hard to reuse and exchange. On top of this data
quality is variable depending on criticality of the system.
In response Citi-Sense will create mechanisms for data exchange that do not require the
legacy systems to be changed and transform the data output into widely acceptable formats.
•
Language barriers: During the preparation of the feasibility study we have engaged with a
great number of stakeholders from a range of sectors for example people working in the
health sector, council and voluntary organisations. We have spoken to engineers and
academics, carers and housing associations, entrepreneurs and corporates. What has
become clear is that some sectors are so full of terminology and acronyms that it is hard for
the uninitiated to follow a conversation, the same term can stand for different concepts in
different fields and some terms are laden with connotation. Preparing people to work across
silos will have to face this hurdle. We need to invest time at the start of the process to
create a common understanding (if not language) in the multi-disciplinary franchise teams.
•
Technical barriers: On a technical level we need to address the challenge of interpreting and
aligning data from different sources, which are bound up with the above languages. We will
address this through use of taxonomies and ontologies.
•
Barriers through lack of Skills and Knowledge: We assume that access to more data will
lead to better intelligence. However, lack of skills inside organisations is a great barrier to
better decision making. Evidence from professional infographics designers and data
visualisation specialists in Birmingham’s SME community shows that organisations such as
the NHS and local councils are becoming more aware of the value of data. A growing
appetite by services and management to be able to quickly interrogate databases, create
reports and graphics is hindered by a lack of general understanding and skills how to do this.
Mistakes are made when people start interpreting and correlating data from various sources
e.g. for funding bids, if they don’t understand its limitations and had no previous training in
doing so. We plan to address this through a number of measures, including ‘data surgery’
events to educate the ‘do-it-yourself’ person and provision of a procurement framework for
local data specialists.
In developing our strategy for tackling these barriers, we have been informed by a risk assessment
for the broader Future/Smart Birmingham programme, which was undertaken by the public and
private sector members of Birmingham’s Smart Commission. That assessment used the framework
of nine Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for cross-organisation IT-enabled change programmes as set
out in the TGF.
The charts below shows the summary results of a detailed survey of Commission members,
presenting their assessment of the extent to which: a) each risk area is important for Birmingham to
manage successfully in delivering its Future City strategy; and b) the extent to which members’
believe that the city already has the capability to manage this risk area successfully.
28
Figure 7.1 Evaluation of Critical Success Factors
Giving equal weighting to the Importance and Capability score for each CSF, the three highest risk
factors are (in descending order of risk):
29
•
The difficulty of bringing together effectively all the skills we need to succeed.
•
Future-proofing our work, so that it delivers an interoperable and scalable approach for the
future not just meets immediate needs.
•
Maintaining a clear user focus throughout the Future City deployment.
8. Summary
In conclusion, our Feasibility Study has shown very wide stakeholder support for the Citi-Sense
proposal we have submitted to the TSB. We believe Citi-Sense fully delivers against all the criteria
set out by the TSB for the Future Cities demonstrator, as summarised in the table below.
TSB criterion
How Citi-Sense delivers this
Show integration
of multiple
systems in novel
ways
Citi-Sense will provide a business change and technology platform for joining up data
from multiple systems to enable service innovation. We will use proven standards in
delivering this. The novelty comes from a) integrating a whole set of best practices in a
way which no other city has done previously and b) the scale of our ambition and of the
city-wide partnership which is committed to delivering this integration.
Tackle specific
challenges in the
host city
Citi-Sense will tackle the single biggest challenge we have identified to delivery of Future
Birmingham: our ability to integrate systems and data join-up across organisational silos
within the city. And it will do so in a way which is focused entirely on delivering the
core strategic outcomes for the City (economic recovery, safe green communities, wellbeing, and social equity). In the first phase of Citi-Sense (2013-2015) we will
demonstrate the success of this approach in particular in solving challenges for three
specific communities which are of high priority in terms of these strategic outcomes:
SMEs; 16-25 year olds with complex needs; People Travelling in Birmingham.
Have the potential
for a large impact
Citi-sense will become the digital ecosystem for all of Birmingham, touching the lives of
1.1 million citizens and 42,000 businesses. Our modelling shows that Citi-Sense impacts
will add more than £300 million of additional GVA to our economy by 2020.
Combine
investment in city
infrastructure with
the demonstrator
Citi-Sense will add value to existing investments in Smart Birmingham worth over £6
billion. In addition, in delivering Citi-Sense we are integrating into the delivery project
existing activities and co-investment by the City Council and our partners worth £105
million.
Allow innovative
companies to test
their ideas
We have already identified a range of world-leading West Midlands and UK-based SMEs
who are keen to integrate their ideas and innovations with Citi-Sense to help deliver our
vision. We will establish a dedicated procurement framework to help us draw on this
expertise in an agile way as we implement Citi-Sense, as well as to encourage and
incentivise new data business creation in our student community and research base.
Support
innovations in
services and how
the city organises
Citi-Sense is much more about innovation in governance that in it is about new
technology. In particular, the Birmingham Smart Data Owners Community, the Market
Enablement Framework, and the creation of a new, virtual business layer of Customer
Franchises across the existing silos of the city, represent major strategic changes to the
way the city as a whole organises its delivery – changes which will drive innovation in a
citizen-centric, entrepreneurial and market-based way on a city-wide basis.
Have the potential
for further
development
The first two years of Citi-Sense will demonstrate the model and the business case for
change, delivering real impacts in the three focus communities. But it is then an
approach that we intend to use to drive innovation across the city on a longer term
basis. And by taking a standardised approach – based on open global standards at the
technical and also the business change levels - the results will be scalable and reusable
for other cities.
30
Appendix A: Strategic objectives for Birmingham
31
Appendix B: Birmingham’s journey towards best practice
Information Management
32
Appendix C: Background on Customer Franchises
The use of “Customer Franchise” teams as described in our proposal is a TGF-recommended best
practice7 already being deployed effectively in for example, Hong Kong, Queensland, South Australia,
Croatia and New Zealand. The TGF describes Customer Franchises as “a business model which
permits the joining-up of services from all parts of government and external stakeholders in a way
that makes sense to citizens and businesses, yet without attempting to restructure the participating
parts of government.”
These teams are known as “Customer Franchises” because they are:
•
•
Customer-focused: That is, they are empowered to:
‒ “Own” that customer segment on behalf of the city as a whole – giving a strong customer
voice within the system for the first time
‒ Research, understand, engage with and listen to their customer segment
‒ Integrate data, information and services from delivery partners across all sectors of the city
in a way which best meets the needs of that customer segment
‒ Stimulate and support the emergence of community groups, social enterprises and SMEs
who can provide new innovative services to the segment
‒ Act as drivers and champions of change across the city in order to better deliver against
customer needs in future.
A franchised business model: Experience in other jurisdictions shows that this model is:
‒
low cost – because the Customer Franchise teams sit within the existing silo
organisations and budgets (i.e. a franchised, distributed ownership model, which leverages
existing resources rather than creating a new organisation)
‒
low risk – because they operate to a proven and standardised business process,
and can be implemented in a
phased manner rather than
as a big bang change (like
franchised businesses in the
private sector)
‒
high impact –
because they are
empowered to champion and
drive change on a city-wide
basis rather than simply act
within their silo.
The diagram illustrated this role in
relation to the Franchise for Young
People with Complex Needs which
will be established in Birmingham as
one of the initial pilots in the CitiSense project.
7
See TGF Core Patterns 6 (“Transformation Business Model”) and 7 (“Franchise Marketplace”), in Transformational
Government Framework (TGF)Pattern Language: Core Patterns v1.0 http://docs.oasis-open.org/tgf/TGF-PLCore/v1.0/cs01/TGF-PL-Core-v1.0-cs01.pdf
33