Challenges to digital transformation in local government should be addressed at a sector level rather than by individual councils, according to report published as part of the Future Councils programme.
It has been produced by the Local Digital team in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) and is based on the findings of a pilot programme run with eight local authorities last year.
Future Councils is aimed at building the understanding of the barriers by councils and has been focused on three common challenges: influencing organisation-wide factors that can unblock change; making digital and cyber improvements across organisations; and reforming services that are riskier and hard to change.
The new pilot report outlines a lifecycle for digital transformation and highlights a number of learnings on how councils are blocked from completing it. These include: external pressures making it difficult to set a direction; no consistency in making the case for change; complex mechanisms for allocating resources; and difficulties in procurement, finding time for transformation and gathering the necessary data blocks.
These are very difficult for councils to overcome by working individually, and the report says a sector-level approach, with common initiatives relevant to many councils, could overcome the systemic barriers, provide economies of scale and support in leveraging resources. The latter would be particularly important in helping councils to provide resources when they have a myriad of short term priorities.
Three missions
The report also identifies three core missions: to reduce the risks in innovation; create the standards for change; and enable change in the technology market.
In an accompanying blogpost, Local Digital said: “In the short to medium term, we heard that councils would welcome more direction and support from central government, be that scaling standards, how to better arrange governance or how to approach the market when procuring and so on.
“It will be important for Local Digital to work with the sector, to seek to understand where councils can address the challenges individually and collectively, where stakeholders may intervene and where DLUHC may convene and facilitate potential interventions.
“The long term ambition of Local Digital is to ensure the sector is mature and robust enough to guide itself, but for now there is a need for this additional support to unblock the sector.”
