“WE’VE LEARNED SO MUCH ABOUT HOW TO IMPROVE IT SERVICE DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY.”

When an incident occurs, Surrey County Council’s Emergency Management Team often has a role to play alongside the emergency services.

In the winter floods of 2013-14, it had to help the county’s most vulnerable people by:

• Gathering data about them from multiple sources
• Integrating and validating it, and distributing it to the field.

“Our team met best-practice standards to process most datasets within an hour of receipt, but we wanted to do more to overcome the limitations of the manual process,” says Mark Edridge, Digital Programme Manager at the council.

The council decided to make things happen faster by developing an application to test new ways of working.

The main challenges were:

• Find a cost-effective infrastructure to support an agile development project
• Be able to deploy infrastructure resources quickly, alter them easily and turn them off without penalty
• Avoid putting personal data about vulnerable people at risk

After eight weeks the council had a functioning prototype that took minutes to:

• Import, merge, cleanse and validate data

• Display the results in a series of dashboards suited to the Emergency Management Team’s responder levels

The next step was a beta solution. “We saw the flexibility of the UKCloud platform,” says Edridge. “The technical architecture was quite different from the alpha solution, but the developers simply made the required infrastructure changes on the fly.”

Once the solution is migrated to in-house production environment, the council will switch off the cloud infrastructure. “We’ll retain the ability to call on development environment services from UKCloud should we need it,” says Edridge.