Socitm invites co-creation of a resource to guide approaches to digital by local public services
Socitm, the membership organisation for IT and digital professionals, has invited interested parties to help it ‘co-create’ a resource to guide the development of local digital strategies and plans.
In collaboration with the Local Public Services CIO Council, Socitm has published Digital Insights, an online resource available at http://plantingtheflag.net/digitalinsights that sets out the what, why, when, who and how of digital and its disruptive impact on local public services.
The resource explains that the positive impact of digital will be felt in the experience of local public services, including:
• offering new ways to understand and address increasing citizen demand and expectations
• meeting growing demand for digital interaction
• unlocking community assets and engagement
• radically changing outcomes in areas of social and health care, waste management, transport, car parking, policing, environmental management, etc.
From this baseline, the resource begins to explore four key principles and ten supporting principles for bringing the digital revolution to local public service delivery and also to the way local public services engage with citizens. The principles are focused on aspects of organisational behaviour and activity that need particular attention if digital technologies and ways of working are to be exploited for the maximum benefit of people in local communities.
The resource has been published at http://plantingtheflag.net/digitalinsights where any interested party may comment on each aspect. Based on the feedback received, Socitm and the Local CIO Council will further develop the resource for a formal launch at the Socitm Spring conference in London on 24 April. Introductory sections cover:
• What digital is
• What business problems digital addresses
• Why digital is relevant to Local Public Services
• Why digital is different to e-government of 2002
• When to apply digital
• When not to apply digital
• Who digital is relevant to
• Who’s at risk of being excluded and what to do about it
• How local and central digital strategies inter-relate
• How service design can benefit from embracing digital.
The four key principles that the resource suggests should inform local digital plans are:
1. Customer experience: focus on the customer and savings will follow.
2. Service re-design: redesign services from first principles taking advantage of digital technologies.
3. Engagement: use ‘digital first’ for engagement with citizens and customers.
4. Ways of working: adopt digital techniques for internal working practices
The supporting principles are:
5. Leadership: improve digital leadership and governance.
6. Capability: build appropriate levels of digital capability in-house.
7. Demand management: analyse and manage demand for services.
8. Usability: develop standards to ensure that the user experience of ‘digital’ is easy, intuitive and consistent.
9. System selection: choose systems for public and internal use on the basis of their usability.
10. Performance: define the success of your digital strategy.
11. Sharing: share as much content, applications and resources as possible, whether locally, regionally, nationally.
12. Take-up: increase take-up of digital services.
13. Assisted digital: develop policies and programmes for supporting people who have rarely or never been online.
14. Transparency: make the organisation ‘open by default’.
The principles have be developed on the back of the Socitm/Local CIO Council 2011 publication, Planting the Flag: a strategy for ICT-enabled local public services reform as well as Socitm’s extensive research and publishing on digital delivery and channel shift.
They also reflect ideas in the Government Digital Strategy, but in a section called ‘Why cannot local public services just follow the Government Digital Strategy?’, some key differences between ‘central’ and ‘local’ that affect the adoption of digital are set out. This explains why each locality will require its own, distinct, approach to embracing digital.
In another section, the resource explores why ‘digital’ government is not simply a re-hash of ‘e-government’, the programme that ran, with considerable funding, from 2001. It is not now enough, says the resource, to enable a one-way only transactions. For example, where people have reported potholes, they expect interaction to see if the pothole has already been reported and when it will be repaired. Applying a digital ‘front end’ to an existing process without re-designing it is to miss the point of a digital way of life.
According to Martin Ferguson, Socitm’s Director of Policy who is leading the Digital Insights initiative: ‘Much has changed since the days of e-government. The technology has developed considerably, public service managers are familiar with its potential from their own use of online banking, shopping and networking, and the take up of digital services by the general population, while not complete, is widespread. So the opportunity is there to really focus on re-designing services openly, collaboratively and with a ‘digital first’ philosophy. We are bringing something of this approach to our own co-creation of Digital Insights.’
Those interested in contributing to Digital Insights are encouraged to go to http://www.plantingtheflag.net/digitalinsights and add their comments.
An updated version of the Digital Insights resource will be presented at the Socitm Spring conference on April 24 at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.