IJYI recently ran a webinar for Public Sector & Health professionals to look at how technology can be used to deliver improved outcomes. 

With such a packed schedule we ran out of time for the planned Q&A schedule but received some questions after the event and have collated them below:

There have clearly been a lot of skills and knowledge gained from the CoronaWatch Data work. How do you see these benefiting the wider council outside of the Covid response?

Rebecca Allen: “From the beginning of our work with IJYI we have been very conscious that the project presented an opportunity for the whole organisation, not just Public Health, to future-proof SCC business intelligence. To this end we set up a bi-weekly meeting involving business intelligence analysts working in other functions across the council to demonstrate project developments, discuss options and share ideas. The model we have chosen is scalable to ensure we have the option to roll out across other projects, and having our in-house IT team working on developments alongside IJYI and our BI team, has ensured that learning becomes embedded locally.”

It is fantastic that AANT is being used and valued outside of Suffolk. If you had a magic wand what would the reach and capability of AANT look like in 3-5 years?

Claire Darwin: “I would like to see the AANT being used by many EP Services outside of Suffolk and there to be a community of AANT EPs who are able to interact, share research and resources using a live AANT platform.

These EPs will also have worked together to inform updates and further develop the AANT platform and its capability e.g. EP chat function, automated consultation booking function, resources page, interactive ‘therapy / consultation rooms’ being part of the AANT live consultation.

We will have used feedback from a range of stakeholders (education settings, families, EPs) as part of this continuous improvement journey.

I would like to see published research that evidences improved outcomes for children and young people due to Educational Psychology early intervention using digital technology (aant.online) and teleconsultation being delivered by the community of AANT EPs (using some kind of virtual consultation room / therapy room type experience). ” 

We’re really excited to hear about the use of cloud native services and best practice deployments within a local authority. Is that the norm in Suffolk County Council or are you setting the new baseline? If it is the norm, do you see SCC as “a leading local authority” in such adoption and how can others learn from the SCC uptake?

Gareth Morris: “That’s a really good question. So when cloud computing became a viable platform for Suffolk County Council we chose to prioritise the hosting paradigms of SaaS first , then PaaS and finally IaaS. This was a strategic principle rather than a hard and fast rule,  as I’ve found a lot of local authority application vendors have yet to really exploit cloud computing or implement the hosting paradigms correctly. As AANT was a “greenfield” deployment I got the opportunity to adopt a cloud native approach coupled with modern identity and authentication principles.

I hope other local authorities will be keen to learn from Suffolk County Council about how they can utilise a cloud native approach for any “greenfield” apps developed in-house or with a development partner. They can also use this knowledge to encourage and influence any of their “commercial off the shelf” software suppliers who have yet to modernise their application architectures.”