South Lanarkshire Council has published a new digital strategy including a strong focus on cyber security.
The strategy, to cover the next five years, includes a series of key themes, each including a set of deliverables, and a quartet of key enablers.
Chair of the council’s finance and corporate resources committee, Cllr Lesley McDonald, said: “A key element of the new strategy will be cyber security. As systems move to the cloud and services are accessed across the internet it will be important to ensure that adequate safeguards are in place to protect against cyber attacks.”
Cyber security is listed as one of the enablers, with a number of objectives including to achieve a council-wide minimum security standard, to ensure all users of the council’s information systems are aware of its acceptable use policy, and to meet all legislative and regulatory requirements.
It also involves developing security standards for cloud services and compliance with payment card industry standards for relevant systems.
Leadership, foundations, standards
Other key enablers in the strategy are digital leadership and governance, digital foundations and architecture standards.
The latter will align with the Scottish Local Government Digital Office’s application of reference architecture standards at a national level.
The key themes are on: keeping the lights on; customer contact and transactional working; agile working; business intelligence and data management; partnership working; digital learning and teaching; digital inclusion; and connectivity.
McDonald added: “This strategy sets out how South Lanarkshire Council will exploit new technologies to help deliver its vision of improving the quality of life for everyone in South Lanarkshire.
“It describes how services will be delivered as ‘digital first’, but we will also ensure no one is left behind as digital services are introduced. This will include working with partners to improve digital connectivity and supporting initiatives to deliver free public wi-fi and user devices.
“We will also ensure that projects implementing new technology take account of impact to users and staff at planning stage, fully train staff as part of all new technology introductions and put users at the heart of new technology projects making it as easy as possible to use.”
