In 2017, BT announced that it would be switching off its analogue telephone network by 2025.

Inevitably, the rest of the telecommunications substrata soon made similar pledges.

Eight years is not a long time when you have to design, roll out, and message – en masse – the existence of a system that aims to supersede one that’s been in place since the 19^th Century.

It may seem like a reasonably intuitive transition – there’s no shortage of good transformation projects to take heart from. The problem is that the analogue telephone network has had over a century of regulatory refinements and optimisation, as well as industry and governmental assessment to ensure it works best for the most amount of people.

While certainly problematic overall, arguably one of the biggest concerns is how the transition will affect telecare – an umbrella term for a litany of services that – as of October 2021 – supported 182,000 vulnerable people in Scotland.

Whie ultimately, the transition to digital will have myriad benefits for those engaged with telecare services, there’s a lot of work to reach that point and as it stands, the majority of services are deeply entrenched and associated with analogue architecture.

First of all, the tech behind the transition has to be up to the task. The Digital Office for Scottish Local Government – with the backing of the Scottish Government’s TEC programme – has a solution, the Shared ARC – a multi-tenant cloud-based telecare system.

We spoke to the Programme Manager for the Shared ARC, Thomas Ozers to shed some light on the project’s status and what it hopes to achieve within the telecare landscape.

What is the Shared ARC and how will it improve outcomes for users?

The shared ARC Technology Solution is a multi-tenant cloud-based Telecare system. Telecare service providers would use the same shared cloud-based ARC technology solution, but continue to operate autonomously, all while unlocking a range of benefits and new possibilities for service delivery.

Backed by funding from the Scottish Government, the project has a number of lofty goals. Most importantly however, is expediting the transition to digital telecare – as Ozers points out.

He says: “Firstly, we want to support services in their migration – expediting and simplifying their transition to digital and making it as painless as possible for them, while providing continuity for citizens who rely on these services.

“But we don’t want to stop there. One of the huge benefits of getting a range of services all moved over on to a common platform is that it will enable us to drive innovation – more so than we’ve ever been able to do before in the telecare sector when we have commonality in data sets.”

This is of particular importance, as Ozers points out. There’s little integration between systems, never mind dissemination of appropriate data sets for research.

Essentially, the benefit to users isn’t just in the immediate. By keeping up with modern telecom demands, the switch to digital will pave the way for future innovations in telecare.

On this, Ozers comments: “Once we start to bring people and services onto this core system, we can implement standardisation on data items, how we’re recording etc…

“But most importantly, through the Shared ARC and the duration of its framework, we’ll be looking to engender and develop innovation in this space with the help of not only the services but also ensure that citizens voices are heard.”

Data Protection

One of the biggest challenges for any project that involves digitisation or integration is the inevitable concerns around data protection. No cloud system is inherently impenetrable with issues like operational security and compliance ranking as some of the biggest headaches for companies.

As a project with huge implications for the public, these scrutiny’s will be on the Shared ARC project more than most, thankfully Ozers and his team are doing all they can to make sure they’re in a strong position with data compliance and ethical use of data to promote innovation and better services.

“This is something we’re really conscious of, we work with the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, as well as the Cybersecurity and Information officers – really making sure that this top of our agenda.”

As well as working alongside Governmental offices to ensure everything’s up to speed, Ozers hopes that the architecture of the ARC system itself will help mitigate data concerns.

On this, he says: “with our cloud-based platform, we’re going to take a tenancy approach, this means you’ll have each services data logically separated. Right from the start, services will have complete control over all their own information, with only the people they want being able to access it.”

He adds: “As we start to look at those kinds of relationships that may involve data exchange – for instance, sharing calls between services, we can work with them to develop data processing agreements, making sure that we have that groundwork in place for GDPR.”

State of the ARC

Despite the ominous presence of a looming deadline, Ozers is confident in the progress of the Shared ARC project.

“We’re in a really good position with the project at the moment, we’ve had full funding confirmed for 24 months which should see the majority of the project delivered, and we’ve already got a brilliant group of telecare services with us – we currently have 14 early adopters who will work with us on the project.”

While this is undoubtedly positive, such an ambitious project comes with challenges, both in conception and development – something that Ozers is happy to talk about.

“When I joined the project in 2019 and began immersing myself in telecare, I became aware of a stark contrast – on the one hand, as a program, we were creating all these documents looking at the benefits of the move to digital.

“But on the other hand, when you looked at what was commercially available on the market, not many of those benefits were going to be immediately available to services. Suppliers seemed to be universally struggling with the transition.”

One of the biggest issues that’s got us here and is inevitably creating problems for Ozers and his team is that Scotland’s telecare services operate in silos, there’s little crossover or parity in operational architecture which complicates things.

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Ozers explains: “The way the market is – and we’re trying to address this – across Scotland, you’ve got around 23 different alarm receiving centres, each one has been set up individually.

“This means that there’s common software that’s maybe used by some of them but they’re all running different versions of that software – this, along with a litany of other operational differences, means that we have 23 little silos.

“Getting reports or data sets to match up is nearly impossible – this has stifled innovation in the sector.”

As such, while the December 2025 deadline for the analogue switch off may seem onerous, the benefits go far beyond merely keeping up with the tech. It’s a means of future-proofing innovation in the telecare space.

Through the Shared ARC project, things like predictive analytics and the power to harness and action data effectively heralds a brave new dawn.

However, there’s still work to be done – not so much in developing the tech to accommodate the switch to digital but educating on why it’s a good idea and simplifying the process of transition for services seems is likely going to be the metric for success.

For all the steps the Shared ARC is taking in easing the transition – creating like for like systems for services to use as a basis to start, for example, shows a dedication to making this a project that will not only herald innovation, but takes stock of the fact that these kinds of migrations are tricky at best.

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