The West London Alliance (WLA) consisting of 6 London boroughs (Brent, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Harrow, Hillingdon and Hounslow) are working together to make their combined adult social care more efficient, and have chosen Oxford Computer Consultants to provide our OCC MarketPlace system to support them. With a combined budget of £330 million a year the WLA has the greatest spend of any single local government organisation in England for adult social care. By combing their budgets the local authorities[...]

The Sport England project involved the development of a Geographical Information System (GIS) that shows the profile of people living in different parts of the UK.  It is designed to help organizations plan their investment into sporting facilities. Sport England selected OCC to develop an interactive web-based tool for viewing their refreshed market segmentation data. The Sports market segmentation web tool enables users to analyze the general population and their characteristics at different social and geographic levels. It makes it[...]

At the recent ContrOCC workshop on ad-hoc reporting John Boyle was reminded of a paper he wrote in 1984  suggesting that the ‘on button’ for a simple calculator (one that could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) should be replaced by a ‘test’ button.  On pressing the test button, the screen would display a simple, but appropriate, test: for example, 7 * 8.  If the human entered the correct answer, only then would the calculator switch on and the user[...]

Here at OCC we are celebrating a double sale of our contract management system ContrOCC. Cheshire West Local Authority has recently purchased both ContrOCC Adult and ContrOCC Children and we also have a number of tenders in progress with other local authorities. This is a really positive step, given the anxiety at the moment surrounding the public sector cuts, showing that local authorities are prepared to and feel that it is still worth investing in contract management.

OCC software is being submitted for approval by MCERTS. This is the Environment Agency (EA) Monitoring Certification Scheme. As OCC provides software for air quality monitoring, we have attracted interest from “MCERTS for Software” which is new. As the EA document puts it: Problems with Data Management can have a number of serious adverse effects Nothing new there. So what’s involved in MCERTS certification? It’s one of those happy occasions where a standard imposes reasonable and not too onerous restrictions[...]

Have you heard of the “smart grid”? The national generation and transmission of electricity is one of the defining problems of our time driven by concerns over energy independence, global warming and emergency resilience. To make the most of our resources and incorporate new power sources, such as wind, we will need a grid that is flexible, responsive and efficient. At National Grid work towards the smart grid has long been underway.  Traditionally power is “broadcast” from a few central[...]