My name is Florence. I am an A-Level student from Oxford, studying English, Philosophy and Psychology, but I also have an interest in art and design. I spent the last week at OCC, doing work experience with the design team. I’m still unsure about the career path I will take, but this week has been beneficial in helping me learn about design. With the help of the team, I worked on multiple projects, starting with making a banner for the[...]
Volunteer-led organisation codebar runs regular, free coding workshops that aim to diversify the tech industry. Local developers volunteer as coaches, and women, minority ethnic groups and members of the LGBT+ community come along to learn whatever takes their tech fancy. Workshops run monthly in Oxford, and on 26th September, Oxford Computer Consultants hosted one at our new St Aldates offices. Attendees mingled over food, then the event kicked off with a welcome presentation, followed by a lightning talk from Reynold,[...]
OCC has donated 8 computers to Oxford’s Rose Hill Community Centre. The computers are being used in the Community Centre’s new beginners’ ICT courses, in a joint project between the Centre and City of Oxford College, with Rose Hill Community Association donating equipment as well as OCC. OCC Project Manager Lois Muddiman said, “We are delighted to be supporting community education by donating these computers. We hope they will be used widely by many different groups.” To find out more,[...]
Hi, I’m Isabel. I’ve always wanted to get into coding and hoped to start at Codebar, Oxford, but was too young. However, through my contact with Codebar I met one of the organisers, Beverley Newing, who’s part of the front-end development team at OCC. Beverley was really helpful and after lots of emails, involving her sending me a lot of resources, and me thanking her a lot, she kindly offered me work experience at OCC. Day 1 I was introduced[...]
Much of today’s most innovative software is created by academics, pushing the boundaries of computer simulation to explore, for example, ever more detailed models of scientific and medical phenomena. Often during this academic journey, potential commercial applications become apparent. Helping a client meet the many and varied challenges of commercialisation is a key role for OCC’s Innovation Delivery Team. ‘The process of commercialising research software is very broad,’ says Dr Reynold Greenlaw, Director of the Innovation Delivery Team. ‘Some research[...]
On Friday the 24th, we sponsored the #upfront workshop in Oxford, which was widely attended by OCC staff. This was a public, evening workshop for helping people build up their confidence and work on their public speaking skills, through a variety of fun and engaging exercises. #upfront run a series of confidence workshops, with the aim of encouraging and elevating new voices on and off public stages. #upfront’s vision is to make the stages around the world more diverse and[...]
At the start of January, I joined Oxford Computer Consultants as a Front End Intern. I’ll be here for another 5 months in the UX Design Studio, building up my Front End skills. Read on for more about me, what I’m doing, and my first impressions of what it’s like to work here… My Background I graduated with a degree in English and German Literature in 2015, but I’ve been slowly transitioning into tech since then. I worked in admin for[...]
We exhibited at the Low Carbon Network Innovation conference (LCNI) again this year. LCNI brings together distribution network operators, National Grid and energy industry suppliers to network and present the innovative ways they are responding to current challenges in the energy industry. As the industry reduces its reliance on carbon-based energy sources – which are concentrated, predictable and controllable – in favour of more distributed and variable green alternatives, the challenge is to maintain electricity and gas supplies and respond[...]
At OCC we are always looking at ways to improve our social care products to meet our customers’ and users’ needs. As part of the design process, we run a series of sessions with stakeholders* and users**. Each type of session has different objectives which are described below. Stakeholders interviews The aim of stakeholder interviews is to understand the business and features requirements. We aim to get a complete perspective on the requirements, so we talk to representative stakeholders. These are one-to-one[...]
OCC’s Ami is one of the latest ‘tech for good’ projects to receive funding from Nominet Trust, the UK’s leading social tech funder. There were 298 applications in the recent round of Nominet Trust’s Social Tech Seed programme, of which 9, including Ami, were successful. “Too often older people in our communities can feel isolated and lonely,” said Vicki Hearn, Director of Nominet Trust. “This isn’t just a social problem – it’s damaging to their health too. We’re very excited[...]
Last Wednesday, Reynold, our projects director, and I gave a talk at ACCU Oxford. We shared practical UX techniques to embed UX in development cycles and talked about the importance of a good user experience in tech. Abstract Good user experience is essential to the success of your product, it creates a competitive advantage and saves you money by reducing wasted development time. But how do you know that what you develop are the features that users will care about?[...]
Performance may seem like an abstract concept until it involves the care of some of society’s most vulnerable people. ContrOCC is OCC’s finance management software. It is used by about 50 local councils, has more than 1,000,000 lines of code and took over 10 years to build. The software is used by local council social care finance teams to manage contracts and budgets, make payments to suppliers and collect contributions from service users. ContrOCC payment calculations are complex. As the[...]
Warwickshire Counter Fraud Partnership select Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) and Infoshare Limited to provide Data Matching Software for Fraud Prevention Warwick January 2016: Following a competitive tender, Warwickshire Counter Fraud Partnership WCFP are delighted to announce the award of the contract for Data Matching Software for Fraud Prevention jointly to Oxford Computer Consultants (OCC) and Infoshare as part of the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) counter fraud initiative. By bringing together and matching a number of key datasets[...]
Oxford Computer Consultants has long links to Parkinson’s research, being involved with a number of EU projects including Parreha, ParkService, PERFORM, and CuPiD. A group of OCC employees and their families decided to take part in this year’s Oxford Walk for Parkinson’s on Sunday 25th October. On a sunny Sunday morning, Rosalind Ravelli, Laura Walton, John and Marie Boyle, and Reynold and Liz Greenlaw all walked the 4 mile course in under 2 hours. James Greig, Andy Muddiman, Julie Mabbett[...]