Evaluation of the London Office of Technology and Innovation

Key information

Publication type: General

Publication date: Thursday 11 January 2024

The London Office of Technology & Innovation (LOTI) was set up in 2019 to inspire and facilitate better digital collaboration in London local government.

It is a membership organisation: now with 27 member boroughs each contributing £30,000 in annual fees. GLA and London Councils also each contribute £100,000 per year. The GLA recently agreed to fund LOTI for a further three years.

GLA City Intelligence evaluated LOTI from the perspective of its members via a survey of data and digital professionals and eight semi-structured interviews. Seven activities were assessed for their value for money.

We found that LOTI has substantially improved digital collaboration across London, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from both the survey and interviews with LOTI members. Members feel supported by LOTI staff and ultimately LOTI helps them ‘get things done’. Collaboration is challenging and members feel that the cross-borough work co-ordinated by LOTI would not happen otherwise. However, challenges to collaboration remain; there is a lack of alignment around goals, different organisational mindsets and silo-working in local government is hard to overcome.

We also found that LOTI helps boroughs save time and money. Recruitment support from LOTI is associated with cost savings for member boroughs of at least £300k compared to market rates for the same type of support, and the Data Sharing Agreements project has potentially delivered £1.4m in savings compared to individual agreements between all parties. Other projects appear to be cost effective in certain plausible scenarios, for example to provide net benefit to the public, the Attack Surface Mapping pilot would only need to have avoided one cyber-attack (costing ≥£242k).

A comprehensive social cost benefit analysis would consider the resulting outcomes of these activities for Londoners to determine their value for money. The social and economic benefits to Londoners could be far higher than the financial savings to boroughs.