Towards a fair, healthy, inclusive and sustainable city

The need for a holistic view of the child

Ann James, head of children services at Bristol City Council, underlines the importance of providing extra support to children and families so that children and communities can thrive.

Access to information is essential for effective safeguarding and the prioritisation of services.

“Traditionally, children services have relied on a referral,” explains Ann James, “when we do hear a worry for a child, we need to be able to see a whole picture of the child, understand who else is involved in that family and make an assessment of how serious those worries are.”

To aid these efforts, the council saw an opportunity to create a common data platform in Microsoft Azure. Like many organisations, Bristol City Council had many disparate systems in use across its operations and this had created silos of information. 

Bristol’s digital transformation

“The council had a culture of IT being seen as a very ‘back office’ function and not really being seen as an enabler to the business,” says Simon Oliver, director for digital transformation at Bristol City Council. “Bristol City Council has been on a journey of improvement over the last five years.”

As part of its digital transformation, the council worked to lift data from its silos and bring it together in a unified way. It worked with itelligent-i to deploy a data and analytics platform in Microsoft Azure, using both Azure Data Lakes and Azure Data Factory. Automated updates from databases, shared files and open-source data are saved to secure storage where analysts can securely and easily work with the information. The analytics team uses Microsoft Power BI to develop fantastic, visual and interactive reports and dashboards. Now, children services have a single view of each child across all the disparate systems.

“The Microsoft Azure solution has been revolutionary for Bristol City Council, “ says Simon Oliver. “We are now able to see the outcomes of the decisions we give. And by being able to do that at scale we’re able to make decisions based on what will happen.”

Digitalisation drives improvements

The improvements achieved from the migration of data and solutions to Microsoft Azure have gone beyond delivering the holistic view of the child desired by children services by using Azure Data Lakes Storage and Databricks.

“Microsoft pushed us forward in terms of our resilience and our security,” says Simon Oliver. 

New possibilities to work with the organisational data to deliver better outcomes for Bristol City residents have been revealed and are being explored. Ann James says, “Now, we’ve got that potential to grow and go further in our use of data so that, together, we’re able to deliver on our vision for the city – one within which no one is left behind and everybody has the opportunity to achieve their potential.”