Build vs Buy - a dilemma for Local Authorities

Local authorities’ dilemma around assessment and RAS tools

Local authorities (LAs) are currently facing a conundrum. Despite the Government postponing the social care reforms to 2025, LAs are keen to ensure that social care transformation remains at the top of their agenda. To help manage demand, drive consistency, promote strengths-based practice and unlock efficiencies, we are now seeing LAs deciding they need to ditch their old assessment forms and standalone ‘cost calculator’ spreadsheets. Instead, they are aiming to invest in an integrated, flexible, and comprehensive approach to support their desired workflow and processes around assessment and resource allocation for Personal Budgets – including the introduction of self-assessment.

It can be difficult to decide where to go next, though. Should your new system be built or be bought – that is the dilemma. Do you buy off-the-shelf software or go to the effort of developing a system in-house? Both ways forward have benefits and drawbacks.

A third option

There is a third approach – a system that enables you to get up and running quickly without sacrificing efficiency and control. More crucially, it is a proven system that lets you avoid needing to build something from scratch.

Imosphere has been working with local authorities for almost 30 years and the Imosphere ‘Strengths-based Toolset’ and ‘Formulate’ tools provide an off-the-shelf solution for assessment and resource management that can be configured for each LA based on their local requirements whilst using intelligence from benchmarking across many other areas.

Designing, agreeing, and building digital solutions can take weeks and months of time from multiple people – and time for testing can often be limited. Imosphere’s adult social care solutions are tried and tested across other local authorities and available ready built within leading social care IT systems.

Internal resource and software update challenges

When software is designed and built locally, there is then an immediate dependency for the local authority on the developer of the tool – with all the risks of ‘information silo’ that this brings. The internal resources used are often diverted away on to other tasks once the work has been completed – meaning reviewing and updating the RAS tool – as local policies, priorities and care costs change – gets forgotten or deprioritised. This results in the tool quickly becoming out of date and seen as ‘not fit for purpose’. The ongoing service commitments from Imosphere means keeping the local configuration elements within the tool up to date is quick and easy over time – with Imosphere actively facilitating this process with each local authority who uses the tool.

The design and build process for internal tools is also frequently documented inadequately or not at all. This means that when the person or people involved in the process move on, the skills and knowledge is lost, resulting in a tool which nobody knows how to update. Imosphere takes responsibility for maintaining the Formulate tool year-on-year, with regular updates taking place to respond to new requirements and enhance accuracy levels.

Degradation and compliance risks

Tools that support self-assessment and personal budgets – as well as IPBs (Independent Personal Budgets) in the future – need to stay current and retain the confidence of users. Therefore, regular sampling checks need to be done to verify accuracy levels and identify instances where accuracy levels were not adequate. This often does not happen with a local tool due to lack of available internal resources, resulting in the tool degrading in usefulness and effectiveness over time. Additionally, as legislation, best practice and reporting requirements change, solutions need to be kept up to date to ensure compliance and protect from challenge. When a solution is locally designed and built, this means that substantial time is taken away at regular intervals from operational and IT staff if it is to be kept up to date.

Working with a trusted partner like Imosphere can alleviate these concerns. Imosphere takes responsibility for reflecting legislative changes within all our solutions, updating them in collaboration with our customers, who can then take upgrades ‘off-the-shelf’. Our team also works with local authorities to run annual ‘health checks’. This helps to ensure that our tools are working effectively – providing recommendations where relevant to make things better and correct any issues.

Innovating - off-the-shelf meets bespoke

Working with Imosphere enables local authorities to implement an off-the-shelf solution with extensive options for local customisation. Imosphere’s solutions for adult social care are already tried and tested – being the result of years of learning from, and working directly with, dozens of local authorities. Imosphere enables a faster, less costly, and lower risk method of system development, which enables LAs to completely re-think how they digitise their operations.