Our Understanding
In addition to our wide experience of working with regeneration agencies which started at Brent in2 Work back in 2001, CogniSoft's involvement in the City Strategy pathfinders has provided a valuable insight into the challenges faced in effectively implementing and managing employability programmes across city areas.
One of the key challenges faced by city strategy organisations is how to pull together consistent and meaningful information from all their partners, with their many disparate systems.
The issue is that the inherited landscape - a complex patchwork of organisations, programmes and funding streams that have been built organically over time, with some parts working very effectively - must be very carefully stewarded to cause minimum disruption where it is not warranted.
Fundamentally, we have learned that because the supply of consistent information from partners is paramount in being able to make appropriate strategy decisions, flexibility is the key to ensuring the programme itself can be implemented fully amongst partners, and that their very different technology and processes can be maintained in the overall framework of standardisation.
Our Software
Our experiences have ultimately resulted in an open and flexible approach to information exchange at the strategy level that enables organisations to integrate where their systems are working (and therefore not cause unnecesary disruption to the work they are doing) and provides simple and intuitive recording channels for those who need an alternative.
Ultimately, the 'umbrella' city-wide employability system, 'Connect' provides employability organisations with a solution that will flex to meet the existing landscape and provide them with the meaningful and comprehensive management information across all partners in the city. This in turn enables partners to receive the most appropriate funding for the work they are doing, with the minimum upheaval and disruption.
- A fully web based strategy system with a single, central database that is built on the very latest and most reliable Microsoft enterprise technologies
- Ability to take automatic data feeds from a wide range of case level systems to ensure when they are effective, they don't need to be replaced
- Sophisticated web-based case level systems (IO and YETI) to provide partners with the opportunity to chose a solution which is part of CogniSoft's overall product suite if theirs isn't effective
- A simple and intuitive 'just enough' recording portal for organisations to enter data directly if they prefer
- Practitioner led development with regular user groups and frequent updates
- Limitless reporting capabilites and the autonomy to easily get the information you need, to the people who need it, whenever it is needed over the internet
Our aim has always been to harness our technological edge alongside our experience to produce a flexible solution that can support the needs of city employability organisations, and that will continue to grow with them as these develop.