MISSION THREE
Sustainable and Innovative Digital Public Services
MISSION THREE
Sustainable and Innovative Digital Public Services
“The council’s budget continues to be under significant pressure. The same goes for many other institutions and businesses in the city and for our residents. The pressures come at exactly the same time as the demand on our services is likely to grow.
A cost-of-living crisis for citizens is combining with a cost of doing business crisis for local companies. We must respond to this challenge creatively and in ways which maintain our core services, especially for our most vulnerable citizens”
Glasgow City Council (Glasgow Strategic Plan, 2022-2027)
Digitisation continues to transform all sectors of the economy, not least with the recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides computing with the intelligence to create text, images, and media. These rapid advancements of technology increasingly provide new opportunities to rethink how we provide our services to make our processes more efficient, to improve our customer experience, and improve outcomes for the people and communities of the city.
Already, the Council Strategic Plan (as well as other strategies such as The Glasgow’s Economic Strategy, Transport Strategy, Housing Strategy, Glasgow’s Climate Plan, and the Glasgow Health and Care Partnership Strategic Plan) all contain commitments that will be underpinned by digital solutions. With the scale of digital trends that we are now experiencing at a global scale we will continue to be presented with new opportunities to reimagine how we provide our services to reduce our costs, improve our customer experience, and improve outcomes.
Digitisation continues to transform all sectors of the economy, not least with the recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that provides computing with the intelligence to create text, images, and media. These rapid advancements of technology increasingly provide new opportunities to rethink how we provide our services to make our processes more efficient, to improve our customer experience, and improve outcomes for the people and communities of the city.
Already, the Council Strategic Plan (as well as other strategies such as The Glasgow’s Economic Strategy, Transport Strategy, Housing Strategy, Glasgow’s Climate Plan, and the Glasgow Health and Care Partnership Strategic Plan) all contain commitments that will be underpinned by digital solutions. With the scale of digital trends that we are now experiencing at a global scale we will continue to be presented with new opportunities to reimagine how we provide our services to reduce our costs, improve our customer experience, and improve outcomes.
To be able to deliver our existing commitments and react to these new opportunities we will need to increase our capacity to innovate and to adopt digital solutions at scale (and at pace). The challenges of how councils across Scotland can benefit from digitisation were documented in a report called “Digital Progress in Local Government” published in 2021 by Audit Scotland.
The report recommends that councils need to: -
- Provide clear leadership and vision
- Engage with their workforce and their communities
- Have a plan for involving communities in service design
- Improve how they monitor benefits
- Develop plans for developing the digital skills within the workforce
- Make better use of data to better inform decision-making
- Re-use common solutions within the sector and wider public sector
- Work in partnership at a local, regional, and national level.
Our focus for Sustainable and Innovative Digital Public Services is on how digital can help us to sustain and improve our services and to:
- Improve the Efficiency, Resilience, and Agility of our Operations
- Improve the Customer Experience of our Services
- Redesign Services to Improve Outcomes for our Citizens and Communities
Whereas the previous strategy set out our ambition for Digital Public Services in terms of the programmes we planned to deliver, the actions contained in this Action Plan set out how we will create an environment that encourages (and provides capacity for) creativity, and how we will improve the quality, scale, and pace at which digital programmes are delivered within the resources available.
