At OCC we have been building and hosting software that deals with sensitive public sector data for over a decade. But where do you start if you are embarking on a project/business that has sensitive data at its heart? ISO 27001 The basic standard you need to look at for a company in this sector is ISO 27001:2013. You can purchase a copy of this standard online. If you go along this path the one thing I will say is[...]

Last month OCC took part in LocalGovCamp 2015 and the Local Democracy Maker Day fringe event in Leeds. LocalGovCamp is an annual “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda by pitching sessions, building a schedule, and taking part in the sessions that appeal the most to them. To people used to formal conferences, it might sound a little chaotic, but it works incredibly well and results in a highly topical and engaging event. Sessions ranged in topic from Open Data,[...]

Tom Litt & I will be attending The Lead Developer conference in September – it’s a new conference with a great line up of speakers covering new and disruptive technologies (of course), tools, methodologies, and, because it is aimed at Leads, also managing teams, motivation and leadership. To warm up I’ve written an article for the conference blog: How to write a 5 year plan (and why it doesn’t matter if no one follows it).

Oliver Britton, a DPhil student in the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Oxford, has won an international prize for his paper on a new computer model of cardiac electrophysiology. The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) awarded Ollie the prize for its potential to reduce the number of animals used in drug testing. He plans to use the prize grant for further research to apply the methodology in neuroscience. OCC has been[...]

If you’re more than 20 years old you will remember the annual delivery of your local telephone directory; the thud as it lands heavily in your hallway, often with a crumpled cover, a testament to the efforts of the delivery boy to fit the tightly published pages through your letter box. For me, this directory was my first exposure to search engine rankings, with its wonderfully named 001 Aardvark Taxis vying angrily with 001 Ace taxis for first place in[...]

This picture was generated based on the most common words in the user guide for the upcoming ContrOCC version 8 roadmap release. Client, Service, Care and Package are seen to be important as are Financial, Payment, and Charging. More prosaic common words are dictionary, date, default, report, see, and used. Our thanks to the entertaining wordle.net which made this fun and easy to do.

Imagine you’ve been asked to think up a really difficult technical challenge. Well how about delivering health and social care on line, using self-service portals, to frail and elderly citizens? For good measure, imagine that those people need your services to be as simple and familiar as Amazon or Google and that the people funding you are Local Authorities, facing budget cuts in the order of 60%. Oh and you have to ensure accessibility – from PCs, tablets, mobile phones,[...]

Jeff Gothelf is the author of Lean UX, a book that plugs into the theory of The Lean Startup and looks at how User Experience design processes fit in with the Lean approach. Jeff was interviewed by Communitech News and described what he believes is the key to building an innovative product or company: Talk to your customers. I mean, really have the humility to listen to your customers. Learn what it is that they love about your product; learn[...]

National Grid will be showcasing three of their OCC-partnered projects at the Low Carbon Networks & Innovation Conference (LCNI) in Aberdeen, 20-22 October 2014. The conference is a platform for gas and electricity network operators to showcase projects sponsored under their NIA and NIC innovation schemes. The OCC-partnered projects are: Ramp Rate Study System: an interface to a numerical modelling tool that allows engineers to study the effects of a sudden change in gas pressure (“ramping”) on the network. Standards[...]

David Hannaford and Mark Stone attended Digital Health Oxford’s Hackday, held at the Oxford Launchpad in Said Business School, Oxford, over the weekend of 12th and 13th July. David’s team came 2nd for the data visualization tool they built to enable a doctor to show a patient their survival rate if they are at risk from cardiac issues. The app calculates the survival rate of an individual by looking at data on risk factors, such as age, weight, blood pressure,[...]

Reynold Greenlaw and Andy Muddiman attended the Oxford Startups demo night at Oxford Launchpad in the Said Business School, on 15th May where they demoed the GaitAssist smartphone app that has been developed for the Cupid project. They demoed it pretty much continuously at our very busy table to the many interested attendees and our communications manager Janine Smith joined in to lend a hand. The app continuously compares the gait of a user with Parkinson’s disease during walking with[...]

We recently started a new project – EmerGent, which is a 3 year European project researching the impact of social media by emergency services during a crisis. Whenever there’s a large fire, riot, earthquake or other crisis a lot of information immediately appears in social media – some valuable, some completely erroneous. With our partners we are developing tools and techniques for mining and validating that content. The EU-FP7 EmerGent project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework[...]

A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique. Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed[...]

For our 2013 Christmas do we decided we would visit our colleagues in Poland rather than go for the usual Christmas outing. As Poland tends to be rather chilly in December we opted to hold out until May and hope for some summery weather. So, over a long weekend, we (along with friends and partners) enjoyed the delights of a boat trip, a visit to underground cellars where vodka is made and aged, a walk round a picturesque lake, two[...]