Sharing insight and best practice with your colleagues across boroughs is one of the most important things you can do to foster innovation and collaboration. In particular, we encourage teams to engage with other boroughs before embarking on any complex, important or novel procurement. As we show below, this engagement can take various forms, depending on the requirement, and whether it has been done before.
As you begin to evaluate and plan for a new service, being able to hear about and learn from similar projects is crucial. It can help to solve challenges or avoid mistakes faced by other boroughs and discover new and innovative technology solutions. It is important, therefore, to make sure that you engage with other boroughs as you approach a procurement, but also that you are available to share your insights to support other boroughs' procurements too.
Knowledge sharing and collaboration can happen at all levels of an organisation but is naturally led by technology and strategic leadership teams.
Service Teams Service teams can engage with other boroughs to understand how they have adopted technology to meet a particular service requirement, including how it has helped to deliver concrete improvements for citizens.
Digital and IT Teams Digital and IT teams, led by CTOs/CDOs, should also be constantly communicating with other boroughs to understand their technology approach for certain services. This, of course, is particularly important for open source code and documentation, as well as replicable no-code services.
Procurement Teams Procurement teams also have a role in active knowledge and insight sharing across boroughs: this includes sharing knowledge about price and specifications of a service, procurement route selected, and broader commercial strategy relating to a service. ****
There are a number of ways of sharing and learning from best practice across London boroughs: some require face-to-face discussions, while some are lighter touch.