Turning the gas up to 11 at Norfolk County Council

The Coronavirus pandemic accelerated the council’s digital transformation programme taking teams from ‘quill and parchment’ into a modern, future-proofed environment with RPA, IoT and O365

Norfolk County Council has recently undergone a significant transformation, accelerated by the Coronavirus pandemic which ‘turned the gas up to 11' on the programme, according to Kurt Frary, CTO and Deputy Director of Information Management & Technology at the organisation.

Frary explains that the pandemic showed council leaders that they needed to think differently.

"At the start of the pandemic we realised things needed to change. We've got 7,500 staff, and most of them were working from home with no access to the usual on-premise tools. So we needed to look at our connectivity and broader technology, otherwise we'd never be able to delivery digital services," says Frary.

Document management was one of the big needs with printing unsurprisingly 90 per cent down compared to pre-pandemic levels.

"We had to look at document management including how they were circulated, signed, posted and tracked. Like all councils we have stacks of paperwork which needs to get to the hands of the right people, which is far harder when everyone's at home."

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The project was led by Gerry Baker, digital transformation and print projects manager at the council.

"We looked at it like a box of lego bricks, with a number of digital tools available to us to pull out," says Baker. "Covid turned the gas up to 11 in that we rapidly accelerated the digital transformation programme."

One success of this acceleration was the organisation's rollout of Microsoft O365, which had been intended to run for a year, but was completed in six weeks.

"One of the drivers of the acceleration was the legal team," continues Baker. "They had a need to issue corporately signed, stamped and sealed documents. That includes things like contracts and Deeds of Transfer - documents with a big wax seal on them. So we had an urgent need to stop people going into our buildings, but a corporate need to continue essential services.

"So we rolled out Adobe Sign for the legal team and integrated it with a dashboard and Microsoft Power Automate and the broader O365 stack. That took them from almost the quill and parchment era into the modern age. Previously everything was manual, they had a book and they just wrote in it who had stamped and sealed what. So we took that as a process and digitised the whole thing using Adobe Sign and O365."

The project was completed in a matter of weeks, helping the council to achieve Covid compliance and saving staff hours at the same time.

"We saved two thirds of the processing time, which means four-and-a-half days per month for processing those types of document," Baker adds.

But what did the users make of the new tools, was there any cultural resistance?

"They reacted with shock and awe," explains Baker. "We handheld them through the process and made it as simple as possible. We created some internal champions, just a couple of willing people who helped to bring the rest on board."

However it wasn't all plain sailing as Frary explains.

"The legal team were also adopting a new system at the same time as learning how to cope with Adobe Sign. So they had all new processes, and systems changing, trying to take it all on board at once. We had to ensure we got the timing of everything right because it was all operational services. That's why it was so important to engage early to let them know what was coming, and get those champions on board to help push it onto their colleagues," says Frary.

Baker adds that they stuck with the users even after the updates were rolled out.

"We pulled them in and told them it would all be all right. We told them we were going to stick with them, it wasn't going to be a ‘fit and forget'. Because we were intending to use this project as a template for delivering more service-led development across the organisation," he explains.

One major factor in their success was the fact that several suppliers went above and beyond to help.

"Some of our suppliers really stepped up and helped us, the support was amazing," says Frary. "They took on all our needs and gave us the resource we needed when we were on that battle footing. They helped us to iterate, roll out and ensure all the users were on board.

"Adobe have been amazing and other suppliers too. Capita helped us with an Internet of Things project, providing equipment, support and technical staff. Cannon changed the way they engaged with us, and how you deliver outcomes. The engagement has been brilliant."

With many parts of the transformation complete, the council is now reaping the rewards.

"There's a lot of reduced cost thanks to saved time," says Baker. "There are also physical costs in reduced paper usage. We've taken people away from non-productive processes. The legal team are charged by the hour, so it's good that they're spending more time on legal work."

"There are other, softer benefits," adds Frary. "Where we've completed these rapid action projects, the business has started to realise that it's okay to do more of these, and more prototypes, rather than traditional, long-planned projects. For instance we've now been successful conducting these sorts of projects implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), IoT and projects to gather data to aid our decision-making. These are just some of the areas where we're now doing things differently."

The RPA project involved implementing Blue Prism into the finance team, automating the invoicing process.

"We took most of the manual work out of the system, so manual work is now the exception. It's been very successful, and now the business is asking us to do more of it. It takes a number of weeks to set up, the other people see it and say ‘I'll have a piece of that'. So we're now pushing it out to other areas of the business."

"We're also using RPA in archiving and records management," adds Baker. "We have millions of records, so we're using RPA to link systems together to do active searching for achieve information."

Frary concludes, explaining that all of this is about getting the right tools bolted together.

"We've now got a complete workflow all the way from citizen requests though document signing, to O365, to providing front-line staff with the right information. It all gives us the right toolset for the future."