Digital Leaders Week 2022

Recorded as part of the Digital Leaders Week.

Local government is responsible for a huge number of vital services across the UK. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the vital role local government plays in keeping people safe and well and in building prosperous and resilient localities.

Despite their essential role, the number of people working in local government has reduced significantly and consistently over the past decade. And there has been a similar downward trend in funding for local government. In England, this includes a 37% reduction in core grants from central government since 2010.

Citizen expectations have not reduced in the same periods though. Local authorities are, therefore, looking at becoming more digital – that is, “applying the culture, processes, business models and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations” – in order to meet these challenges, achieve efficiencies and deliver cashable savings.

Data, and the ability to move it in a friction-free way out of and between different software applications to support digital transformation, is often trapped (held hostage even) in councils’ legacy applications. And since every local authority has a huge number of legacy applications supporting citizen services, it’s often a massive, and generally costly, task to untangle this ‘legacy spaghetti’.

The Local Digital Declaration, and its call to ‘fix the plumbing’, recognises the need to address this data deluge. But much of the local government solutions market is hindering, not helping, local government to digitally transform services. Local authorities are being let down and stifled. Suppliers make integration difficult and expensive, hindering the efforts of local authorities to transform.

We think that’s just wrong. And that’s why we are on a mission to put the power of digital transformation back into the hands of local authorities.

In this session, we show you how one council, Ashfield District Council has delivered on their digital transformation using low-code technology. You can hear directly from Vicky Green, Digital Programme Manager for Corporate Services and Transformation at Ashfield how they’ve broken free from legacy IT. Vicky has many years’ experience working in the digital and IT space, both in public and private sector. She joined Ashfield District Council two years ago and is now an integral part of an exciting transformation programme. She has significant experience in managing change and solutions development.

This session was recorded as part of the Digital Leaders Week in June 2022 with Netcall’s Director of Client Solutions for the Public Sector, Mark Gannon.