Yesterday I showcased the Solihull missed waste collections dashboard at the Socitm spring conference. This service dashboard is different from our current dashboards, being the first we have created for a local authority.
GDS's core focus is central government. However, the platforms we are building are available for the whole public sector, offering potential benefits for local public service use. GDS has been working with Socitm to identify specific services which have the biggest impact for users and both central and local government.
We believe the performance measuring functionality of the Performance Platform is particularly useful and a good subject for a project. With this in mind, we have been working with Socitm and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council on a prototype service dashboard. The council have been really helpful in identifying the required data and sharing it with us.
The dashboard is designed to track the usage of one of Solihull’s most popular online transactions - reporting a missed waste collection. If Solihull residents notice that their bins haven’t been collected on the due day, they can report the missed collection online. In a typical week, more than 100 local residents report missed waste collections.
The dashboard shows metrics including the number of reports, the breakdown of how people choose to report the problem (by phone, online, or face to face), and the uptime and response time of the site where you can report a missed collection.
These metrics are similar to those on our central government services. This has meant we can build quickly by re-using visualisations, but it is also evidence of the similar needs of service managers across central and local government. Solihull colleagues have already noticed the peaks and troughs of calls logged on alternating weeks and are interested to see how this relates to specific collection round information and if the trend continues.
So far, we have created a dashboard for one service from one authority. This has gone down well, and the next step will be to create a handful more dashboards for some additional authorities and services. We will be working with authorities to understand their needs and see how the platform can meet these.
Please let us know what you think about the prototype by leaving a blog comment here, or in the feedback link at the bottom of the dashboard page.
1 comment
Comment by Stephen Edwards posted on
This is brilliant!
We've had a lot of problems in our local area with waste collections and we aren't alone. Local residents and councillors have struggled to make improvements as the data isn't public, and it makes it very hard to hold the council, and ultimately the external contractor, to account for the varying service levels.