Category: General

Digital inclusion in Hounslow during 2022

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I wrote this blog back in November 2021 Digital Inclusion in Hounslow – Hounslow.Digital and given the cost of living pressures we are all under wanted to go back and see what we have achieved and what more we need to do. 

With Digital Inclusion we need to deliver the hat trick of connectivity/devices/learning so have been reviewing progress with this in mind. We now have increased resources in this area to drive the work forward and the Digital Inclusion Commitment was approved in October 2022 Year Two update of Hounslow.Digital Digital Strategy – 2020-25 – Appendix 1 – Digital Inclusion Comm.pdf . We have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) we report back to Directors on quarterly basis. All the work across Council is coordinated through the Digital Inclusion Group which includes colleagues and partners alike. 

More detailed information on digital inclusion in Hounslow here Digital Exclusion | Hounslow | Report Builder for ArcGIS. 

We will continue to work with Loti colleagues on Digital Inclusion Innovation Programme – LOTI /Get Online London – LOTI to ensure consistency continues to be built across London. 

Connectivity 

We are rolling out better connections to our Council sites with new fibre connections – some as part of a grant from TFL (Transport for London) for the sites harder to reach alongside making it easier for all to get online and provide better facilities as part of the Council’s warm spaces work Warm Spaces | London Borough of Hounslow. 

This time last year we had signed wayleave agreements with Community Fibre and Hyperopic. Since then, we have signed with OpenReach, and Community Fibre have finished their rollout to Council flats (Community Fibre’s £6 million broadband investment ensures Hounslow’s communities are connected | London Borough of Hounslow).  

The annual Ofcom report on connectivity has come out this week based on info from Sept 22 (Interactive report – Ofcom). Whilst it is not as current as the information from sites such as thinkbroadband which are updated regularly it provides a great snapshot and reporting to reflect on progress over the last year. 

The report shows the good trend in Hounslow continues – in Sept 21 were 1716 premises with poor broadband based on Ofcom definition as at Sept 22 were down to 799. 

Premises with Fibre broadband in Hounslow were 11519 in Sept 21 in Sept 22 up to 33478. 

So, some substantial progress here but lots more than needs to be done in 2023 and plans are in place for this including promotion of social tariffs and the social value offerings from suppliers as take up continues to be slow across all operators. 

Devices

Our aim last year was to recycle 700 devices per year, we have completed 1300 since 2020. 

For 2023 we are aiming for 1000 devices to be recycled working with in partnership with Our Barn Community – Home alongside our Community Solutions colleagues and have the plan and resources in place to do so. 

Learning  

Adult Education continue to have great courses for digital skills – more information here Hounslow Adult and Community Education – Adult Courses (hace.ac.uk). 

We are working to recruit Digital Champions with our partners – if you are interested in this please send an email to getonline@hounslow.gov.uk. 

We also had our Digital Festival during November with lots of opportunities for all to get training along with the continued free access to sites such as this: Make It Click (learnmyway.com) 

So, overall, a lot done with lots of fantastic partners over the last year with lots more planned to continue in 2023 to ensure we maintain the great progress made over the last 2 years. 

Getting back to the office 

Posted on by in General, Staff and Workforce

At Hounslow we are starting to get back to to more regular ways of working as part of the hybrid approach. For me 2 days a week in the office is great so hasn’t changed for me too much as I was in at least 2 days throughout the various lockdowns. Some weeks will see more in Hounslow in line with what is needed by the business.  

We have the colleague conference at Hounslow 2nd to 4th November and our Digital Festival starting from 1st November, which for the first time will be a mixture of in person and virtual. This gives us an opportunity to rebuild connections and continue to meet colleagues and partners who we have only met virtually to date.  

Tidy Fridays 

I didn’t come into the office for one of the Tidy Fridays we are having to declutter offices to make the environment tidier for all as we start to reimagine the space we use. As a result Brucie and the Chuckle Brothers have left the building, we got them during lockdown as a light reminder of a serious message. Colleagues used to say find Brucie and you find Digital so we are thinking how best to signpost our area as we don’t put up posters etc in Hounslow House. 

Reflecting on challenges ahead  

I have some time off now – there is so much to do but so important to take a break from work and focus on family and friends and recharge the batteries. So much great work we will be doing before Christmas so need the rest to be able to move stuff on at pace such as contiinuing our device refresh at 800-900 per year, updating our sites away from Hounslow House to bring them up to date and all the work on connectivity. In the day job the team deals with an average 2600 calls per month for both faults and requests.

We have the updated Digital Strategy and Digital Inclusion Commitment going to Cabinet 18th October for approval – more to follow then as well as some exciting news around our broadband rollout with partners but I cant spoil the surprise yet!

It’s Christmas time  

Did the weekly video update in Director’s absence – got the Christmas jumper out and pleased to say the lights still worked though couldn’t capture it in a video still! 

Building the foundations for Digital Transformation

Posted on by in General, Place and Community

At Hounslow we are well on the way with all kinds of exciting work as part of the Digital Strategy. To deliver all these great services there is a lot of work that goes on often 7 days a week by the teams that report to me, and they are the unsung heroes of the work we are doing as the work done provides the foundation for all such work. 

The numbers in terms of transactions on the systems we look after on are huge for example our new online phone system has processed over 160,000 calls since it went live December and with the last phase planned today 13th May this figure will considerably increase after this. Other highlights that show the scale we work on over the last half year: 

  • 12.2 million emails  
  • 2.2 million activities in teams – up by 27% 
  • 5.2 million files in one drive – up by 6.5% 
  • Over 500,000 files on SharePoint – up by 12% 

This is in addition to the 200 plus virtual servers the teams support both on premise and in the cloud and all the work that is needed to allow our 2400 plus colleagues to operate 24/7 including our website. 

Elections 

Since January the team have been preparing for the Elections – this has involved all the planning for the polling day, the postal vote verification at Hounslow House and then the count itself. Then this week we have been ensuring the 22 new Councillors are up and running to make what is a busy time for time as smooth as possible for their Digital access. 

Team work  

There have been a lot of changes over the last 2 years with the Digital Strategy and for me, personally, doing a Digital wide show and tell every 2 weeks with the odd quiz thrown in has pushed me out of my comfort zone but I like to think I am a total natural now! 

In the final changeover today for our phone system, we moved to a new platform to ensure the resident experience can continue to improve and we have transferred over 2500 numbers – we have had 144 queries with no major issues to report. This work has involved teams across the Council collaborating virtually for most of the time but for go live day most of us have been in the building. It has been a reminder of how much (even though the tech works really well) we can get out of doing stuff with a purpose face to face.  And of course we could not have done all this without Brucie.

Green and Digital

Posted on by in General

At Hounslow there is a strong focus on the green recovery – this across all areas of the Council as part of One Hounslow and the ambition of this can be seen through the roles recently advertised at greenrecoveryjobs.co.uk and the declared climate emergency for Hounslow – Hounslow’s Climate Emergency Action Plan | Climate emergency | London Borough of Hounslow. 

Within Digital we are always asking what we can do to support this in addition to the traditional ways through enabling remote and flexible working and moving further workload into the cloud to reduce our local datacentre use. 

Inclusion

The work has spanned many areas and links into the work being done around Digital inclusion and the green angle is one that is a key part of the work we do – as IT kit gets increasingly powerful recycling of kit become a more of a reality and not a 2nd class choice and when we needed to supply 750 devices to schools as part of work to address Digital exclusion recently recycled kit was the best choice economically. According to the 2020 Global E-waste Monitor, humans worldwide produced 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste in 2019 and only recycled 17.4% of that waste.  

By extending the lifetime of a single laptop from four to seven years, 180 kgCO2e of carbon emissions are avoided. Therefore, this avoided 130,000 kgCO2e equivalent to keeping more than 50 cars off the road. Even considering the energy efficiency of new computers the current benefits of recycling computers and making best use of the carbon invested in their creation far exceeds the benefit from any potential energy efficiency gain from new devices. 

Moving forward as part of the general recovery programme for the Council the continued greening of Digital makes both economic and technical sense – work being done includes: 

  • Widening and improvement of 5G – this fit into the work around Internet of Things in areas such as smart cities and social care needs. 
  • Linking Digital and infrastructure work needed into areas such as electrical vehicle charging to reduce the need for street works and disruption of traffic in the Borough as traffic levels start to go back to levels last seen in February 2020. 
  • Ensuring that green options are at the forefront of all work done within Digital to ensure we continue as a Borough to reduce our carbon emissions where at all possible. 

An SMS fraud adventure

Posted on by in General, Services and Customers

A few of us began receiving SMS based fraud messages over the last few months. Covid-19 related fraud, HSBC overdraft fraud, Royal Mail related fraud amongst others. One in particular was very persistent and it seemed that everyone I spoke with was on the recipient list. Obviously the next step here is to forward the SMS to 7726 (which presented a few challenges, see *footnote below). However, I began wondering if I could to get the fraudulent website taken down myself… well… Challenge accepted!


Private Eye

After a little investigation it actually turned out to be incredibly easy.

Step 1. Identify the DNS provider for the domain.
I used https://mxtoolbox.com/Whois.aspx and I simply searched for the website mentioned in the fraud SMS.

That gave me the name of the DNS provider used by the fraudsters. The DNS provider manages domain names such as website addresses for innocent customers and inadvertently, criminal customers.

In the information returned, you’ll need to look for the “abuse” email address to contact if domains they host are being abused – e.g. used for crime.

Step 2. Email the DNS provider, advising them of the website and the issue and ask them to investigate and take the site down.

Example mail:

Hi,

This website DNS is hosted by you : <insert website URL>
Your customer is sending fraudulent SMS messages to UK residents directing them to this website. The site is being used illegally by your customer to take money and information fraudulently from UK residents.
Please investigate and take the website down.

Thanks!

So.. I sent the mail off the their abuse team and waited..

POW!

By the end of the day the fraud site was inaccessible! (Very satisfying).

Next day I had another SMS with a new fraud URL (linking back to that same website), so took a minute out of my day to check the DNS provider and email them again.

BAM!
Site down again within a few hours!! (ok this is fun)

Later on they seemed annoyed and sent four more SMS one after another, with two new URLs, but same website again…

ZAP!

Got those taken down too!!! (‘k, this is worth a blog post)


Its four days down the line now and no more SMS messages have turned up but if I get any more I’ll still report them, but then try to get the site out of action as fast as possible by contacting their provider directly.


So the point of telling you this is really to show that we are not powerless. We don’t have to just accept fraud, phishing etc. through SMS and Email. Although we’ve received it, we need to push back and report it when we can, so that others don’t get affected.

So I make a request now to you all.

Check out the excellent NCSC guidance here and then help others understand how to spot the tell-tale signs and what to do next.

If you do get a fraud SMS, don’t just delete it, follow the official guidance above and report it, but once that’s done you can also have a go for yourself, and may get the same sense of satisfaction of seeing the site taken down a lot more quickly...

And if you don’t have the time, by all means name the site in the comments and we’ll give it a go for you.

*footnote.

After receiving the SMS I duly reported by forwarding to 7726, only to receive a response saying that the message was undeliverable! A quick search revealed it’s a common experience (and something to look into later).

Not one to be put off, I figured I’d assemble the details into an email, remembering to include the URL of the fraudulent website and sent that off to report@phishing.gov.uk

Ironically Google mail rejected my email, presumably because it contained the very phishing URL I was trying to report!! (hopefully Google completes this circle for us by reporting these blocked malicious URLs to NCSC – would be nice to see some public reassurance about that though). However the dodgy website was still up and I was continuing to receive the same SMS messages.

Eventually I sent a screen shot of the SMS to report@phishing.gov.uk and that successfully went through without setting off any Google alarms and had a nice confirmation email from NCSC.

Designing our digitally-optimised future services

Posted on by in General

Designing our digitally-optimised future services

It has been an intense but exciting six months since Hounslow’s new Digital Strategy, a central plank in how we will achieve our transformational ‘One Hounslow’ vision, was agreed by Cabinet.

We have designed and implemented an innovative, lean governance to support the implementation of the strategy and embed service design thinking into all digital projects.

In the first six months, five major projects have been shaped and agreed through our Design Authority covering a diversity of areas such as Children’s Safeguarding, Regulatory Services, Planning and Building Control, and Educational services.

This has all been achieved through remote working – something which none of us imagined when we were developing the strategy!

The Digital Design Authority is designed to give a rounded view and agreement from a wide range of disciplines that reflect the council’s broader needs. So, in addition to the core IT capabilities you’d expect in a Design Authority (such as technical architecture, security, information governance), we also have professionals from Communications, Procurement, Finance, HR and Organisation Design and two senior representatives from Services.

The power of commitment from a Service Owner

Our Design Authority works by inviting a ‘Service Owner’ to sponsor and lead the presentation of an outline business case on the proposed digital project to the group, supported by Digital and IT. Service Design works with the Service Owner and others to develop the business case – in a genuine collaborative, co-design effort.

Some other things that we believe also help are that we use concise PowerPoint slides rather than long word documents. Over time and with some internal coaching, our Business Relationship Managers will take on this role. Also, we have focused on ‘Futures’ priorities project where service design has the most potential benefits.

This approach has been very well received and has been instrumental in helping to build in service design thinking and moving forward at pace on a number of key projects.

“This (Design Authority) is a breath of fresh air and an absolutely sound approach”  Sarah Scannell, Assistant Director Planning

Where next?

Last month we held a retrospective on our first six months of Design Authority. We used a retro tool to do this online, asking the group what they liked, learnt or thought was lacking.

The feedback was brilliant – highlighting the positives that the group sees but also being very open about what could be improved or changed. For example, some members of the group felt we need to provide more detail on full costs and outputs, even if only estimates. We were challenged whether there was more we could do to quantify outcomes at the outset. And the need to identify efficiency savings (as well as user benefits) was reinforced – no prize for guessing which department that came from!

Service owner Martin Forshaw, Assistant Director Children’s Safeguarding led the case to our first Design Authority back in March. The proposal was strongly backed and some very useful steers and inputs given. He told us afterwards:

“The thought of being the first to do this was terrifying! But it went well judging from people’s response and comments in the meeting. We have a great opportunity to take a fresh look at how we design our services and I’m looking forward to seeing this as we work through it together.”

Following agreement on Children’s Safeguarding at the Design Authority, we brought in a partner to deliver a discovery phase, working with a ‘blended team’ drawn from the Service, Digital & IT and service design specialist skills. We are coming to the end of that discovery – and it has been done completely remotely. But that is a story for another week…

Keep in touch

If you would like to contribute to, or talk about any of the work, you can get in touch with Franco Degan, Andrew Connor or Barbara Munden in the Digital and IT Team

Hounslow Cabinet approves the Digital Strategy 2020-2025

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At a meeting of Hounslow’s Cabinet on 17 March, Hounslow Council unanimously approved our Digital Strategy for 2020-2025.

This strategy outlines the council’s digital vision to create connected and inclusive communities across the borough.

“The Hounslow Digital Strategy harnesses the tremendous opportunity to deliver transformation across the council” 

Cllr Pritam Grewal, Cabinet Member for Customer Services and Corporate Performance

Draft Digital Strategy

Posted on by in General

We want to hear from you about our draft digital Strategy.  We have been working with colleagues across the council to develop this important document to set the vision and direction for the Council.  How we are going to change our services to make the most of data and technology through making sure that we put communities at the centre of what we do. 

The strategy is going to the March cabinet. 

Tell us what you think. 

Hounslow Digital Strategy DRAFTDownload