What we learnt along the way

HackIT (Hackney's ICT department) has learned so much from getting services out there. We've worked with different partners to deliver most of the services and have taken away something different every time. As part of this project, we consolidated our thinking a bit and reflected on what worked, what didn't and what different things we'd like to try.

Bespoke APIs have proved to be hard to reuse and difficult to maintain. We've also seen examples of when they can cause more problems in the future than they solve immediately. As such, we want to move away from that model.

Over time, we have unsuspectingly been building service specific silos of data which, unfortunately, duplicate and differ from existing data. This can be confusing for staff and citizens as expectations are that everyone has access to the same data. Unfortunately this is not the case. The data needs cleansing and mastering in a way that means we no longer have disparities between service data unless that data is not used anywhere else. MadeTech did a great piece on how we could potentially migrate and master housing data to a more sustainable model. In time, this is something we would absolutely like to see.

It's so tempting to go your own way but it rarely ends in reusable work. There's some great examples of keeping data in a common format out there (For example the HACT Housing Data standards) so why design that all again?