by Jon Goldie, ICT Revolutions
I am a registered social worker, and that experience has shaped almost everything I've done since.
It means I know how difficult the job is. It also means I know what it feels like when the system that is supposed to help you do that job simply creates more work instead.
Social workers work with vulnerable adults and children, young people and their families at some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Their time matters. It’s ultimately what the whole system depends on.
Yet for decades, we have asked them to spend a significant proportion of that time recording information, completing fields and feeding case management systems.
None of that is unreasonable in itself. Records have to be kept. Information has to be available when someone else needs it. Decisions have to be evidenced, and accountability matters.
The question I've become increasingly interested in is a different one:
Who are we designing all these systems for?
Thirty years: a familiar conversation
I recently carried out research for the Department for Education looking at the history of social care case management systems and the literature and studies published over the past thirty years. What struck me wasn't how much had changed. It was how often the same problems reappeared. There have been reviews, recommendations, government studies, new systems and new technology, yet the same set of concerns keeps surfacing.
Lord Laming's 2009 report made a series of recommendations about information sharing, social work practice, and the way information should be recorded and managed. Many were never fully implemented. And Laming is only one part of a much larger body of work.
Read across that history and one lesson comes up again and again: if the social worker isn't at the centre of how a case management system is designed and configured, somebody else will decide what it looks like. The practitioner is then expected to work around the result. I think that's one of the fundamental reasons we've found this so difficult in the UK.
The system should fit the work
Put plainly, it sounds obvious: Start with the person doing the job. Understand how they work, what they need, and what information genuinely has to be captured - then when and why. Then build or configure the technology around that.
Yet, too often, we have done something closer to the reverse of that scenario.
A system is procured. Processes are developed around it. Requirements accumulate. Organisational and reporting needs are added, each for a perfectly good reason. The practitioner at the end of that chain inherits whatever it has all added up to.
That's the part I'd ask people to sit with. Every additional click looks insignificant on its own.
Every extra field can be justified by somebody, somewhere, who needs it. But they aggregate, and what they aggregate into has a very real consequence: time.
Moreover, social workers do not think about people’s needs in a fragmented way. We are experts at gathering information, interpreting it and analysing the “whole person” and their circumstances. Too often, Case Management Systems are configured in such a way that the flow of a social worker's professional analytical brain is disrupted by the layout and ergonomic design of the forms and boxes they are expected to complete.
Time at the keyboard is time that isn't being spent somewhere else. For a social worker, that somewhere else is usually a child or a family. Poorly designed case management systems can compound this issue.
Which is why I've never really thought of this as an IT problem.
We know it can be done differently
There are organisations out there who are approaching this issue in another way. Internationally, Denmark has done some genuinely interesting work on bringing practitioners much closer to the centre of system design.
There are examples closer to home, too. Gateshead and North Tyneside have each looked at getting more from the systems they already have, rather than assuming improvement has to begin with buying something new. In one case, the result was a reduction of around 40% in the time social workers spent at the keyboard.
The 40% isn't really the point, striking though it is. What matters is what that time becomes. A conversation. A visit. The chance to think properly about a case rather than racing to finish the recording for the last one. Being available.
That, to me, is one of the measures by which we should judge whether technology in social care is working.
AI gives us another opportunity AND another risk.
We're now entering another period of significant change. Case management suppliers are beginning to build AI into their products, with real potential to reduce recording time and lift some of the administrative weight off practitioners. That's genuinely promising, and I don't want to be cynical about it.
But new technology doesn't automatically solve an old problem. If we use AI simply to make an existing process run faster, without asking whether that process was serving the practitioner in the first place, we will have repeated the same mistake with better tools.
The opportunity is larger than efficiency. It's a chance to ask again what we actually need these systems to do, and this time, to start with the people using them.
Two Ears and One Mouth
ICT Revolutions has been going for around fifteen years, and my social work practice has stayed with me throughout, particularly in how we think about implementation.
Our job isn't to arrive with the answers. It's to understand the people who will have to live with what's being implemented. I often describe it as having two ears and one mouth: listen considerably more than you talk.
The reason is simple enough. The front line staff doing the work know things the project plan doesn't. They know where the time disappears. They know which processes make no sense in practice, where information gets duplicated, and how a supposedly small system requirement becomes a daily frustration. They also know what helps.
Technology has an important role in the future of social care, and AI may make that role more significant still. But the purpose of a case management system was never to be a perfect case management system. It is to support people doing extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily important work with vulnerable people.
Thirty years of research gives us plenty to learn from. As we design what comes next, the most important lesson may also be the simplest:
Start and finish with the social worker.