Check out our work
Empowering schools to deliver faster support
Supporting the Department for Education and to build the Eligibility Checking Engine (ECE) to empower schools with autonomy - enabling faster, more consistent free school meal checks while saving costs.
Responding to challenges in detecting fraud and error
Supporting the Department for Work and Pensions in successfully preventing over £1 billion in incorrect Universal Credit payments (set to reach £13.6 billion by 2030).
Improving prisoner resettlement outcomes
Delivering a new service vision for prisoner leavers with a cohesive user centred design and engineering approach - to give prison leavers the support they need on release to live crime free lives.
Delivering NHS login
Delivering one of the most-used digital identity services in the UK. NHS login is an ongoing, large-scale transformational solution providing access to a broad range of digital healthcare services for the public in England.
Download whitepaper: The art of the doable
Delivering user-centred data sharing across Government’s legacy estate
This white paper focuses on The Art of the Doable. Instead of waiting for multi-billion-pound legacy overhauls, we must focus on what can be delivered today: practical, user-centred integration, simple and standardised governance, standards, and new tools like AI to help bridge differences between older systems.
Key Insights
The white paper examines outlines possible solutions for:
- Outdated and fragmented legacy systems: Core public sector databases rely on decades-old infrastructure (including COBOL) that cannot easily exchange information.
- Project-by-project legal delays: Teams spend months negotiating bespoke Data Sharing Agreements (DSAs) for individual projects due to ambiguous legislation and risk-averse legal interpretations.
- Misaligned interdepartmental incentives: Departments face single-year, isolated budgets, forcing them to spend their own funding and resources to share data that only benefits another department.
- Misguided "clean-slate" assumptions: Policy efforts often attempt to copy small-scale, centralised foreign models (like Estonia's X-Road) or hold out for multi-billion-pound system replacements that are economically unviable.
- Loss of public trust: Citizens fear data sharing could be used for surveillance or automated penalties, creating hesitation around data usage without clear consent controls.
- Data format and terminology mismatches: Different legacy databases use inconsistent domain-specific language, acronyms, and undocumented formats, making automated integration difficult.