From the archive: What was LOLA?
Computing is celebrating its 50th year of informing and empowering IT leaders. One of our early readers has been in touch with a story of his own about an ambitious project from the 1970s.
In its earliest incarnation, Computing was the official magazine of the British Computing Society, and one subscriber from the deepest, darkest 1970s has been in touch. Alan Cooper, Senior Business Analyst, now retired, is reaching out to former employees of a project he began working on in 1970 - a project that was featured in the pages of one of the early editions of Computing.
London On-line Local Authorities (LOLA) was a new and pioneering local government computer partnership. Alan Cooper was one of LOLAs first hires. The aim of the project was to develop a modern strategic information management system that would support all interactions with citizens from cradle to grave. It was a partnership between the boroughs of Haringey, Hackney, Hillingdon and Tower Hamlets.
LOLA was one of the first UK implementations of Information Management System (IMS) software from IBM. IMS was developed in the 1960s, originally under the name of Information Control Systems (ICS) and was used to track costs and materials for Saturn V and Apollo programmes. After Apollo 11 and the moon landings the software was relaunched as IMS.
From the moon landings to Enfield
From its base in Enfield, LOLA used IMS to support VDU access from council offices and real-time database updating. It was quite the step up from systems using punch cards and magnetic tapes.
Incredibly, in 1972 LOLA went live on time, despite buggy IMS software and power outages caused by the miners' strikes. That fact alone seems extraordinary, given how accustomed the UK public now are to budget busting public sector project over runs. The first application was Rates. This was the system by which local government was funded before the council tax was established in the early 1990s. LOLA established the foundation databases of property and people that would link further applications. By 1978 there were 13 major suites with over 300 programs.
LOLA featured in Computing in 1977. A cutting of the article by Roger Green is pictured below.
The article makes fascinating reading because not only was LOLA ahead of its time for local government, the use case of nascent database technology was also pioneering. Incidentally, a full half century later, more recent incarnations of IMS are still in use in many enterprises.
Because the project pre-dated the internet, very little of LOLA can be found online. To address this, Cooper has built a website - Lola.org. He comments:
"I'm reaching out to former LOLA employees, gathering artefacts and reminiscences. The aim is to deposit all the material with the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge."
LOLA was unusually long-lived. The programme continued to evolve until the 1990s when some of the boroughs began to break away in an effort to reduce costs with different applications of technology.
If you can help the project then please do get in-touch via the LOLA website.