John Galsworthy, Head of Business Services at Islington Council spoke at the CIO Event, March 2013

1. Making Savings in Local
Government using BI
John Galsworthy
Head of Parking & Business Service

2. The Background
•Local Authorities have to make year on
year savings
•Constrained by no loss of service
•More people with needs appearing
•Focus on efficiency and effectiveness
•Limited finance to invest in change

3. In the beginning
•Never heard of BI
•Lots of data in lots of formats no
metadata
•Had limited KPIs on services
•Knew I needed a dashboard to visualize
the service
•Needed to deploy to all staff

4. Understanding the data
•4 levels of data and process
•The strategic level
•The service level
•The frontline
•Applications and workflow
•All our data had the same core components
•Person/place
•Service/Activity
•Date/Time
•Cost/Value

5. Strategic BI
High level data aggregations giving KPIs or
correlations for investigation

6. Service BI
Is my Service running well?
Management by exception

7. Frontline BI
Resource deployed and effective? Real-time info

8. Workflow
BI as a web application with real time updates of
databases.

9. Getting started
• Needed quick return so didn’t have time or money to
build a data warehouse or universe
• No meta data so had to reverse engineer databases
• Started on simple KPIs at service level that created
quick wins
• Needed to deploy to lots of uses via web platforms in
multiple locations and mobile
• Real-time info required for the workflow so had to pull
data direct from the systems
• System deployed in 1hr, first report built in 5mins
• No external resource needed to install on configure

10. What I got back
20 FTE £760k Reduction in staff in both frontline
and back office
30% £200k Reducing wasted time increased
productivity productivity of resource
26% Increase Priceless! Customer satisfaction improvement
for the change in services and
improved output
Fixed broken £350k BI identified where processes where
processes failing in the background and what
processes were obsolete
6% £1.2m Using intel to track customers down,
improvement detect fraud and miss-use.
in recovery of
income
Smarter £300k Integrated management on contracts
working as BI was doing the checking

11. Independent check
Nucleus Research did a case study on
the project
Saving made was year on year, over 5
years the ROI
6400%