Ontario aids marginalized populations with cloud-based collaborative solution on Microsoft Dynamics 365

Bringing social ministries together

The Ontario government provides a wide array of services to the more than 15 million Canadians that call the province home. Its network of services includes employment assistance, social housing, senior care, child welfare, disability support, Indigenous affairs, and others. They noticed an increase in the number of complex, noncriminal situations that local police were being asked to respond to. And they determined that in many of these situations, people would be better served if other service providers responded, through an integrated approach.    

The Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General (ministry) introduced a modernized approach to Community Safety and Well-Being (CSWB), which promotes a holistic, multi-sectoral approach to support those in need with the right response from the right service provider at the right time. Ideally, this approach would both provide aid to at-risk individuals sooner and reduce the variety of incidents police are asked to respond to. Over time, the program would also help reduce the number of people in Ontario who are introduced to the scenarios that put them at risk in the first place. 

Since its ideation, CSWB in Ontario has blossomed. The ministry partnered with 11 other ministries as well as the federal government through its Inter-Ministerial CSWB Working Group, and together they share communications channels and information in a unified effort to identify and respond to the needs of marginalized or at-risk individuals and populations. 

Various Ontario communities have also recognized the need to work collaboratively and target local risks in more effective and efficient ways through multi-sectoral planning initiatives and rapid response interventions (e.g., Situation Tables). These types of models are an example of a strategy that aligns with one of the pillars of the CSWB Framework developed by Ontario. They involve multi-sectoral risk interventions that are intended to reduce risk of harm/victimization for vulnerable individuals and alleviate the need for emergency response. In Ontario, multi-sectoral risk intervention models are happening at the community level and are not considered a provincial initiative. However, the ministry does recognize the value of supporting these types of models as they align with Ontario’s Community Safety and Well-being Planning Framework and encourages a collaborative approach to community safety and well-being.

To underpin the effort of CSWB and local communities, the ministry developed the Risk-driven Tracking Database (RTD) on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and offers it free of charge to communities across Ontario that are engaged in these types of models. The RTD is one tool that communities can use to collect risk-based information about local priority risks and evolving trends to help inform the community safety and well-being planning process.

Using the RTD helps communities provide effective and efficient risk-based interventions while protecting personal privacy by limiting data collection to de-identified information and determining systemic issues and trends that lead to crime and victimization. “We’re really trying to take an all-of-government approach to identifying and responding to the root causes that put people at risk,” says Michelina Longo, Director, External Relations Branch of the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General. 

Unified and de-identified data

Situation Tables—regular meetings between frontline human services workers—predate the RTD. At those meetings, government ministries and other social support agencies were already hashing out interdisciplinary solutions designed to reduce human risk in local communities. The ministry noticed that, because local agencies vary widely in terms of capacity and resources, many Situation Table participants were manually recording discussions at the tables. They realized that with a tool like the RTD, the government could standardize and digitize data collection for these agencies. Plus, the data shared during Situation Table meetings could be collected and made available to help workers identify local risk-reducing opportunities. “We wanted to be more effective in identifying synergies across our communities and help those communities identify situations of acutely elevated risk,” says Longo. “With the RTD, we have a technological solution capable of supporting those goals.”

The RTD team began with a three-month proof of concept, incorporating feedback from local practitioners into the solution’s design. This effort confirmed that information sharing was among the most common barriers to multisectoral collaboration. In 2016, in collaboration with community and policing partners as well as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, the ministry released its guidance document on de-identified information sharing in multi-sectoral risk intervention models. As a database, the RTD helps standardize the gathering of de-identified information regarding situations of elevated risk. Communities with a Situation Table or other collaborative risk-based solutions can use this database alongside other local data sources to identify people and groups facing elevated risk, protective factors that might help reduce risk, and develop community safety plans. So far, 62 Ontario sites have been onboarded.

The information the RTD collects regarding individuals who receive support from Situation Tables is very limited and de-identified. For instance, all names are omitted, and discussions are stored by number. A person’s age is only represented by an age range. The team purposely designed the RTD with no open text fields so that workers can’t accidentally gather personal data. Situation Table discussions are also not meant to be tracked over time. Instead, best practice in the intervention processes for individuals at acutely elevated risk is that an intervention is planned and launched within 24 to 48 hours of the meeting. The ministry uses the RTD to produce a provincewide annual report, which breaks down provincial and regional results, and highlights the success of multi-sectoral partnerships in reducing risk over time by working collaboratively to identify local risks and then launching interventions that consider local demographics, needs, and resources. 

The annual report aggregates data concerning which organization initiates a discussion and which organization leads the intervention by sector. The RTD can show results at the provincial level and by individual community, giving areas a more practical, actionable view of their unique social services and response system. For agencies that lack the expertise to generate their own specialized reports, the government created different report templates that can be automatically populated with local data. 

Illuminating locally available response options

Once participating sites add their information to the solution’s database, the RTD provides highly tailored, localized response options by optimizing their strengths and approaches. “One of the key principles of community safety and well-being planning is identifying local high-priority risks and implementing strategies that effectively remediate them,” says James Lee, Team Lead in Program Development for the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General. “With the RTD, we’re providing Ontario communities with access to data that can help inform community safety and well-being planning, in conjunction with other local datasets.”

Many of the agencies involved in frontline work with at-risk populations are largely made up of people who volunteer for this work in addition to their regular job/duties. Despite having tremendous will to aid people at risk of eviction, drug overdoses, and other threats to their wellbeing, these organizations simply lack the budgets to adopt their own digital tools. By giving them free access to the RTD, the Ontario Government extends the capabilities of these smaller organizations, while simultaneously granting them increased data security.

A highly secure and scalable cloud-based solution

Increasing the security around ministerial data was part of the reasoning behind the government’s recent decision to move the RTD from an on-premises solution to the cloud (work has been completed and went live in July 2023). “Initially, we thought security was a reason not to move to the public cloud,” says Amitesh Narang, Sr Manager, Justice Technology Services, Ministry of the Solicitor General. “After we did our due diligence, we not only reversed that thinking but began exploring the diverse benefits the cloud has to offer.” These benefits, Narang explains, include ease of use, infrastructural scalability, computing flexibility, and the adaptability that comes with software as a service offering.

The Ontario Government also sees the cloud as an avenue for improved support. “We want a software supplier who we can reach out to, whether that’s about expanding our use of ERP and CRM tools, creating standardized data visualizations, or altering our cybersecurity landscape,” says Narang. Chris Walpole, Former Head of Solutions at Justice Technology Services Division for the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, agrees. “Using the cloud inherently reduces our operating costs. There’s no infrastructure we need to care for. We don’t have to worry about mobility or redundancy for disaster recovery. Basically, moving to the cloud helps us focus on our bread and butter—keeping people safe.” 

A solution to benefit local, province-wide, and national organizations

Since the introduction of the RTD, the Ontario Government has noticed ministerial data silos beginning to break down. Ministries and agencies that regularly meet at the Situation Table have begun collaborating more closely, both in times of acute need and when they feel that interagency responses can address less time-sensitive concerns as well. Smaller community organizations have also benefitted from the free solution, as their new access to local and provincial data has begun to better inform their funding requests. “A lot of these organizations are involved in this work because they’re very passionate about it,” says Natalie Brull, Community Safety Analyst in Program Development for the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General. “They’re volunteering their time in some cases, so giving them this easy-to-use solution and supporting them through training and use of the solution can be hugely valuable to them.” 

In addition to its provincewide benefits, the RTD has also extended across Canada with the National project beginning in 2019, by onboarding 14 sites in Saskatchewan. Manitoba also uses a version of this model and has 12 sites accessing the information through the RTD and the ministry continues to have conversations with other provinces and territories interested in the solution. Maybe someday soon, the unified perspective of risk that Ontario has achieved through consistency of data and analysis could extend to the national level. “Generally speaking, there has been a trend in favor of coordinated, integrated responses from the government,” says Longo. “We want to understand root causes, making sure to consider the effects of one intervention on others downstream. With the RTD, we’re both supporting that process and driving a deeper understanding that we all operate within a single continuum of public service.”

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