Digital

Today marks a watershed moment for the Royal Borough of Greenwich, where I’m privileged to lead digital, data, technology, and customer services.  We've published our new digital strategy , which sets out how we plan to put services online, use technology to change how we work, and build sustainable digital skills. 

I joined the council in January this year, with no idea what lay ahead. I live in the borough, so my job for the first time felt highly personal to my own sense of place and belonging. It gave me a sense of deep accountability to local people, and I knew very quickly that we needed a human-driven way of moving the council forward in how we were using technology. Royal Greenwich has not historically been at the leading edge of digital among local authorities, and I could immediately see the potential to improve our residents’ and staff’s lives; it was a huge but exciting series of challenges, which I was keen to capture in a simple strategy. 

Then 9 weeks into the job, COVID hit, and any sense of strategic planning went out of the window as we pivoted to a series of urgent problems: making sure our staff could work from home, quickly spinning up new online services for our highest-need residents and businesses, and taking care of each other through an unprecedented period of intense work. I learned more than I can express about people’s immediate vulnerabilities — about how precarious many people’s lives are. For me, Digital inclusion will never more be about a series of accessibility actions, but about appreciating people’s entire lived experiences, and having a laser focus on how you can help them while causing them the least possible delay or worry. 

It was summer before I turned my mind back to thoughts of writing a digital strategy, and what I found was that while the basis of what we felt was the right way forward hadn’t shifted, the way I was framing the problem had. What I hope I’ve expressed is not a technology plan, but a plan for how we’ll use digital technology to help people through the coming years: help them to access services, to connect to each other and to thrive, whatever their circumstances. It is designed to be an iterative strategy, focusing on real outcomes for a real set of people that I care deeply about: our residents, our businesses, our visitors and our staff. 

This period has also changed my expectations of what is possible through technology. Since March, new digital services have had to be created not in months or years, but in days or weeks. Focusing on what’s absolutely necessary and iterating from there will, I hope, inspire speed and pragmatism alongside quality, and an absolute focus on user-centred design and thorough research — even when we have to start without those things in place. 

Working in the open 

This is the first digital strategy that the council has had, and I’m delighted that it will be open for comment from the public, to whom we’re accountable for running the best council possible. Working in the open is fairly new at Royal Greenwich, as it is in many other public sector organisations. It’s testament to the support that the Chief Executive Debbie Warren, and the Leader of the Council Danny Thorpe, have shown, that we’ve come as far as we have.  

For me, this marks the beginning of a new era for the council. We’re starting a 4-year period of investment in digital technology, which is no trivial move at a time when all councils are struggling financially. However, it’s clear to us that digital is one of the biggest opportunities we have to keep us on a sustainable financial footing. By helping our residents access services more easily, introducing new channels, using service design to change our processes and systems, and using data to better understand what people need, we will make our services better as well as more cost-effective to run. 

At the same time, although we have a major investment window, this is really the beginning of the new normal for Royal Greenwich; we are putting in the building blocks not only to bring the council right up to the present day, but to build the skill set, leadership, and nimble, loosely-coupled technology which mean we will never slip behind. 

We’re doing this all by focusing not on show-off technology and futuristic promises (you won’t find AI or the blockchain in this strategy), but on the solid building blocks of a modern public sector organisation which uses digital technology as a means to better serve the public and meet its mission, not as an end in itself.  

What we’re going to do