Infoshare are delighted that the customer access category for IT Excellence was won by the London Borough of Hackney, a council that has been innovative in using the bespoke offering of Infoshare’s ClearCore product suite to improve customer service for their citizens by creating a new citizen index system.

Like all Local Authorities, Hackney hold citizen information on various disparate systems within the council departments such as CRM, parking, library, council tax and the electoral register. Previously these different systems did not communicate. Therefore the citizen or ‘customer’ experience was adversely impacted and resulted in increased operational costs. For example, every time a citizen made contact with a department, they had to provide basic details such as name, address and date of birth, this information had to be entered in to the system so that a record could be established. Now with the new citizen index supported by the ClearCore data product suite, the council representative can run a search and all the existing records from any council department can be brought up automatically within seconds.

A key issue also addressed by the new citizen index was the ability to both validate and link records from different systems with varying levels of data quality into a single view with a high level of confidence in the quality of the data.

This process not only saves staff time and improves efficiency but also, removes the need to type the information again, limiting the ‘human error’ data entry mistakes which would inevitably arise. The new citizen index system was created using the ClearCore product suite developed by Infoshare with integration provided by partner OCC the solution has made the intradepartmental sharing of the data possible, allowing for improved efficiencies and convenience for citizens.

The overall amount of time saved by contact staff is expected to be 30%. If a citizen informs one department of a change such as a change of address all of the departments are informed and records updated in real time.

There is also a big financial motivation for these improvements in systems communication; for example, now that the electoral register data can be referenced against the council tax data, fraudsters who are falsely claiming to be living alone and are benefitting from a 25% reduction in their council tax will now be exposed by a report generated by the ClearCore software.

The benefits extend in to the future whereby Hackney is now in a position to work on developing online user access for citizens, this project is entitled ‘My Hackney’. It was not previously possible to consider this because of inaccurate data held in disparate systems that could not share information.

A key aspect of the ClearCore software that has been the backbone of this project is its unique method of cleansing, improving the data, then cross referencing to check for matches. ClearCore is the only data cleansing and matching software that uses end to end evidence based approach to data cleansing and matching. Every other provider uses a probability based approach which limits the level of cleansing and, in particular matching and linking that can be achieved on poor quality data and this consequently has an impact on the long term success of data quality projects of this nature given that data is constantly changing.

With Infoshare’s evidence based approach, it is possible to provide a full audit that explains exactly why we know J. Smith of 1 Greenview Heights is the same person as John Smith of 1a Green View.

230,000 people reside in the Borough of Hackney, yet the Council’s databases comprised 400,000 records before the project. ClearCore initially cleansed the data in the different databases, standardised it, enhanced it with actions such as spelling amendments and postcode corrections or additions by checking against a gazetteer; the data was then processed by ClearCore to match records and create links, removing duplications and enriching records with new data from each source, thus creating a ‘Golden View’ / best record of the citizen.

Initially the ClearCore software was able to reduce the records from 400,000 to 290,000, after this ‘first wave’ of matching the software then outputs ‘possible matches’ for further iterative matching to continue to match records to get closer to corresponding with the actual number of citizens. A cascade of iterative matching continues until any change or match created in the records data does not have any further impact on the records.