Public sector digital activity is driven by a broad range of external forces that transcend global, national and local borders. These forces have never been more challenging for local public services, with a perfect storm of heightened economic, social and environmental pressures, often severely constrained budgets and resources, supplier lock-in, increased assessments and inspections, heightened cyber threats, accelerating pace of technology, political uncertainties, devolution proposals and growing public demands.
All this makes it hard to find the space, risk appetite, resources and prioritisation for substantial change programmes. Many public service organisations, such as hospital trusts, end up buying new technologies and systems, rather than implementing complex change.
Despite this challenging context, feedback from those involved in contributing to our analysis and evidence drawn from case studies indicate that the sector is delivering wide-ranging change, innovation and transformation.
Building on experience during the Covid pandemic, local public services are increasingly seeking to ‘connect together better’ to solve complex issues of ‘whole system working’. Delivering better outcomes for people and communities in ‘Connected Places’, by devolving, connecting and collaborating are becoming recurrent themes for local public services in many of our LOLA and MCE partner countries.
Developing new digital capabilities provides opportunities to overcome many of the constraints imposed by uncontrollable external forces. This will require public services to recalibrate, particularly in areas such as:
- Place-based leadership, harnessing people, technologies and data.
- Digital skills and capability, from service delivery to board level roles.
- Community resilience, as more dependence is placed on digital systems and access.
- Innovation to deliver better outcomes for people, communities and places by harnessing data, systems and service remodelling.
- Standards to enable data sharing and insights to target resources and services more effectively.
Understanding how to take advantage of digital and technology opportunities to build connected public services will enable digital and technology priorities to be aligned, sufficiently resourced and managed in the context of external pressures and service needs:
Case study
Trend analysis – 10 trends that affect the municipal and regional assignment
The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR) offers workshop materials for use by local governments based on its latest analysis looking towards the year 2035, describing five fields of tension and ten trends that will affect municipalities and regions in different ways.
The analysis presents their top five digital and top five technology trends, set in the broader context of the pressures and drivers facing public services and the people, communities and places that they serve.