Situation
As part of its Next Gen Public Services vision, a London council set out to modernise its operations and prepare for the future of citizen engagement. The goal was clear: to make the council ready to deliver next-generation public services by creating a single, trusted view of every citizen and household – enabling more effective, joined-up service delivery across departments.
Like many local authorities, our client faced challenges with fragmented data held across multiple systems. Each service area – from Council Tax to Housing and Education – maintained its own records, identifiers, and formats. This siloed approach meant data quality varied significantly and duplication was common, making it difficult to link individuals across services or gain meaningful insights at a borough-wide level.
Approach
To overcome these challenges, the council partnered with Valcon to design and implement a Master Data Management (MDM) solution using Semarchy xDM and Senzing’s Entity Resolution software. The new system enabled the council to unify citizen data from twelve core services into a single, consolidated view. Through a combination of data integration, enrichment, governance, and advanced matching capabilities, the solution ensured that information could be trusted, shared, and reused across departments. Valcon’s approach focused on delivering both technical excellence and long term adoption – embedding strong governance and clear data ownership principles to maximise ongoing value. By resolving duplicate records and enriching address data, the MDM platform improved accuracy and transparency across services, empowering teams to make faster, more informed decisions.
Results
The introduction of MDM marked a major step forward in our clients digital transformation. With a unified, high-quality view of citizen data, the council can now better coordinate services, improve fraud detection, and unlock cross-insights that drive smarter decision-making.
Key results include:
- A scalable foundation to extend to new domains such as Organisations and Properties
- Unified citizen data from 12 services
- Improved data quality and duplication detection
- Enriched address data for greater accuracy
- Enhanced fraud detection
- Better cross-insights leading to improved service coordination for residents
