London Borough of Ealing

In a ‘digital discovery’ we have blueprinted the Special Education Needs (SEN) Assessment Service. The blueprinting of the current journey has highlighted multiple ‘pain points’ for staff and customers and is expensive in both organisational time and effort.

Now knowing the ‘pain points’ we have identified how a digital analytics and Artificial Intelligence based solution could remove paperwork and increase the speed of creation of Education Health and Care Plans.

Having reviewed current suppliers of systems, it is evident that the current providers do not meet the needs of the process that we require.

We want to build out a wire frame solution, testing the data analytics and algorithms that would drive a semi-autonomous system enabling our professional staff to more from the ‘assess and plan’ end of our process to the value adding part of ‘doing and reviewing’ for our SEN clients.

Discovery evidence

As an organisation we realise that there are huge benefits in moving to digitally enabled services.

In knowing this we have commissioned several ‘digital discoveries’ in areas that we suspect the underlying system and its processes can be dramatically improved.

The ‘discoveries’ act to blueprint the service and identify improvement steps that can be taken that would transform the service in the short, medium and long term. The blueprints included:

• Clarity of Purpose.
• Scope.
• User Research and Blueprinting.
• Persona Generation.
• Wardley Mapping.
• Improvement Planning.

The improvement plans that have been created cover changes to process, behaviours and technology including the assessment of current digital solutions available in the open market.
Our realisation in the case of these solutions is that:

• We are constrained by an oligopoly of providers, as we and they operate to avoid risk.
• Innovation is incremental and often only on a ‘me too’ basis.
• Upgrades and changes cost time and money and solutions do not meet modern system expectations.

We have acted to make the short-term changes, however, we realise that in the long-term the solution to our problem is probably to build our own system with interested partners who have the same needs and cost pressures.