For local councils across England and Wales, improving their digital tools, processes and ways of working has become one of their most important priorities. But despite pockets of collaboration and working groups, digital efforts can sometimes feel quite siloed, with councils not always benefitting from the skills, experiences and support of their peers. Councils often also lack a shared language about digitalisation, which makes it difficult to benchmark their performance against others, or identify where digital can have the greatest outcome.
To solve this problem, the LGA created a framework of 12 strategic outcome areas for local digitalisation, developed in consultation with the sector. The framework is intended to promote the use of a common language and shared strategic outcomes by local government when engaging with central government, private, voluntary, and community sectors as well as with one another.
The LGA then worked with PUBLIC to create a simple, user-friendly Digitalisation Almanac, as an annual resource providing practical guidance, case studies and assessment tools for councils to put the 12 strategic outcomes framework into practice.
We developed the Almanac in consultation with 50+ local councils, digital government experts and third-sector organisations, creating a single source of information and knowledge sharing for the sector to understand and benchmark their performance for different digital themes.
The Digitisation Almanac was launched on 21 March 2023, and councils nationally are using it as a central resource to build a strong digital culture, prioritise work programmes, self-assess strategic aims, mitigate common challenges, learn from best practice and engage with colleagues, other councils, central government and suppliers. The content of the Almanac has also been adapted to provide ‘Digital Foundations’ training directly to elected Councillors across the UK, to help them to understand the key digital challenges affecting their councils, and where they can make the greatest impact.
Authors
Helping three councils to analyse their unstructured financial data to optimise spend, drive collaboration and measure sustainability performance
Working with the Cambridge City Council (CCC) to build a clear, actionable digital transformation strategy to ultimately serve its communities
Working with DLUHC over a 3-year period to conduct a robust, research-driven evaluation of 60+ local government digitalisation programmes
Developing learning materials to embed cyber resilience into local government supply chains
In 2020 PUBLIC worked with the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) to assess barriers preventing procurement collaboration between London boroughs.
