Our new Partner Portals module is a direct result of a desire to cut costs but also to facilitate better more joined up working taking a ‘least possible management’ approach. It has been developed in direct response to the requirements of the South Yorkshire Regional Partnership whose LASOS (Local Area Statistics Online Service) is an ORIGIN hosted solution. Needless to say it presses all the right buttons in terms of the new government’s emphasis on cutting costs and shared services.

One huge change is the introduction of the ability for any user to load data into the system which can now be achieved from any connected device 24/7 as opposed to it being handled by a central team.

The other big change is that each member of the partnership now has its own branded portal. The single LASOS system remains in place but it now supports four portals. Users of one portal can see everybody else’s data and vice versa if access has been granted. Each portal can be looked after by its own users which means that the costs for managing the system centrally are significantly reduced.

You might question that all this does is introduce duplication but actually it provides an alternative to a centrally staffed and managed LIS by simply devolving the central tasks into the job descriptions of the local partnership staff. So what you end up with is local system managers, for each town, Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and Sheffield and one for the PCT who are able to take on the workload because they will only really be dealing with their own data. For buyers of new systems this might well prove to be an attractive and cost effective option - a single instance of ORIGIN with a number of locally managed partner portals.The requirement for intensive training has been cut by making the system extremely intuitive to use.

The new NeSS module will also be used here as there is a lot of region-wide data available from the ONS Neighbourhood Statistics Store (NeSS). Loading this data into LASOS has been designated to one person who sets it up for the whole partnership, thankfully once set up the module takes over and downloads the data automatically.

The Partner Portals module provides a cost effective alternative to a centrally resourced and managed LIS which could significantly change the way in which these hugely powerful systems are viewed in the future.