Minutes:
The Committee considered the undernoted report:
“1.0 Purpose
1.1 To update Members on the final draft of IBM’s ‘Belfast Smarter Cities challenge’ report who are seeking for approval for its publication. Members are asked to consider the report’s recommendations for the city and the Council. Following approval IBM will publish the report on their website.
1.2 Officers are currently considering the implications of the recommendations, particularly in relation to how they might inform the design and implementation of Community Planning. IBM are offering some limited follow-up support to facilitate this work.
2.0 Background
2.1.Belfast was one of 31 cities to be awarded a Smart Cities Challenge grant in 2013. A team of six IBM experts travelled to the city to do the following:
(i) To propose a smarter and more effective approach to planning and decision making and provide a single view of activity based on multiple data sources from several agencies.
(ii) To do this in a manner that allowed for greater engagement and awareness of services by the public.
(iii) To do this in the context of health inequalities and the inter-connections with segregation and persistent disadvantage (while focusing on parts of west and east Belfast to gather their evidence.)
2.2.Whilst the researchers focused on particular issues in west and east Belfast, their findings and recommendations were intended from the outset to address the wider context (ie, how to tackle long term problems in a city with complex governance arrangements involving many organisations with no shared accountability for citywide impact or performance).
2.3.IBM presented their initial findings at a conference hosted by the Lord Mayor in October 2013 and subsequently prepared a draft report. Following a number of minor edits which were based on feedback from council officers, they are now seeking approval from the council to make their independent report publicly available on the Smarter Cities Challenge website: smartercitieschallenge.org/smarter-cities.html
3.0 Key issues
3.1 The final report is structured as follows:
- The terms of the challenge the council presented to them
- Their findings (based on a literature review and interviews with stakeholders including those working in east and west Belfast)
- Their thirteen recommendations for the city
- An outline roadmap for implementation
3.2 The recommendations describe the following:
- A process to put in place a Community Planning model for the city which encourages partnership working and engagement with the resident;
- An approach to establishing shared measures of impact and performance across the city;
- The ICT infrastructure for managing decision-making data.
3.3 Each of these three phases are considered in more detail below:
(1) People: Create a collaborative planning environment (Community Planning)
3.4 This phase sketches out an approach to Community Planning, community engagement and the structures they might require. It assumes the active involvement of community planning partners (particularly in terms of shared decision-making and data collection). The Council has already been calling for stronger outcomes-based accountability and performance management arrangements with our CP partners and this report offers independent credibility to this argument.
(2) Process: Define an evidence-based decision-making
3.5 This phase is about building on the community planning structure to create a shared performance management and outcomes-focused culture that allows partners to make decisions based on clear data.
3.6 To measure such shared outcomes the authors make the case for common metrics (such as a ‘Locus of Control’ or ‘Wellbeing’) that make it possible for many organisations to jointly measure if their interventions are actually making a difference to people’s lives.
3.7 The ‘common metric’ idea was warmly received when raised at the IBM conference and OFMdFM are currently testing Locus of Control/Wellbeing alongside a second measure proposed by QUB (‘Self Efficacy’) as project and programme evaluation measures for Delivering Social Change across NI. The council is also looking at opportunities to try out such common metrics in preparation for measuring performance of a future Community Plan.
(3) Technology: Management system for providing services and consolidating information
3.8 At the heart of the report is a recommendation for suitable software infrastructure to manage the necessary data associated with future Community Planning. The authors identify three key pieces of technology:
A web-based portal (which Community, Provider and City hubs to capture and share results between partners and with citizens)
Analytics capabilities within the system to analyse the data to support decision making
A database to capture and manage the data
3.9 There are no indicative costs given against these technology proposals but this element is likely to prove expensive to deliver. Some aspects of the technology solution (such as cloud-based technologies) would have significant capital and ongoing revenue costs.
3.10 Future Council decisions around technology solutions will need to be in the broader context of our new ICT strategy and our future approach to managing data under Community Planning. There are a number of strands of work within the draft ICT strategy that may have particular significance including a future approach to cloud-based community engagement; the development of social media-based sentiment analysis; and collaboration on the development of a citywide data set.
3.11 Given the likely cost, and the need to involve Government departments in the creation and management of the data, it would also be important to involve departments such as OFMdFM who may be considering a regional approach to managing outcome and performance data in relation to Delivering Social Change and other social programmes.
Broader issues for council
3.12 The final IBM report makes an important independent contribution to the council’s thinking about the design of a Community Planning process for the city. A number of the recommendations, particularly those regarding testing common metrics and new approaches to using shared data for joint decision-making, are likely to prove influential.
3.13 In terms of the recommendations relating to technology and city data management, issues of appropriate scale are important. For example, Government Departments, who will contribute to community planning in the city, are unlikely to enter into separate data and performance management arrangements with each of the new eleven Community Planning partnerships across Northern Ireland. They are more likely to support a single regional approach. However, this might provide an opportunity for Belfast City Council to act as a pathfinder for such a solution.
Next steps
3.14 IBM have offered some limited follow-up support to the Council to help us determine the change management challenges that the recommendations represent for the organisation. This work will consider how we can use the recommendations to support the design of the infrastructure required to deliver community planning over the longer term.
3.15 Over the medium term officers will look to test individual aspects of the recommendations. This is likely to include finding opportunities to work with partners to measure our impact using a common metrics and exploring how we can effectively manage this data.
3.16 In the short term, following Committee approval, IBM will make the report publicly available. Officers will then contact organisations and individuals who contributed to the research to share with them the recommendations.
4.0 Resource Implications
4.1 None at present.
5.0 Equality and Good Relations Implications
5.1 There are no equality or good relations implications at this stage.
6.0 Recommendations
6.1 Members are asked to note the contents of the final Smarter Cities report and give approval for IBM to now make it publicly available.”
During discussion, several members expressed disappointment at the recommendations contained in the report and suggested that its publication be deferred.
The Director of Health and Environmental Services pointed out that the report was in the ownership of IBM and that officers would speak to Party Groups about their concerns and bring back to the Committee a report on how the recommendations could be taken forward before publication of the IBM report.
The Committee agreed to this course of action.
(Councillor Hendron in the Chair.)
Supporting documents: