We are pleased to announce that we have been named as a supplier on Crown Commercial Service’s Big Data and Analytics framework. We can supply on Lot 1: Design, build and run services.
The framework opened for business on 20th September 2022, and will run for an initial two years, although there is scope to extend it by up to a further two years.
Crown Commercial Service supports the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services. In 2021/22, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits equal to £2.8 billion – supporting world-class public services that offer best value for taxpayers.
Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is an Executive Agency of the Cabinet Office, supporting the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services.
Wandle Housing Association has extended a contract with Bramble Hub and our partner Blacklight Software.
The project, which began in 2018, set about replacing Wandle’s legacy housing management system with a new one to be developed by Blacklight, based on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
For more information about Blacklight, please see the profile article that we published here.
Bramble Hub and our partner Civica are to supply a Housing Management System (HMS) to Luton Borough Council.
The Council selected Civica’s Cx Digital Platform after a competitive tendering process which evaluated rigorous requirements set by the Council, for a “… fully integrated end to end Housing Management Solution that provides a single trusted source of information, streamlines processes and enables self-serve functionality across all service areas.”
Our successful bid responded to these requirements, stating that “Cx is a cloud hosted, web browser agnostic platform which includes Housing Management, Asset Management and Internal Contractor Management as well as portals for customers and business partners. It also enables field working through its role-specific mobile solution. All areas of the Cx solution are based on a single database meaning that there is a ‘single version of the truth’…
Self-service can be achieved using a web portal, chat AI, social media integration, email or sms, all of which are supported by the Civica Cx Digital Platform.”
Luton is a Bedfordshire town with a population slightly above 200,000 people.
Bury Council have opted for a leisure management solution from Bramble Hub and Gladstone Software.
The deal will cover Bury’s three leisure sites: the Castle and Radcliffe leisure centres, as well as the Ramsbottom Pool and Fitness Centre. In addition to licensing the core Gladstone leisure management product, the Council has licensed further modules:
The GoLearn module, which allows coaches and teachers to monitor the progress of participants on fitness courses, and
The GoConsumer module, allowing online joining and booking, and
Powerful reporting and analytics.
Additionally, the deal covers cloud hosting services.
The contract was awarded under the G-Cloud 12 framework.
For more information about Gladstone, see their partner page.
The amount of information held by businesses has been growing exponentially for many years. Each new technological revolution promises us the ability to store more data, access it more easily, and manage it more flexibly, and all at ever-diminishing cost. All this creates new opportunities, but also new headaches. This is especially true since the advent of regulations such as GDPR, under which companies can face heavy fines for privacy breaches.
Businesses now tend to have multiple silos of data, often unconnected from each other, stored using a wide variety of technologies. Although paper is becoming a thing of the past, many companies still hold scanned archives of their old paper records. Mature businesses today may hold data using dozens or even hundreds of formats and device types. This was the enormous, and growing, problem that RecordPoint’s founders, Anthony Woodward and Elon Aizenstros, set out to solve, when they founded their business in 2008, in Australia.
Brent Gatewood is a RecordPoint Product Evangelist and data regulation expert based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He points out the rising regulatory costs and pitfalls associated with holding data:
“Our founders identified a need to manage records in-place. If you go back before 2008, records management began in the traditional way. There was a plethora of laws about retaining information. Then you had the rise of privacy – in the UK that means GDPR especially – and now as well as minimum retention times, there were maximums. At the same time, data growth was going crazy, so it became beneficial to the business to dispose of old records.”
Reducing the amount of information that a business holds is not only necessary for regulation, but it reduces cost and risk. Potential legal processes, for example, become less costly if there is less information to declare during a discovery process. Businesses operating in regulated industries can also avoid significant fines if they handle data according to relevant compliance legislation.
Meanwhile, security and privacy breaches are becoming more common around the globe. Businesses now need to seriously prepare for the event of a breach: it’s no longer a matter of “if” but “when”. Understanding where your data is, and its sensitivity, is key in making sure it is protected.
The cloud was still in its infancy when RecordPoint was born. “We’d started with paper records being digitized. Then we had the rise of SharePoint on-premises, followed by SharePoint Online. So, we launched Records365, our cloud solution.”
But just as data was proliferating, so were the forms that the data took:
“It wasn’t just SharePoint, of course. There was data in OneDrive, Exchange, Teams, SAP, Salesforce, Workday… Records365 is based on our connector network, and we connect to anything. There are literally thousands of systems we can connect to. And because everything is bespoke – nobody has a vanilla SAP installation – we create Recipes for each customer so the Connector is tailored to their environment.”
Does this also help companies to manage the costs of their legacy systems? “Sure – what we’re doing is taking Records365 and managing content. So, say you have an old JDE mainframe [younger viewers should imagine a ton of metal pumping out large amounts of heat and noise], but it can’t be turned off. We allow management of data within that system. You find right away that you can lose 40% of that data because it’s Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT). And then we can manage the rest of the data until it’s sunsetted.”
Going forward, the RecordPoint platform allows old and new data to be married together. “We can reach in and pull content out to be used elsewhere. For example there’s old contract data that might be tied to data in a newer system. We can reach in and access that information. But we’re not trying to be a new repository, simply allowing people to access data wherever it lies.”
This saves on the need to migrate old data, and to retrain users. “We don’t disrupt the old systems – that’s burdensome for the end user. We attach compliance and regulatory information, but the user of the old data doesn’t need to know.”
The Records365 platform consists of a sophisticated set of tools: “Classification Intelligence is an AI tool to that classifies data automatically. File analysis allows us to identify ROT [redundant, obsolete, trivial] content. And then there’s metadata enrichment – taking metadata from system A and applying it to information in system B.”
Brent points out that RecordPoint offers more value than just the abilities to manage information and ensure compliance. “What we’re giving our customers is management of data through its entire lifecycle. Now we’re more than just managing the retention of it: we’re enhancing the value. Getting rid of the clutter increases the value of that information asset.”
These days, RecordPoint is a global business. In the UK, the company partners with Bramble Hub to deliver projects to the public sector. For more information, see their partner page.
Bramble Hub, in partnership with Bluestar Software of Reading, have been awarded a contract by Greater Manchester Police to undertake a significant data migration exercise.
This marks the fourth project win for Bramble Hub in alliance with Bluestar, which specialises in providing solutions for police forces and related agencies.
During the project, Bluestar will migrate crime, custody, case and intelligence data to a new cloud platform based around Corvus, Bluestar’s platform award-winning framework for delivering systems, and will implement the Corvus reporting and mapping functionality.
Great Manchester Police provides policing services to Manchester and surrounding boroughs, covering a population of around 2.8 million people.
PPF, based in Croydon, Surrey, placed an order for RecordPoint’s records management software as well as additional services. The order covers RecordPoint’s Records365 Starter Plus, including the FileConnect Premium Connector. Additionally, the deal allows for a later upgrade to Records365 Standard Edition, and provides the Fund an option to later adopt RecordPoint’s Classification Intelligence module.
Records365 is a powerful cloud-based tool allowing unified access to records in a wide variety of formats, via an extensive library of Connectors. The Classification Intelligence module allows RecordPoint’s customers to automatically classify legacy data in both structured and unstructured formats. Its use can save organisations countless hours of error-prone manual classification work.
In addition to the software licenses, PPF purchased consultancy services.
PPF is a statutory public corporation led by its board and accountable to Parliament through the Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions. Its duty is to protect people with pensions whose employers become insolvent.
Matt Atkinson exudes enthusiasm for his job as Chief Innovation Officer at Waymark. When talking to him, it quickly becomes clear that his focus is on cutting-edge tech: “As long as it’s digital, we’ll play with it!”
Waymark (which until its recent rebrand, was known as Waymark IT), was founded by David Brophy a decade ago as a bespoke software development company. While complex software development is still a core part of their offering, the company has broadened its scope, and redefined itself as a digital transformation specialist. Increasingly, its 20 employees focus on digital strategy, as well as delivery.
“We consult with our clients to help build digital strategy and ensure we understand the client vision. We spend a lot of time understanding the business, and that understanding forms part of a digital roadmap. It’s not always about technology – we focus on people, experiences and processes first and foremost.”
— Matt Atkinson
But still, the company’s focus on technology is perhaps its defining feature. “We unashamedly love tech, and we do tons of R&D. We always try to stay ahead of the curve, and have great relationships with firms focused on new tech.”
Matt’s role means that he has to constantly stay on top of developments in technology. He collaborates with organisations such as the Centre for Process Innovation, a hub that helps companies to develop, prove and commercialise new products and processes.
Although Waymark has delivered solutions into sectors as diverse as Construction, Manufacturing and Energy, the company made a strategic decision, a year ago, to focus on healthcare. This was a decision made by the whole team: “The team voted to work in healthcare even though it wasn’t our greatest revenue generator,” Matt explains. “There was a discussion about how Waymark could help make a positive difference to people’s lives by applying our trailblazing methodologies and digital know-how.”
Healthcare technology is an exciting field for a tech-focused company like Waymark to work in. “We’re doing a lot of work with the Academic Health Science Network, which looks at innovation within the NHS. We’re working on a backlog of things that they’ve brought to us. There are so many interesting use cases in health: How do we improve the user experience? How do we create Just In Time healthcare, and get rid of the backlog in the NHS? How can we make the clinical experience less stressful?”
Asked which project he’s most proud of, Matt mentions one designed to improve mammography. “The patient needs to be in exactly the right position. Nurses get RSIs from helping them move into place. So we’ve pioneered some intelligent concepts to help the patient to move themselves into the optimum position.”
The Waymark culture encourages involvement in social causes. Matt is an ambassador for the Digital Poverty Alliance. “We look for solutions to difficult social problems. I’ve been involved in a project to get homeless people back to work. We looked at a case where someone visits the GP, but they have no phone, no fixed abode. How do they pick up messages from the NHS? So we’re exploring the potential of using cashpoint machines as a tool for people to pick up messages from their doctor.”
Techno-optimism is a part of the Waymark culture. Team members have been involved with a project related to suicide prevention, and another examining the use of virtual reality to help children with autism. “We enjoy business success, but you learn it’s about more than making money. Knowing you’re creating some good, being part of the solution… that’s important.”
London Borough of Wandsworth has purchased a call logging and incident management system from Bramble Hub and our partner TOPdesk.
The supplied system, which will be used by the Council’s Joint Control Centre, will provide call logging functionality, as well as comprehensive incident and problem management features, and will be delivered as a cloud-based solution.
The system will also provide comprehensive management dashboards with reporting capabilities, and be accessible via web browsers and mobile devices.
This is the latest in a series of recent public sector successes for Bramble Hub and service-desk specialist TOPdesk.
Wandsworth is one of London’s 32 boroughs, and the Council serves a population of over 300,000 people.
The award was made under the G-Cloud 12 framework.
Bramble Hub and our partner Xn Leisure have been awarded a contract to supply software and services to North Tyneside Borough Council.
Xn (who were recently profiled on this site) are to provide the following modules of their leisure management software suite for use in North Tyneside’s leisure facilities:
Leisure Hub Online Joining
Leisure Hub Bookings
Leisure Hub Timetable
Ticket Hub
SMS & Email
On Course
Additionally, Xn will provide project management, training and support services.
North Tyneside has a population of around 200,000 people, and the Council manages five leisure centres.
