London Council Aims To Save £95m Through SaaS Crowdsourcing Initiative

Lewisham Council has launched a crowdsourcing drive that it hopes will help to cut budgets by £95 million over the next four years by using ideas from its 3,000 strong workforce.

We.Create, which has been launched by the London council, uses Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight for Government software-as-a-service [SaaS] that allows internal or external groups to be created to stimulate ideas, innovation, feedback and insight.

“Innovative ideas can come from anywhere within an organisation and it is for precisely this reason that we are using this tool,” said Barry Quirk, chief executive of Lewisham Council. “We will involve our staff in the change process and give them some ownership of those changes too. Our role as a council is to help people and communities improve the quality of their lives and we’re excited by the prospect of seeing ideas to achieve this emerge.”

Whilst the plan is to use the SaaS to obtain ideas from council staff, there is still the option to use the communities feature of the service to source ideas from external groups that could include some of Lewisham’s 275,900 residents.

“All local government is aware of the need to reduce costs but few councils are approaching the task in such a meaningful and transparent way as Lewisham,” said Simon Hill, MD, Wazoku. “They genuinely believe that crowdsourcing ideas from staff can help transform the way services are delivered as well as save money.”

Wazoku is currently the only idea management firm that is on the UK government’s G-Cloud Framework and the Idea Spotlight for Government s already used by various public sector bodies like the NHS, MoJ, DfE and other councils across the UK.

Image Credit: Flickr (clogsilk)