techUK Local Public Services Committee: Introducing #ReuseAndShare
Have you ever asked a supplier if the thing you’re trying to do has already been done?
As our wonderful Committee Chair, Dia Nag, laid out recently in techUK Local Public Services Committee: vision and strategic objectives, we have a vision of enabling UK local authorities to deliver digitally and data mature, citizen-centred, and sustainable services powered by responsible AI and innovation. The techUK LPS committee is made up of a diverse membership representing a broad range of digital, data and technology suppliers. This includes big power houses, SMEs and even a social enterprise. It is a true experiment and test of collaborative will. As suppliers representing different fields, backgrounds and values, we each aim to put our own organisation’s goals aside to collaborate meaningfully and converge in broad agreement around public benefit priorities. We want to fan the flames of hope for a future where local authorities and industry can work together more cohesively. This is especially important in the current context when the scale and complexity of challenges across local authorities is risking overwhelm.
The techUK LPS Committee has separated into teams to focus on two priorities. The ‘Improving procurement in local government technology’ team will soon be publishing a Procurement Survey designed to support a stronger and more effective collaboration between suppliers and councils. This post has been written to share what the team focused on ‘Accelerating digital maturity and data-driven decision making’ has been up to so far. And spoiler alert, it will of course include an ask!
The launch of #ReuseAndShare
At the techUK Local Public Services Innovation Summit on 15 September, we will be launching our #ReuseAndShare Campaign. In our team’s first committee discussion we converged around the belief that the blockers to achieving digital maturity and data-driven decision making were not a lack of playbooks or available use cases; rather, the challenges are deeper and require a more systemic lens. We agreed that our most valuable contribution, utilising the unique perspectives and capabilities of our committee, was not to spend time developing yet another playbook, but rather to drive awareness of that which is already available and accessible to those local authority officers in the here and now faced with making critical decisions about digital, data and technology. Awareness is the first necessary step towards adoption of best or test-and-learn practices to enable opportunities for delivering the societal outcomes we aim to realise; ultimately paving the way for amplification of impact at scale.
There are many excellent resources and assets already available to public service leaders and decision makers to support the planning and implementation of robust and reliable technology stacks. In many cases these have been the product of deep thought, experience and collaboration across local authorities and government. The problem is that these excellent resources are not all collated in one obviously found and searchable place, and when people step into important decision-making roles these will often not form part of their induction. While these assets may have been promoted at the point of release (which in some cases could be years ago), they can be forgotten amidst the daily grind of managing immediate and complex priorities, and especially amidst an operating context of change, uncertainty, and political and financial pressures.
In local authorities, with frequent staff churn within and across councils, knowledge can often be lost when role holders change. We should not expect those who are new to a role, or those role holders whose expertise lies outside of technological fields, to inherit all established knowledge by osmosis. Sharing and passing on that which has been learned before alongside the signposting of valuable assets needs to be embedded into our daily practices if we are to avoid duplication of effort at scale and, importantly, enable our shared knowledge and capabilities to evolve collectively.
What we will promote for reuse and sharing
Our #ReuseAndShare campaign will drive awareness of the artefacts that already exist to support innovative planning, implementation, maintenance and continuous improvement of digital public services. To date, our team has been on a mission to collate all the useful assets we can find that are already available and has been clustering these into themes. In no particular order, the cross-cutting themes that have emerged include: vision for digital government; data maturity; digital service design (standards, principles and codes of practice); digital data and technology (resources, skilling and workforce development); cyber security; AI (awareness, guidance and upskilling); digital inclusion; and communities of practice. We have also begun considering how best to communicate these in a manner which recognises that people, process and technology must remain in balance if we are to create and maintain effective and sustainable services.
We have specifically chosen to keep LGR specific artefacts outside the scope of this campaign as resources are already being collated and curated on techUK's LGR hub. However, it is important to recognise that #ReuseAndShare assets are still relevant to LGR as they speak to the most important principles around establishing and maintaining critical digital public services.
What we will be doing next
Our committee team will soon begin sharing our raw lists of assets within our networks and communities.
We will be crowdsourcing other assets that we may have missed.
We will be asking you all for feedback on what themes you deem most pressing in the here and now, those which the techUK LPS Committee can specifically focus our efforts for building awareness, enabling adoption, and scaling successes through amplification.
Once we have honed in on the most important themes in this current environment and operating context, we will create short explainer videos to promote reuse. These will be designed with sharing in mind.
While we recognise that reuse and sharing isn’t a new concept and many have tried collating lists before, what makes this campaign different is that we are looking at it as a maintainable, dynamic and easily accessible service for all to consume and engage with. We will focus on ways to create awareness and ongoing curation so this becomes a sustainable service, accessible and managed by all.
It will be an experiment for genuine cross sector collaboration with data, digital and technology suppliers working together in partnership with local authorities, with shared aims in mind.
Who we want to collaborate with
Public service leaders are responsibility laden but time poor. To ensure shared focus and assumptions, our committee team spent some time undertaking a proto-persona activity. This helped to bring to the fore the differences between the roles, needs, pains and struggles of tech expert and non-tech expert leaders responsible for important decisions on public services. We want to work in collaboration with these leaders, those who are currently in roles of influence with the responsibility for decisions over technology options, but also those up-and-coming officers who may in the near future be in these important roles holding the burden of responsibility for decisions that will impact thousands of lives.
At the heart of the techUK Local Public Service Committee ethos lies a will for meaningful collaboration between local authorities and the digital, data and technology industry. None of us pretend that there has not been cause for walls of distrust to have been built in the past. But this particular context and time calls for us all to step above our individual goals and to set our sights on what a fair and effective collaboration could look like! As my excellent committee colleague, Andrew Boxall, said recently from the perspective of the technology supplier to local authorities, ‘we come in peace’.
As our #ReuseAndShare campaign is launched, we invite your feedback, your experiences, and your collaboration throughout. We ask that you will work with us to establish an ecosystem that works for all.
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