Welsh social care is currently breaking new ground and, as is often the case with most pioneering work, the road has not been an easy one.
Imagine you’re an airline. You’ve commissioned a brand-new shiny aircraft that is bigger and more efficient. It holds many more passengers and can do many things your old planes couldn’t.
Work is going to be a lot easier now.
Except the waiting lounge is too small, the runway needs changing, and the baggage system cannot cope. Suddenly, all the processes built around the old aircraft need a rethink. Probably an overhaul.
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge Wales is now facing as local authorities move to new social care case management systems.
Replacing one system would be complex enough. Doing it across multiple Welsh local authorities, moving years of sensitive data from different legacy systems into different new platforms, while social care services continue to operate throughout, is another matter entirely.
Tej Chaggar, one of the specialists working on the programme alongside ICT Revolutions’ wider team of experts, has more than 20 years of experience in system implementation. He says the scale of the work being undertaken across Wales is unprecedented across England, Scotland and Wales, putting Wales at the forefront of social care transformation.
While individual migrations take place every year, what makes the Welsh programme unusual is the number happening together, across one country and within the same pressured timeframe.
In our previous article, Transforming Social Care IT Infrastructure Across Wales, we looked at ICT Revolutions' work with the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) during the discovery stage, helping to understand the existing data landscape and build the migration strategy.
That work has now moved into delivery.
And this is where things get interesting.
The Welsh Data Migration and Change Management Challenge
There are 22 local authorities across Wales, with 18 involved in the current implementation programme. Of those, 15 are moving away from WCCIS/Care Director, two from PARIS and one from an internally developed system. 16 are moving to The Access Group’s Mosaic platform, while two are moving to Civica/OLM’s Eclipse.
Lots of different roadmaps, and not everyone is heading to the same destination.
Even those authorities using the same existing system have spent years configuring it around their own services, processes and ways of working. Children’s services may operate differently from adult social care, finance may have its own requirements again, and reporting structures can vary from one authority to the next. So, although the programme involves 18 authorities, this is not one migration being repeated 18 times.
Each organisation is starting from a slightly different place and bringing years of historic decisions with it.
That matters because a new system does not arrive in a vacuum. Processes have grown up around the old technology, staff have developed ways of working that suit their local circumstances, and different teams have made different decisions about how information is recorded and used.
The technology may be changing, but all of that experience and historical processes and data comes with it.
Tej puts it simply:
“The only constant in social care is change.”
A new system may offer far more than the one it replaces, but that does not mean the organisation around it is automatically ready for take-off. Processes, infrastructure, data and established ways of working all have to adapt alongside the technology.
At the same time, social care itself continues to evolve. Legislation changes, government requirements develop, services are reorganised and reporting needs shift, so the system has to be capable of adapting to an environment that is constantly changing.
The Complexity of Social Care Data Migration
Whilst the aircraft analogy explains the scale of the organisational change, Tej uses a different analogy to describe the data migration.
Think about when you’re moving house, except you’re packing for a house before you’ve even seen what’s in it. You know what you own, and you can put it all into boxes, but you have no idea how many cupboards you are going to have, how big they will be, or whether some of the things you are packing will have anywhere to go at all. Then the removal team arrives at the new house with everything you own.
Some boxes have an obvious home. Others do not. Some contain things that will not fit anywhere, and suddenly somebody needs to decide whether you need another cupboard, whether something belongs in the shed or whether you need to create somewhere completely new for it to live.
That is, in very simplified terms, what happens when years of social care data are extracted from one system and moved into another. Extracting it is only the beginning. The data then has to be understood, transformed, and mapped into the new system, whose structure can be very different from the one it has come from.
Fields do not always correspond. Historic configurations have created different structures, and information may have been recorded differently, not just between authorities, but between departments within the same authority.
In some cases, engineers have had to create entirely new structures because there was no suitable equivalent in the new system.
The ICT Revolutions team is working alongside the wider programme during the current migration rounds to identify these issues early, map where problems are emerging and help find solutions before they affect later stages of implementation.
In a programme of this scale, being able to see where the problems are likely to arise before they become much bigger problems is critical.
Archiving, Retention and the People Behind the Data
When you move house, there is almost always stuff in the loft that you’ve not looked at for years. The removal team is waiting, there are boxes everywhere, and some of them contain things that have been carried from house to house several times. You still have to decide what goes into the new house, what belongs in storage, and what needs a different solution altogether.
Some of the information being moved across Welsh social care today may already have travelled through several generations of systems. Historical records may have been carried forward during previous migrations, and a major national implementation is not necessarily the time to stop and manually unpick every record accumulated over decades. But the responsibilities around that information do not disappear because it is being moved.
Retention requirements still apply. Information may need to be archived rather than brought into the live system. Other records may need cleaning, correcting, redacting, or further investigation before they can be migrated. Access controls must remain appropriate, and GDPR obligations still have to be met throughout the process.
Those decisions become particularly important when you remember what the word data means in this context. Tej and the wider team of experts are always mindful that these records belong to real people, often documenting some of the most sensitive periods of their lives and the services and support they have received over many years.
Maintaining the integrity, security and accessibility of that information throughout migration is therefore not merely a technical requirement. The people represented by those records still need services, and the professionals supporting them still need access to the right information.
Getting the migration right is critical.
Designing Social Care Systems for Wales
Local authorities need systems that work within Welsh legislation and regulatory requirements, while also meeting Welsh-language obligations. The products being introduced were not necessarily developed specifically for that environment, so those requirements have to be considered as part of the implementation rather than assumed to exist out of the box.
This adds another layer to an already complex programme, where decisions around configuration, migration, reporting, training, retention and archiving are all connected. A seemingly small decision made in one area can have consequences much further down the line, particularly once a system is live.
This is where specialist experience becomes especially important.
ICT Revolutions is working alongside the wider programme to identify risks as implementation develops, challenge assumptions and understand how decisions made in one area may affect another. The purpose is to identify potential issues while there is still time to address them, rather than discovering them during the final stages before go-live.
All of this work is taking place while local authorities continue delivering essential services. Social care does not stop while a new system is implemented, which means services, payments, safeguarding responsibilities and access to critical information all have to continue throughout the transition.
That makes it essential to keep the people who will actually use the systems firmly in view throughout the process.
Social workers and other frontline teams need systems that support how they work, give them access to the information they need, and don’t add unnecessary barriers to already demanding roles. Their needs therefore must be considered throughout design, configuration, migration, and implementation, not only after the technical work is complete.
You can have the newest and most efficient aircraft in the fleet, but if the runway, terminal, baggage handling and people working around it are still set up for the old one, you are never going to get the full benefit.
As Tej says:
“You always have to think of the end users, both when building it and after go-live.”
Getting the technology live is only part of the job. Getting it right for the people who rely on it every day is what makes the implementation successful.
Breaking new ground in Welsh Social Care
The scale and concentration of change taking place across Welsh social care makes this programme different from the individual system migrations that have gone before it. There is no existing blueprint to pick up and follow, which makes the experience and expertise brought into the programme particularly important.
ICT Revolutions continues to work alongside the WLGA and the wider programme team, bringing specialist expertise across social care systems, data migration, configuration, reporting and implementation to help identify issues early, solve problems as they emerge and support a programme of change being delivered at an unprecedented scale.
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