Phil Rumens recently wrote a post on whether the Service Standard works for local government. It makes some really good points on the challenges, but I’m not sure that a new, more inclusive standard is the answer.
The Local Digital Declaration has been great at setting a common vision for the future of local public services and something for the #LocalDigital community to coalesce around. Whilst cyber is featured in the Declaration it’s not something the MHCLG Local Digital team actively focussed on in the beginning.
It’s been 2 years since the launch of the Local Digital Declaration (wow, where has the time gone?!).
Richard Pope blogged last week about approaches to scaling solutions that are developed by council(s) across the sector. It is based around the product of the collaboration being software councils can use to deliver a service. Whilst that is one product, I think there are more… help me test my thinking!
It feels like a long time coming, but today the Local Digital Declaration was formally launched at the LGA Conference. You can read more about it on the new Local Digital website but in summary it’s a statement of intent around local public services that has been co-published by 40 organisations including the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and a number of local authorities including both Kingston and Sutton.
It’s time to refresh a number of products used to deliver online transactions and we’ve been starting to think about what the technology of our platform needs to be and look like in the future to help support our aspiration of delivering services designed to meet the Local Government Digital Service Standard.
We’re now deep into organising this year’s LocalGovCamp which is being held over 2 days on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th of September at Bristol City Hall.
LocalGovCamp is a free event organised by volunteers who work in or around local government for people who care about making better public services. Often the focus of the event is around digital but that doesn’t mean technology, social media or marketing. Everyone is welcome from councillors and senior leaders, to council or voluntary sector staff or to individuals who just want to help. This mix of people is one of the things that makes the event so interesting for me.
Last year a group of us got together online to look at Wardley Mapping (also known as Value Chain Mapping). You can read more about what Wardley Mapping is and what we did in the session in a previous blog post.
Today marks 6 months since I left Guildford Borough Council as the IT developer in the Business Transformation Team and moved to work in the shared service for Royal Borough of Kingston and London Borough of Sutton as their Digital Service Design Lead.
LocalGov Digital: who knew you could achieve so much with so little?
