West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority

Once all our Digital Services are built “Lego style” from a common set of building bricks, incredibly transformative ways of working become possible!

We strongly believe in the disruptive benefits of defining a Digital Service declaratively via open standards –decoupling the intent of a Digital Service from the technology/procurement/vendor lock-in etc. that’s traditionally required to deliver it.

We have termed these holistic definitions “Blueprints”.

Blueprints are designed to meet a growing demand for:

• Interoperability
• Collaboration
• Shared services
• Cost savings
• Data governance
• Modern deployment strategies
• Agile working

Our three-year-long Discovery phase has led to the development of our open source Tymly platform. Tymly takes any number of Blueprints and delivers them as Digital Services throughout teams in an organisation and beyond.

We’re currently in Beta at West Midlands Fire Service, ahead of a wider roll-out to three further Fire Services.

We envisage Blueprints to be of use to any organisation or collective and welcome collaboration with any sector or Department.

The next iteration of Tymly will focus on real-time updates, richer UI content, drag-and-drop blueprint editors, alignment to the latest open standards, improved User Experience, improved developer resources, User Research for an audience beyond our organisation and establishing a Tymly community.

Discovery evidence

We have a strong 15-year history of building award-winning Low Code platforms for the Fire Service. The forerunners of Tymly have enabled us to orchestrate 3 million processes from over 4,000 users via a unified platform. Due to the close-proximity of our user-base during this time, our User Research to-date has been of an iterative, evolving nature – but we now capture these requests as User Stories.

As per Government Best Practice, the many software packages that form Tymly have been developed entirely in the open, on GitHub:

https://github.com/wmfs

We have already published Blueprints to help organisations work with familiar data sets:

• Addressbase Premium Gazetteer (Ordnance Survey)
• Scores on the Doors (Food Standards Agency)
• OFSTED
• Care Quality Commission

The use of these Blueprints has received specific recognition from GDS:

https://twitter.com/edent/status/997038944482217984

We’ve blogged about Blueprints:

https://tymly.io/blog/the-reckoning/

And Tweeted about Blueprints:

https://twitter.com/TymlyJS/status/1009923692753768450

We’ve fostered wider discussion in the approach via GDS, for example:

https://github.com/alphagov/open-standards/issues/51

And are starting to encourage others to take a similar path:

https://tymly.io/blog/752/

However, it has been apparent the Central apparatus required for us to easily/effectively engage with a wider audience on this topic is limited. For us, this is the appeal of the Local Digital initiative.