Peterborough City Council's shift to the Amazon cloud will bring machine learning to social work case files

Richard Godfrey tells Computing how cloud will transform Peterborough City Council - in advance of Computing's Data Centre Summit later this month

When Richard Godfrey and the Digital Peterborough team were selling the idea of shifting Peterborough City Council's IT infrastructure lock, stock and barrel over to the Amazon cloud, it wasn't the potential cost savings in IT that won councillors over, but the potential operational savings that could be gleaned in all the different departments across the council.

And what excited councillors on top of that was the prospect of being able to use predictive analytics - or machine learning - in order to help social workers better identify at-risk children, for example, and many other ways in which it could make the council more proactive in terms of service provision.

"Our server room needed a fair bit of work in terms of refreshing quite a lot of equipment. We were planning to move towards a Salesforce-based platform across the entire council, working with other products that are designed to work with Salesforce," Richard Godfrey, assistant director of Digital Peterborough at Peterborough City Council, told Computing.

He continued: "Obviously, moving the entire council onto that platform would take time, yet our server room also needed a fair bit of work. We needed to refresh quite a lot of equipment, which made no sense with the plan to move to Salesforce, Box and other cloud-based systems.

"So we looked at various models of data centre moves, and Amazon was the one that gave us the best cost, the best flexibility and access to all the other tools that you get with Amazon. What we want to do, is almost a 'lift and shift' of our estate now from our server room into Amazon. A lot of those applications will then become software-as-a-service.

"What we may well find as well is that EC2 usage of Amazon decreases, but our uses of other tools, like Lambda and machine learning will increase."

Cloud-based machine learning tools are already attracting interest from organisations that have long been priced out of predictive analytics provided via packaged software. But with Microsoft, and then Amazon, offering low-cost usage-based machine learning tools, which are also relatively easier to use, more and more organisations are considering it in a bid to automate some of their processes.

When the shift, which is currently around one-third of the way through, is completed, the aim is to embed IT staff within departments in order to work with them in developing and refining the utility of the new tools.

"At the moment, we have a housing system, a regulatory services system and a children's social care system. None of them talk to each other, but by bringing them onto the same platform, we can break down those data silos, which will enable us to do a lot more in-depth work on that data and understand exactly what's driving certain things," said Godfrey.

Hence, IT will be involved in building analytic systems that can, for example, examine social-work case files and highlight cases where intervention might be advised, based on certain factors, instead of relying solely on social workers' regular case-file review meetings.

"It will enable us, as a council, to move to a trigger-based process. It's not just the council. The police within Peterborough are looking at similar things as well: again, could we match some of the social care with some of the police data and even weather data - what kind of impact does weather have on crime?"

Godfrey, who will be presenting Peterborough City Council's work at Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2015 on Wednesday 23 September, said that in addition to a data centre shift to the Amazon cloud and Salesforce-based CRM, the council will also be using Box for storage.

And in selling the radical project to the council, Godfrey added that instead of focusing on the savings that could be made in IT, they focused on the savings that could be made across the council.

"We didn't do a traditional on-premise versus cloud business case for a lot of it. Much of it was about spending the IT budget better to enable everything else to happen. For example, if my IT budget is (say) £6m and the social work budget is £60m, which one am I going to try and save 10 per cent of?" said Godfrey.

By investing the IT budget wisely, he suggested, much larger savings can be generated throughout the council, not just within the IT department. IT resources, meanwhile, can be re-deployed to make those departments more effective.

Want to attend the Data Centre Summit? It's free to qualifying end-users - register here.