AMASE: Advanced Multi-Agency Service Environments

EPSRC Funding: £870,000

Abstract:

In an unfortunate recent case, a child died while in the care of social and health services. She and her family had been in contact with over twenty individuals, agencies and departments in the year before her death. Subsequent investigations showed that there had been little communication or co-ordination between these agencies. As a result of this and in response to clear policy at the national level, there is an extremely strong will at all levels in health, social and voluntary services to co-ordinate more effectively across agency boundaries to ensure the quality and effectiveness of services to children and, indeed, of all areas of public service.

Supporting specific initiatives to provide a co-ordinated response to the delivery of services to children in the city of Newcastle, for homeless children in North Tyneside, represents one aspect of the piloting activities of the AMASE project. A second pilot is concerned with the organisational and technical issues of linking academic and NHS networks to improve clinical education and training and the quality of patient care. The final pilot area concerns the introduction of multi-application smart cards in transport and in emerging areas of e-government in Tyne and Wear and in the wider Northern Region. In each of these pilots, the project is delivering consultancy and facilitation in strategy development and in operational planning of new systems and organisational processes. These pilots represent the grounding of the AMASE the project in real world problems.

At the level of service architectures, AMASE is developing common models of service at the structural and infrastructural levels. We are applying models of intermediation and brokerage in an attempt to synthesise a more effective way of thinking about service integration and the systems which can support it. These models are based on an approach to the structuring of architectural discourse which supports the representation and reasoning about roles and responsibilities - the intentional aspect of socio-technical systems - as well as the more conventional means of exploring solution spaces in terms of information and communication processes. The objective here is to develop and test concepts for multi-agency service integration architectures at the regional level.

Finally, and at its most fundamental level, the AMASE project is attempting to understand whether and how the quality of architectural discourse can be improved in situations where organisations are being re-engineered not just in terms of new work-flows, processes and technologies, but also in redefining themselves, their roles, responsibilities and relationships.

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