Kent County Council responds to climate change with our weather reporting software

The challenge

Legacy application modernisation was needed

With severe weather events predicted to increase due to climate change, it’s imperative to gather actionable data on the phenomenon. This is especially true for public bodies such as local councils.

For this reason, Kent County Council has developed a strategy to prepare for severe weather including flooding, storms, and heatwaves. This requires creating a climate change impact assessment to identify how the council can improve its response.

However, the council’s SWIMS weather reporting software was not collecting the volume of data needed to properly inform a response. The reason for this was an unintuitive interface that hindered non-technical users. In turn, this was preventing the council from preparing effectively for future weather events.

On top of the difficult interface, the weather reporting software also lacked scalability. With severe weather events on the rise, it was important that the software could handle larger volumes of data.

And if our solution proved successful, the council wanted the option of rolling it out to other public bodies in the future. Therefore they needed a weather data analytics development solution that was easy to replicate, modify, and scale.

The solution

Delivering a new weather reporting system

Having impressed the council with our response to their invitation to tender, Influential was chosen to deliver the project.

We proposed rebuilding the SWIMS weather reporting software in .NET and hosting it in Microsoft Azure. With Azure’s fully maintained and scalable cloud services, this would ensure long-term value for the software.

Overall, the weather reporting system had the following features:

• data entry with fields such as text, numbers, dropdown lists, and check boxes
• data analysis allowing users to produce custom reports based on their roles
• the ability to easily export data in .xlsx, .docx and .pdf formats

At the same time, the system had to reflect the council’s administrative structure (from high to low): county, organisation, and service. Each of these levels was reflected in a different user type with different permissions in the software:

1. administrator: can send out county-wide notifications, run reports on system usage, and edit the categories users select
2. enhanced user: can access and report on data within their organisation, and delete users in line with GDPR legislation
3. standard user: can only access data within and run reports about their service

Furthermore, the solution had to comply with EU and UK data hosting standards, as well as being secure and password-protected.

Our software engineers delivered the project according to the agile development methodology. This meant meeting with the client regularly to get feedback to incorporate into the next “sprint” of work. Using Jira project management tools, we let the council’s stakeholders track our work in real time. This approach ensured that we used our time effectively and were able to make any desired adjustments.

Overall, some core features of the development work were:

• database development
• security, access, and permissions development
• event creation
• enquiry and maintenance screens development
• UI development and improvement based on user feedback
• dashboard development
• report development
• data extract controls development

The benefits

Helping Kent weather the storm