LGA strengthens partnership with Porism
Porism Limited has been awarded a contract with the Improvement and Development Association, the commercial part of the Local Government Association (LGA), for delivery of their LG Inform service over the next three years.
The contract extends Porism’s position as supplier of software and hosting services for LG Inform which the company took over in 2014. The company’s involvement with the LGA dates back to 2002 when the two organisations first offered the electronic service delivery (esd) toolkit to councils, helping meet the Implementing Electronic Services agenda. esd-toolkit now forms part of a wider set of tools and open standards named LG Inform Plus.
LG Inform, which also drives the LGA’s Value for Money site, provides open reporting tools for councils to compare one another’s characteristics, spending and delivery of services. Porism brings to the mix an understanding of how metrics from many diverse sources can be standardised and used for reporting via a single application programmer interface (API). The API underpins tools offered by the LGA and is made available to councils and independent developers.
Porism first brought esd-toolkit to the Web with three London councils. The LGA’s involvement brought it to a much wider range of UK (mostly English) councils. Its raison d’être was to make standardised data and generic online tools available to all councils and so avoid repeated effort across each of them. LG Inform fits this model well by taking metrics from more than 50 sources and presenting them consistently to reveal new insights. It saves councils the burden of convoluted local processing of data which is published by source organisations in a myriad of formats.
Porism director, Mike Thacker, comments “I’m so glad to win the LG Inform contract and so deepen our relationship with the LGA. Local Government is often seen as a poor relation in the public sector, but it has the strongest immediate impact on our lives. Hence there’s most to be gained by managing data in a way that improves both transparency and productivity”.
Porism website: porism.com
Porism on Twitter: twitter.com/porism
LG Inform: lginform.local.gov.uk/
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About Porism
Porism is a small software development company, based in Brixton, south London, that specialises in web applications driven from complex secure databases.