Diving Deeper with the Tech Industry

by Shelley Heckman, Published 13 September 2021

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From a SAVVI perspective, we are keen to understand how (and the extent to which) the SAVVI data standards and model that we have come up with over recent months could be usefully adopted by the tech industry. We are not under the illusion that we know best; afterall, we have only been in the business of working with vulnerability data since September 2020. Many of the tech businesses which we seek to engage with have been experts at handling vulnerability data at the operational level for years. Phase two of SAVVI firmly remains in the test and prove (and improve) phase and our engagement with suppliers is in the hope of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our data models from a supplier perspective.

To this end, the SAVVI project has been deep-diving with tech suppliers, delving into the nuts and bolts of SAVVI data standards (in the kind of detail that you won’t usually find me blogging about). We held the first SAVVI Tech Working Group meeting on 20 July 2021. The inaugural meeting was chaired by

Georgina Maratheftis⁠

(techUK) and I published a blog about it a few weeks ago. In that blog, I talked about how

Paul Davidson⁠

, iStandUK (SAVVI Product Owner), gave an introduction to the SAVVI Data and Standards. The introduction was a high level overview out of necessity (we had limited time). Paul therefore offered every member of the group the opportunity to go through the standards at a detailed level in individual one-to-one sessions. This offer has been enthusiastically taken up by a number of tech companies, and this update is to let you know how reviews with group members are going.

We have had a number of one-to-one SAVVI data standards deep dive sessions, lasting 90 minutes, with the following suppliers: ForgeRock; Xantura; Policy in Practice; Gemserv and Liquid Logic.

All the suppliers that we have spoken with have a common thread in that they sell to the local authority market, and that their products and/or services involve the handling of vulnerability data. Our first observation is how diverse the above organisations are in terms of size, products/services, and types of data they handle. For example:

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Gemserv⁠

is in the energy business; they have vulnerability data to identify those who need energy prepayment services that are not on energy contracts.

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ForgeRock⁠

is the leader in digital identity, delivers modern and comprehensive Identity and Access Management solutions for citizens/consumers, employees and things to simply and safely access the connected world. An innovative and forward-thinking company with active participation in consortiums and a major contributor to the creation of industry standards including User Managed Access (UMA).

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Liquidlogic⁠

is a supplier of software for local authorities social care and education management services and in particular would like to work with SAVVI to support early intervention for adult social care to use data to identify possible trends and trigger involvement rather than waiting for social intervention.

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Xantura⁠

is a provider of data sharing and advanced analytics to the public sector and advocates the use of these analytics to address society’s fundamental problems by tackling the information governance challenges.

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Policy in Practice⁠

is a social policy software and analytics company working with councils, government, housing providers and community organisations to analyse the impact of policy, identify and engage the people impacted and track the effectiveness of interventions.

Our second observation is that we are getting strong affirmation that the SAVVI approach to vulnerability data is generally in line with what is being done now, and what is needed in the industry to support sharing of vulnerability data. In the sessions, Paul Davidson provided an in-depth walk through of the following:

SAVVI Model Process: SAVVI has two pilot councils (North Yorkshire County Council and Huntingdonshire Council) to test and prove the SAVVI model. In looking at their respective ways of supporting vulnerable people and households, we are mapping their approach to the stages of the SAVVI model process:

Purpose (where a lead organisation sets out to find and support people with a particular vulnerability)

Find (run a risk index model)

Assess (when they can reach out)

Support (provide services to address a need)

Report (provide a dashboard of key metrics)

Improve (learn from the profile of people who needed assistance to improve the approach).

SAVVI Concept Model: this is a domain model conceptualising the space. The concept model walks through how a [LEAD ORGANISATION] designs a risk [STRATIFICATION-POLICY] to define the type of [VULNERABILITY], through to an [OUTCOME] being recorded as each [NEED] is concluded. The full

SAVVI concept model⁠

can be found in the SAVVI playbook.

SAVVI Logical Model: this model details the entity definitions that match up to the concept model with reference, where available, to the sources of these attributes. The

logical model⁠

can also be found in the SAVVI playbook.

Thirdly, every supplier has offered in some way to find a practical way to apply SAVVI, or to support us to test/evidence that it would work in the real world. This has been an unexpected (and welcome) development. SAVVI’s main aim and expectation from these deep dive sessions was to get a sense check that our thinking would be useful to industry. We are pleased that suppliers have gone further to generously offer ways to engage more deeply at a business level and in practical ways. For example:

Xantura has proposed a use case for the development of SAVVI standards to enable the flow of summary data across council boundaries. The standards would be supported by a messaging platform. Council social care case management systems would be able to integrate into the messaging platform via a secure API.

Forgerock is keen to scope the potential of SAVVI for longer term outcomes.

Gemserv has agreed to write a proposal for working with SAVVI.

Liquidlogic has agreed to help SAVVI understand the challenges (from their Merseyside project), to give us a page giving a general opinion on the difficulties of accessing health data for risk stratification

Policy in Practice have provided examples of data sharing that they use that we can share in the SAVVI catalogue.

The next SAVVI Tech Working group has been scheduled for 28 September 2021, and we are keen to invite the above organisations to share their own thoughts with the wider group about how they hope and plan to engage with SAVVI. Watch this space for a follow-up blog!

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