A conversation with Theo Blackwell, London’s Chief Digital Officer
Thought Piece #22 London's CDO talks fixing the plumbing, corporate citizenship and building a data ecosystem...
Finding a place to live in a major city like London can be difficult, as I found out the hard way last year. You want to live in an area that is up-and-coming; where the high street is thriving; a place that’s safe and – once you have settled on an area – in a flat with the proper licensing.
On finding the ideal flat, you then have to traverse the city to go and view it. You arrive for a viewing in Barking, only to discover the flat is actually in Barkingside – half an hour’s ride away by the quickest public transport. One can easily lose half a day traveling back and forth between Kensington; Kenton and Kentish Town in an attempt to find Kensal Rise.
Luckily, as the famous Apple slogan goes, “there’s an app for that”. Or more specifically, one of the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) 90 data services. There’s the High Streets Data Service showing spend and footfall data for the UK capital’s 600 high streets; Safestats, which presents some 18 million data points on crime in each of London’s 32 boroughs; and a property license checker for making sure that rental properties fit the relevant licensing criteria.
Nowadays, with apps like Citymapper leveraging Transport for London’s (TfL) open datasets, the most difficult thing about reaching a tube station like Ruislip or Grosvenor Square is getting the pronunciation right…
This is largely thanks to Theo Blackwell’s team. As London’s first Chief Digital Officer, Blackwell is responsible for leading the city’s digital transformation, data and smart city agenda. As with any global city this is no easy task, requiring constant coordination between local authorities, a population of almost nine million people, and almost one million businesses (including the European headquarters of hundreds of multinationals).
Leveraging the network effects of this complex ecosystem is as important as it is difficult. When I ask Blackwell what inspired him to take on the Chief Digital Officer role, he tells me about his experiences trying to serve vulnerable people while working in the London Borough of Camden, where he was told by a public health professional that a dataset of 280,000 people was too small to adequately understand their needs. What he needed, he realized, was joined-up data between boroughs - a data ecosystem built to support not thousands of people, but millions.
“Fixing the Plumbing”: Building London’s data ecosystem through user-centered design
Fast forward to today, six years into his tenure at London’s City Hall, and Blackwell’s vision remains the same. He maintains a blog about his work, where he regularly writes about “fixing the plumbing”. This is sometimes to be taken literally: as one of the world’s first telecommunications hubs, London has a huge copper legacy, which will require a great deal of infrastructure to replace with a full fiber network.
But the phrase is equally metaphorical, a commitment to tending to the needs of the interconnected web of stakeholders who make up the city’s technology ecosystem. Like a plumbing system, London’s digital services touch every household and – as anyone who shares their pipe network with others knows – a failure or blockage in one part of the system can have adverse effects elsewhere. And like a plumbing system, Blackwell’s vision is for GLA’s digital government to act as a foundation on which other players can add their own contributions.
To this end, one of GLA’s digital priorities in recent years has been building a new Data for London platform, designed to replace the London Datastore that has been in place since 2010. In one of his blogs, Blackwell describes the new platform as “like a big library book index” to help “users find the datasets they are looking for”, designed in contrast to a “data lake or all-you-can-eat smart city platform”. Such an index works on the premise of finding the right datasets for the right users, a process that starts with user identification.
“At the beginning we didn’t ask who was using the data”, Blackwell tells me as we discuss the London datastore, “because it was open data – we may have gotten pushback from people if we had asked”. But as thinking on user-centered design matured, a renewed focus on identifying users of the platform revealed an increasingly narrow set of beneficiaries: public servants; journalists; academics and a limited range of businesses.
To broaden the new service’s appeal, a data community of potential users has been formed as part of a legacy to London’s first Data Week - a cross-sectoral festival about using data to better shape the city. In this community, there is a focus on engagement around data ethics and ownership in addition to technical design specifications. The aim, says Blackwell, is “to give people a real sense of moral ownership over data, for them to recognize it is something they are stewards of”.
This comment reveals a co-creative element at the heart of the way that Blackwell approaches user-centered design. GLA’s services focus more on active co-creation and less on answering a wishlist of user needs. If you approach a user too early, Blackwell tells me, the response you will often get is “but what can this platform or service actually do?”. There is a “goldilocks moment for when you press the on-switch” that gives users a foundation to work from, but nevertheless allows them to be both co-designer and recipient of a service.
“Showing corporate citizenship and adding value to the city”: Achieving public-private data cooperation
Good user-centered design does not by itself make a strong data service. That requires investment and innovation from those who hold the data. Blackwell gives the concrete example of London’s open-source planning platform, which gives a live feed for all planning applications across the city. The data underpinning this service has been tracked digitally since 2004, but was until recently uploaded in an unstructured way – “uploads were dependent on any given local authority’s planning department. One might upload it every Monday night, one every other month, and then another wanted to give us a pdf”. Making the service “fit-for-practice” necessitated buy-in from the boroughs themselves, demanding - as Blackwell frames it - both capacity and vision.
Then there is the private sector. GLA already has a proven track record of success in private sector collaboration through open innovation calls, tenders that give companies a chance to work in multi-disciplinary innovation teams with City Hall and London’s communities to co-create solutions. Among the 37 recipients of £2.5 million GLA funding to date, urban planning innovator 3D Repo and electric vehicle charging firm Connected Kerb have both been able to use London as proof-of-concept, attracting additional private investment and scaling their solutions across the United Kingdom and beyond.
At the forefront of these tenders has been a commitment to mutual learning: “city officials […] walk away with more knowledge about innovation and experience of delivering innovation” and private sector innovators “learn more about engaging with public sector bodies and create networks they can use in the future”. Looking ahead, as more and more data is needed to derive insights through artificial intelligence, replicating this collaboration through data sharing will be just as important.
This is a version of proactive approach to governance that looks beyond government as a service provider and positions it as an ecosystem generator and orchestrator. It is a model that has found some success to date. It is with plumbing that we end, literally, with a discussion of the city’s Infrastructure Mapping Application. Some 45 different construction and utilities companies - used to competing with each other - have signed up to share data with City Hall and align with each other on plans for installations. With London’s authorities charging a Lane Fee by the day to dig up roads, this shares the cost between the companies, not to mention reducing traffic jams and pollution for citizens.
As he looks ahead to the future, Blackwell’s desire to engage partners in scaling London’s data capabilities shows no sign of abating. “Contributing through data is a key way for a company headquartered in London to show their corporate citizenship and add value to the city”, he says. I am reminded of his story about Camden. With an eye to addressing the biggest problems of all - including tackling climate change by leveraging shared private sector environmental data - it is no surprise that, six years on, today’s data is still not enough.