Local authorities

A new generation of management information systems allows local authorities to monitor their performance against government indicators and improve their responsiveness to customers’ and communities’ needs.

With as many as 100 performance indicators (PIs) to co-ordinate, local authorities are now using tools such as ‘digital dashboards’ to help them focus on the decisions they need to take today. Many, however, find backward-looking government PIs of little help when it comes to thinking about the way they should use their resources to best effect, the quality of the services they provide and the right response to demographic and political change.

Blueprint can devise custom measures or adapt familiar frameworks such as Golden Thread and Balanced Scorecard to link government PIs to internal measures that relate directly to their current situation. These reports are then designed to show managers and front line staff what changes are needed and how they can contribute.

Local authority finance managers who deal with hundreds of separate budget holders using incompatible spreadsheet-based systems know how difficult it can be to pull information together across directorates. Blueprint financial planning and consolidation systems can cure this logistical headache, and streamline complex budgeting and planning processes.

The issues we are most often asked to assist with by our local authority customers include: 

Performance monitoring and management: ‘Can you show me in detail what’s going on behind my PIs? Can I have all my PIs on one screen that the whole team can access? Is it possible to create alerts, so we can deal with the things that need fixing quickly?’

Financial planning and consolidation: ‘How can we speed up the reporting process? I’d like a single, consistent view of budgets right across the directorates. I want to run scenarios so I can see what happens to services if budgets change, and vice-versa.’

Strategic planning: ‘We’d like to explore what changing patterns of need in our communities and political change at national level could mean for us.’

Customer services, complaints and member inquiries: ‘We have performance issues at our new call centre – we need to understand what’s going wrong and how we can improve. We’d like to create a unified system for dealing with member inquiries.’

Environmental services: ‘I need to know how our contractors are performing against their SLAs. We’d like to improve our responsiveness to customers’ complaints.’ 

Blueprint for local Authorities