Awarded to Bodvoc Ltd

Start date: Monday 28 September 2020
Value: £28,000
Company size: SME

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council (TMBC)

Data Standards to share Events & Actions, Circumstances & Risk Factors to find vulnerable households

9 Incomplete applications

7 SME, 2 large

5 Completed applications

5 SME, 0 large

• Published: Monday 17 August 2020
• Deadline for asking questions: Monday 24 August 2020 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Monday 31 August 2020 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Summary of the work: Central Government (MHCLG) funded project to develop data standards to share event, circumstance and risk attributes for vulnerable people and households. Further standards and protocols to share interventions and actions across multiple agencies. Mapping out data flows for some core vulnerability scenarios including COVID19 and Homelessness Prevention.
• Latest start date: Monday 28 September 2020
• Expected contract length: Between 8 and 12 weeks
• Location: No specific location, for example they can work remotely
• Organisation the work is for: Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council (TMBC)
• Budget range: Up to £28,000 ; (Note that we will not be paying for additional expenses.)

About the work

• Why the work is being done: TMBC have been awarded funding from the government's COVID19 challenge (https://mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/07/27/11-projects-funded-through-local-digital-covid-19-challenge/) to propose national data standards that improve a locality’s ability to make use of data to support vulnerable people and households.; ; This work has been inspired by the COVID19 epidemic and will make local councils better prepared for future outbreaks as well as improving other types of vulnerability such as homelessness prevention.; ; The conditions of the funding, plus the urgency of the need to reduce hardship, requires that standards have been proposed and trialled by 7th December 2020
• Problem to be solved: Local Councils need to identify vulnerable people and households, and then lead a multi-agency, and community response to assessing needs and providing support and interventions.; ; This has involved blending attributes from data sourced from many local and national organisations.; ; Councils have found that; • datasets containing vulnerability attributes need to be discovered and shared;; • attributes are hard to extract from many datasets due to inconsistent semantics, quality, and governance;; • matching datasets is imprecise due to inconsistent use of identifiers and lack of biographic standards;; • action tracking in real-time across many agencies requires a secure standards based ecosystem, rather than shared product.
• Who the users are and what they need to do: As a Council Data Analyst, I need to discover, match, and blend attributes from many sources so that people and households vulnerable to a specific risk can be identified and prioritised.; ; As a community support officer, I need to monitor life events, circumstances and risk-factors so that I can apply the right intervention.; ; As a community support officer, I need to see up-to-date information about needs-assessments and actions to support households, so that I can take the right action. ; ; As an IG specialist, I need to request data from other agencies, so that data is used and handled appropriately.
• Early market engagement: None
• Any work that’s already been done: We are working with Huntingdonshire District Council who have established a risk score methodology founded on a core-set of ‘life events’ such as Job loss, family breakdown, bereavement. Huntingdonshire have a Vulnerability Management App which they intend to modify to incorporate the proposed standards for vulnerability attributes, action recording’, and multi-agency collaboration.; ; We have worked with some of our project partner councils to draw out the common data problems that they faced during the COVID19 outbreak and other vulnerability scenarios such as homelessness.; ; The approach to standards is in line with the iStandUK vision for data sharing outlined in ; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K2OGmya48X0vrqyVlbRM9vD9BFMZ9yyaY_aRiofwNoU/edit?usp=sharing
• Existing team: You will be working alongside our team which includes direct staff from partner councils including; ; Project Sponsor - CIO of Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and chair of iStandUK; Product Owner - CDO of Sedgemoor District Council and director of standards for iStandUK; ; Project Management and support is from the iNetwork Partnership office from Tameside Council; ; We will be generating and validating requirements and success criteria with partners including NHS Digital, DWP, MHCLG, DCMS, Government-Digital-Service, LGA, CRISIS, TechUK; ; Core requirements come from Huntingdonshire District Council.; ; Partners to the iStandUK.org board are GMCA, North Yorkshire CC, Bolton Council, Sedgemoor District Council.
• Current phase: Alpha

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: Partner councils are based in Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Bolton, North Yorkshire, Bridgwater, Huntingdon
• Working arrangements: Over 8 to 12 weeks, we envisage between 40 and 50 days of participation from the supplier; ; leading on; ; • proposing re-usable data standards and protocols to communicate event, circumstance, risk-factor attributes for a person or household; • proposing data standards and protocols for multi-agency action tracking; • mapping out and visualising key data flows and stakeholders; ; Providing support to; ; • set requirements and success criteria from the Huntingdonshire project, and other partners; • research existing applicable standards; • establish standards and an Information Governance framework to discover, assess, share, join data; • take part in fortnightly online show-and-tell events
• Security clearance: N/A

Additional information

• Additional terms and conditions: N/A

Skills and experience

Buyers will use the essential and nice-to-have skills and experience to help them evaluate suppliers’ technical competence.

• Essential skills and experience:
  • Experience of developing open standards
  • Experience of developing REST APIs to open standards
  • Experience of developing ‘in the open’, using tools such as Github
  • Experience of implementing open standards into a technical architecture
  • Experience of master data management
  • Follow agile project management methodologies
• Nice-to-have skills and experience:
  • Experience of managing a metadata repository
  • Developed a service to meet the national, or local government digital service standard
  • Developed REST APIs to Government Standards
  • Supported a local authority during the COVID19 outbreak
  • Demonstrable experience of applying the HL7 FHIR protocol
  • Experience of mapping public sector data flows and Information Governance Requirements

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.

• How many suppliers to evaluate: 3
• Proposal criteria:
  • Understanding of the data issues faced by councils and their partners when coping with the COVID19 outbreak, and tackling vulnerability in general.
  • Proposed approach to developing applicable standards and protocols
  • Capacity and Value for money
  • Skills and Experience of the Team
  • Examples of data standards that the supplier has been involved with
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • The focus of the supplier on the public sector
  • Readiness to work with our team, our partners, and other suppliers
  • Approach to working in the open
• Payment approach: Capped time and materials
• Additional assessment methods: Presentation
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  60%

  Cultural fit

  20%

  Price

  20%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. How does the budget and timescales tie in with normal GDS style alpha work?: The budget and timeline is based on the MHCLG award. Given the urgency of the challenge, MHCLG have advised that this accelerated approach will not require the normal level of analysis and business support. We are taking user-needs directly from the Huntingdonshire project, as well as feedback from our own project partners. ; MHCLG - These projects need to deliver as quickly as possible with the timescales reflecting this urgency. We require tangible outputs to solve these problems and also to indicate what might need funding in the future.
• 2. To what extent would you be happy to draw on other existing standards?: We welcome incorporating existing standards, so long as they are ‘open standards’. We are also interested to build on existing good practice that can become the basis for open standards. The standards we propose must support interoperability across products and platforms to be scalable and replicable across organisations and agencies.
• 3. We missed the opportunity to join the Q&A session on the 21st August. Will a recording or the presentations and questions asked from the session be made available?: The two questions that were asked have been repeated, and answered here. ; ; The Q&A presentation only contained content from the Digital Marketplace posting - nothing new was introduced.
• 4. Your question on "Supported a local authority during the COVID19 outbreak"; can we refer examples from other countries or strictly within UK?: We can consider an example that is non UK.
• 5. Please elaborate on the standards required to develop Rest APIs to Government.: HM Government have published guidance on how to develop public sector APIs including https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gds-api-technical-and-data-standards
• 6. Please describe “in the open” for the question: Experience of developing ‘in the open’, using tools such as Github.: HM Government provide some advice on ‘in the open’ at https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2017/09/04/the-benefits-of-coding-in-the-open/; ; This is to mean that early outputs are shared with a wide audience to encourage feedback.
• 7. Please describe “open standard”, and what are the preferred technologies?: HM Government define open standards at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-principles/open-standards-principles.; ; Government standards are typically written in well known schema definition languages. Government advice is to document APIs using the open API specification ( aka Swagger ).; ; Government is promoting a Metadata language - see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/record-information-about-data-sets-you-share-with-others