Sheffield has a large public sector workforce and is home to a breadth of public sector organisations, each with a drive and commitment to support our citizens and improve our city. Ambition abounds. The potential to have a powerful impact and make significant change is considerable. But it can be frustrating to see that organisations often operate in silos and don’t maximise their collective potential. How can we join the dots of these varied agencies to exploit their expertise, overlapping ambitions, and resources? How can we combine the public sector’s efforts such that together they become greater than the sum of their parts and we unlock the progress for our communities that is so badly needed?
The multitude of public sector organisations in Sheffield is powerful but can make joint decision-making challenging. Then add to this over-stretched budgets and depleting resources creates an environment where achieving transformative regeneration and realising the city’s true potential can seem overwhelming.
We need to find a way to make smarter decisions collectively and do more with less to create lasting change. We need to exploit the potential that digital innovation can bring for the collective good.
The Government’s latest Spending Review (June 2025) sets out a clear commitment to invest in digital and tech as part of plans for Britain’s economic growth. Digital innovation can drive efficiencies in processes, make information more accessible, reduce costs and enable greater collaboration. Accessing digital innovation can however seem daunting, and for organisations embracing digital change brings the thought of huge potential risk and disruption. The status quo is not sustainable.
We are working on how to bridge the digital divide to help the public sector make informed decisions, overcome their complex hurdles and catalyse change. As Architects we are used to grappling with these societal challenges. The architectural brain is a busy place! We absorb, we sift, we analyse, we prioritise, we future gaze, we design, we dream…….and we try to bring clarity to complexity. Some challenges, however, aren’t easy to see. How do we get our arms round something so big and so detailed? The complex, inter-related, multi-faceted threads of social economics, public health, housing and education needs, infrastructure investment, and environmental sustainability – to name a few! – are inexorably interwoven. This is where we can turn to the digital sphere to help us unravel the threads and start to weave them into a comprehensible pattern.
With the Sheffield Place Pilots commission (working alongside RLB and Akerlof) our aim has been to help our Public Sector organisations in the city understand the extent, breadth and potential of their land and building assets and importantly to facilitate collaboration and identification of opportunities.
Using HLM Place (our pioneering digital approach) we created a customisable visual dashboard – this contains all the assets from 27 public sector organisations in Sheffield who were part of the pilot, including Sheffield City Council. And this data was mapped geographically.
We then integrated both people and place-based data. People-based data included, for example, the Community Needs Index, Index of Multiple Deprivation, workless households etc (provided by Akerlof); and place-based data including planning policy data, flood risk data, listed building information, sub area boundaries etc. We also jointly hosted a series of workshops with the various stakeholder organisations to get under the skin of their individual priorities, visions and challenges.
As Architects, masterplanners and urban designers we then analysed and tested: the macro and the micro, questioning and interpreting. Fundamentally this is not just about representing existing data – it’s about the ‘so what?’ Bringing our expert consultancy together with the HLM_Place smart dashboard allows us to easily navigate complex information and to facilitate collaboration across public sector organisations. We are able to tell the story of places and how people use space and importantly we can identify the need, the opportunity and the potential.
With Sheffield Place Pilots this has allowed identification of opportunities to unlock value and catalyse change for our city, bridging the gap between estate data and evidence-led decision making.
“HLM Place has been invaluable in working collaboratively to easily identify potential locations in public ownership across Sheffield, facilitating easy navigation of complex estates information.
Demonstrating the data in a format that was easy to interpret and showed the best opportunities across the city to facilitate the required change, resulted in a much more effective use of officer time.
Without the use of HLM Place site analysis, this potential project would have taken significantly longer and been far more complex, due to the number of different landholders involved and the challenges of comparing data across multiple organisations.”
Sean McLean, Sheffield City Council
