Richard Biscoe, Delivery Director
“It’s a bit of a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true: ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. You can apply that to any number of situations in life, but it has a specific relevance to the implementation of social care systems.
“Generally speaking, the implementation of a brand new care system is a relatively infrequent undertaking. Reviews may take place every few years, but it’s not uncommon for a system to remain in place for a decade or longer.
“There’s a consequence to this infrequency, and it’s that it then becomes very difficult for authorities to build up a level of retained internal knowledge. Even in organisations fortunate enough to have dedicated project teams, those people will often move into new roles in-between system implementations. As a result, it’s very unlikely that the same internal resources will be available the next time an authority needs to switch.
“Even if they were, there’s then the fact that the systems themselves will have seen significant updates during that time. While the core of what a platform delivers will remain intact, enough can change around the periphery to make implementing it a very different prospect to the last time around. We’ve seen that with the shift towards software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based systems, and we’ll see it again with the new possibilities offered by artificial intelligence (AI).
“So, even if an internal team does have experience of implementing a social care system, that experience can easily be five or more years behind what’s happening in the market today. That makes it difficult to predict how an implementation will go, because a lot of the assumptions made can be based on what happened a long time ago.
“This is where broader experience can be so useful. At BetterGov, for instance, we’re working with systems like Mosaic, Liquidlogic, and ECLIPSE on a daily basis. That keeps us current with any changes as they happen. Similarly, our work with authorities across the UK gives us a much wider perspective on the challenges that can occur during an implementation. It also means that the solutions we’ve developed are usually replicable elsewhere.
“It’ll never be possible to predict every bump along the road when it comes to an implementation. The benefit of experience, though, is that it makes it much easier to navigate them when they do pop up.”
