New digital strategy launched!

We’ve had a real focus on digital transformation over the last few years, and we’ve been successful in making positive change across a range of our services, with a clear focus on meeting residents’ expectations and improving their experience, but also to support our teams and how they work. It’s not really a choice anymore – customer demand, expectation and local government budgets mean we have to be doing more for less.

By no means are we there yet, but a few highlights that we’ve delivered over the past few years:

• Building a garden waste service with a simple, quick renewal process (with over 87% renewing online).
• An online bulky waste service offering collection within a fortnight – with re-use and recycling at the heart of the service and moving the service from deficit to surplus.
•  Licensing applications available online – reducing the need for in person interactions and cumbersome word document forms.
• An online planning application tracker that updates you every step of the way (think Domino’s Pizza tracker).
• Automating our communications so residents get alerts about their cases, such as ‘your bin is on its way’!
• Transforming our telephone system – making use of natural language so that callers can say in their words why they’re phoning without needing to know our internal structure or hunting through phone menu after phone menu.
• Taking a different approach to flooding – I talked about this one in a previous blog post but in short, utilising GIS (data) to inform where we needed to respond to a flood event.

We’ve got lots more examples, and we’ll be launching a ‘five years of low code’ soon, highlighting some of our work. It’s great to see our approach has been recognised nationally – and for a small council and team, it means a lot – and we’re keen to keep pushing.

Just over a year ago we merged our IT and Digital teams, and I now oversee them both – does that matter? Well, our focus initially when we set up the digital team was on improving the customer experience and not making it all about the technology. This is still important to us… IT has to be an enabler, and it shouldn’t be used as the reason ‘why not’ to do something. Now the two teams are working to the same priorities, which is working well. To sit alongside this merge, we’ve been busy refreshing our strategy – a joint strategy and we’re really pleased with what we’ve created.

Working alongside the one and only Dave Briggs at Localise, we’ve engaged at all levels across the organisation and come up with something that will set out how we go about continuing to do what we do for the next few years.

We’re talking about:

• Maximising our digital capabilities (so we can continue to prioritise our residents’ experience and improve how our teams work)
• Fostering a collaborative culture, because the best ideas come from working together!
• Delivering outcomes that support our Council Plan vision to ‘support people and strengthen our communities’.

We’ve split it down into three core elements:

User Experience:
Designing services that people choose to use – perhaps even on-par with that of the private sector! The ambition is to have accessible 24/7 digital forms, integrated directly into our systems and where possible, resolved at first point of contact. Built using an agile, user-centred approach. We’re not forcing anyone online, for those residents and customers who want or need to call us, we’ll still have that option too. By creating an excellent experience online, we can make sure the experience over the phone is great too.

Data:
We’re aiming to become a truly data-informed organisation. With that comes better decisions, smarter services, and even predicting needs before they arise. To achieve this, we need our staff to confident with data, after all, they are the ones who are working with it. We need to make sure that data across the board is in a position we can rely on (especially UPRNs!) and that fixing data issues becomes second-nature.

Technology:
Investing in reliable, flexible technology – no more accepting of clunky local gov systems… all this of course comes with security and sustainability front and centre. Utilising low-code platforms and open source, we can re-use and collaborate across the sector reducing complexity.

But what does success look like?

We’ve set ourselves some ambitious outcomes:

• Better experiences for customers (obviously!)
• A digitally confident workforce
• Financial sustainability
• Strong and secure technology foundations
• A data-informed organisation
• Readiness for devolution and local government reorganisation
• Environmentally conscious service delivery (less paper, less travel, and more recycling)

The strategy is about building resilient, efficient and innovative services designed around the evolving needs of our residents and communities.

We’re taking an iterative approach to this, and we’ll keep it live – adapting as we need to. We’re now busy working on developing the strategy’s framework with DDaT playbooks and blueprints:

Look forward to sharing more on those but in the meantime, you can have a read of the full strategy here.