We have had an LGA peer review this week for our DDaT capabilities, so lots of time has been spent organising that, but will be worth it. With us 6 months into our insourcing, it’s a good time to reflect and look to the future (and hopefully help put some structure to the hundreds of thoughts milling in my head!)
We’ve also changed our management team meetings to give a bit of structure. Standing agenda items are:
- SMT actions update
- General update by me (including anything from our corporate team)
- Round Robin by all members of SMT
Then one of these every meeting (so they come round once a quarter)
- Budgets (revenue and capital position)
- Risks
- People (wellbeing, learning needs and vacancies)
- Review of strategic roadmap
- OKR progress (our OKRs are not SMART, but it’s a starting point to bring the new service together around some shared goals. Each OKR has a roadmap behind it)
- Contract renewals (forward planning)
Technology roadmap
We had a workshop facilitated by our partners Softcat to get us thinking about our technology roadmap. My head of Digital and Data Solutions, Hazel Lunn, has done some great work developing our Architectural principles and is working on setting up our Architectural Design Authority – using DeBonos thinking hats as a framework (Luton has a history of hat making so it seemed very apt – but is also about facilitating culture change so we look at things in the round, and not only from a technology or security perspective).
Download our architectural principles
Download our forward plan and OKRs
AI
And lastly, we’re kicking of a CoPilot pilot and we agreed two AI projects with the University of Bedfordshire. The first is scoping the areas of opportunity for different types of AI. The second is deploying a LLM (ChatGPT or another) locally. This means staff will be able to use generative AI securely, with the information staying on our domains. Whilst use cases such as drafting job descriptions or writing adverts are low risk, a locally hosted LLM opens up use cases such as creating child-friendly letters from social care case notes, summarising confidential information and many more. The second phase of this project will be looking at training the LLM on Luton data which can open up even more opportunities. Exciting!