Scottish Assessors
Shaping a portal modernisation strategy
The Scottish Assessors set a goal to upgrade their 20-year-old, publicly accessible portal and sought guidance on the best way to achieve it. Following a tendering process in which we stood out by constructively questioning assumptions about the portal’s future, we were commissioned to provide that guidance.
Scottish Assessors are independent statutory officials who are responsible for the valuation of all heritable properties within their designated areas for local taxation purposes. Scotland’s 14 Assessors and their senior staff work collectively and collaboratively through the non-statutory Scottish Assessors Association (SAA). The main function of the SAA is to facilitate a consistency of approach in the administration of the Assessors’ duties. In this case study, references to the SAA are a shorthand for Scottish Assessors working collectively.
The Scottish Assessors’ Portal, launched in 2004, provides online access to Council Tax Bands and Rateable Values for all eligible domestic and non-domestic properties in Scotland, aggregating data managed and hosted by each Assessor. To promote consistency, the Assessors work together to produce valuation guidance reports, known as ‘Practice Notes’, and the portal provides public access to these.
At the end of a 12-week engagement, our small, multidisciplinary team delivered an analysis of the current portal solution and where it was not meeting business and user needs, and strategic recommendations for future development. Our recommendations, cost estimates, and delivery roadmap provided the SAA with the core elements of a business case for investment in the new portal’s development.
Establishing Key Principles
The technical architecture of a system should be born out of the business architecture of an organisation – i.e., its overall strategy, processes, structure and capabilities. This comprehensive and strategic view is what’s known as an organisation’s enterprise architecture. Taking this approach ensures that the solution supports the organisation’s goals and processes effectively.
So, to commence the engagement, we brought together key stakeholders for a workshop to explore the SAA’s strategic goals and current issues, and to identify the needs of its service users. User research with the public was out of this project’s scope; however, through internal user research and proxies, we formed working hypotheses with the SAA that defined four main user groups and articulated their needs, challenges and pain points in using the existing portal.
Next, we analysed the SAA’s current solution architecture, assessing it through four lenses: a Business lens, looking at the roles, processes, and structure of the organisation today; an Application lens, looking at the organisation’s current software applications; an Infrastructure lens, looking at where the applications were hosted; and a Data lens, looking at what data was held, where it was stored, how it flowed through the organisation, and who was responsible for it.
Taking the outputs of the workshop and the ‘as-is’ analysis, we helped the SAA to distil a set of Key Principles. These are high-level concepts that shape the overall direction and character of a technical solution, helping guide decision-making to ensure the delivered solution remains aligned with strategic objectives.
The SAA’s Key Principles looked ahead to the portal’s ‘to-be’ state and laid down the foundations for its design, delivery, operation, and evolution. The principles would also promote alignment with the Digital Scotland Service Standard (DSSS) and the recommendations of the Barclay Review of non-domestic rates.
With our support, the SAA translated a high-level goal into a logical series of achievable steps, giving them confidence in their ambition to create an accessible, modern portal that would serve the needs of Scottish citizens for years to come.
Deriving solution architecture from business architecture
The next step was for us to work with SAA stakeholders to envision the ‘to-be’ architecture through the same four lenses we used before and, importantly, to apply the Key Principles in the process. In a structured way, this supported our stakeholders in considering what would be required to achieve the target state.
For example, in order to abide by the principle of increasing transparency and promoting self-service by users, what new roles, processes, applications and workflows might be required? To achieve compliance with the Digital Scotland Service Standard, what would this mean for the SAA’s future solution and data architectures?
At this stage, we always focus the discussion at a high level, rather than the details of specific technologies; this frees our clients to think logically about the requirements of the ‘to-be’ state, rather than getting bogged down in today’s practical challenges. In this way, we worked with the SAA stakeholders to delineate the broad outlines of the future portal’s solution architecture.
Given the nature of the SAA’s constitution, an important factor was how to strike the right balance between the independence of the individual Assessors and the co-ordinating function of the SAA. Again, the Key Principles came into play here. With reference to the principles, we supported the SAA stakeholders to shape the architecture required to achieve that balance.
So, while master valuation data would continue to reside with the Assessors, the principles relating to transparency and automation would ensure greater data integration in the future portal. Whereas customer enquiries were currently received and processed by each Assessor’s office, the principle of user-centricity would ensure that enquiries were managed centrally in the ‘to-be’ state, promoting a consistent customer experience.
Promoting SAA self-sufficiency
The maintenance and development of the current portal was a significant ongoing cost, requiring external technical support. If the maintenance of the new portal were outsourced, the SAA would end up in the same position. We encouraged the stakeholders to consider the ongoing maintenance of the portal with reference again to the Key Principles and ‘to-be’ business architecture.
There were no plans to recruit in-house development capability, so we formed a working hypothesis with the stakeholders that a low-code or no-code platform might be the right choice for the new portal. While this would not eliminate the need for some technical support in the portal’s creation and setup, it should allow the SAA to be much more self-sufficient in the ongoing maintenance of its data flows and front-end interfaces.
At Scott Logic, we are richly experienced in working with clients on the specification and delivery of services such as ScotPayments. However, at this strategic ideation stage, our role was instead to apply that experience in forming a series of robust hypotheses for validation by the SAA during the discovery phase, rather than a detailed specification.
The low-code/no-code platform hypothesis was justified based on the SAA’s envisaged in-house capabilities and the advanced data management proficiency of its current workforce. However, it would be important to validate the low-code/no-code options during discovery.
For example, one of the Key Principles was to facilitate self-service for citizens via the new portal; if a given platform required citizens to create an account with associated licensing costs, this might make it an unfeasible option. Equally, to meet the principle of complying with standards like the DSSS, it would be necessary to validate whether it would be possible and cost-effective to configure a given platform in line with, for example, accessibility and style guidelines.
Laying the foundations for service design
Over the course of the engagement, we supported the SAA to explore its business goal of modernising the portal, taking our stakeholders on a structured journey that would lay the foundations for the portal’s service design – from proxy user research to business architecture and Key Principles, and from there to solution architecture.
Through these steps, we were able to present the pros and cons of a range of options to the SAA, from fixing the existing portal to a full transformation. This helped our stakeholders establish their appetite for change.
From there, we helped shape an incremental roadmap and familiarised the SAA with the discovery, alpha, beta and live phases of the Digital Scotland Service Standard. The next step for the SAA would be to create a business case for investment. We brought our experience and expertise to bear in supplying ballpark cost estimates, for iterative refinement at the discovery phase and beyond.
At Scott Logic, we pride ourselves on our pragmatic approach, and this is what our stakeholders at the SAA valued the most, as an organisation with no in-house development capability. With our support, the SAA translated a high-level goal into a logical series of achievable steps, giving them confidence in their ambition to create an accessible, modern portal that would serve the needs of Scottish citizens for years to come.