The London council needs to overhaul its existing systems as use of artificial intelligence expands.
According to a commercial notice of intent, the UK capital authority needs to develop its ‘next generation, strategic data platform’ to ‘underpin reporting, analytics, AI and personalisation goals’.
A ‘core data warehouse’ will be created using tech made by Snowflake. The firm’s delivery platform will also ‘likely support a range of other products and services’. The work will take place in a series of phases, beginning with a focus on data hub and data deliverable items, laying the foundations for a far reaching transformation.
‘The programme of work will involve consolidation of a range of existing data platforms through migration activities, as well as identifying and processing new datasets to fuel new data products,’ Westminster Council’s commercial notice read.
‘The initial phase will be to design the new data warehouse environment, then migrate and refactor the existing corporate data warehouse (CDW),’ it continued. ‘It will involve discovery and analysis around the data sets, privacy considerations of the data held in the existing Microsoft SQL Server environment. These datasets and their data pipelines will need to be migrated onto the Snowflake environment.’
Local authorities across the country are under increasing pressure to invest in technology which will, over time, save staff hours and therefore costs. Downing Street is adopting increasingly ‘DOGE-lite’ rhetoric around public services, echoing the recently created US government department responsible for tens of thousands of redundancies this year in a bid to reduce expenditure. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has described the UK public sector as ‘flabby’.
Image: David Dibert / Unsplash
More on Data Management:
Most AI struggles to tell the time – University of Edinburgh study
Leave a Reply