Submit your nomination for the 2024 Socitm Awards

Newsletter: Find fixes that you can adapt and adopt for your projects

The front doors, side-by-side, of two terraced houses in Brighton. The houses are different colours.

Keep on using your free member events, meetings, resources, and training

Final preparations are underway for our annual conference. Confirmations about hotel rooms, dietary preferences and so on are being sent. Maybe you’ve had one? BUT you are a member, and this is your annual conference. Whether you registered months ago or have yet to do so, you will be welcome.

Usually, our Head of Member Services would be in Brighton with us. This year Poppy is on maternity leave with her newborn son Huxley George! Congratulations to Poppy and her family.

As you’ll see below, the alumni community will be growing as two more cohorts finish their programmes in Brighton 😀
If you can support their presentations that would be excellent. You’re the perfect audience!

They and you are invited to join us in our alumni LinkedIn group. And you can support yourself, if you’d like to, with mentoring (as a mentor or mentee).

President’s Conference in summary (browse the agenda)

Tuesday 13 June
Day 1 theme: Designing out of difficult times
Cyber escape room [Remember that registration for this one is separate to your conference registration.]
Workshops
April’s Top Talent cohort conclude their training programme
Our AGM [browse the Annual Report]
In the evening, a drinks reception, dinner, awards, and Leadership Academy training graduation.

Wednesday 14 June
Day 2 theme: Ethical, responsible, and secure use of technologies and data
Accessibility workshop
April’s Empowering Women cohort conclude their training programme

Vote now for your next vice-president

Your colleagues with the most nominations have been shortlisted:

  • Yogita Popat, Assistant Director of Sustainability for Barnet Council and Vice-Chair of the London and South East Committee
  • Kevin Taylor, Senior IT Manager for Suffolk County Council and Chair of the East Committee

Voting [check your inbox for the link] closes at 12:00pm on Monday 12 June 2023.

DLUHC Local Digital Evaluation

Members may be aware through recent communications, of an independent study DLUHC has commissioned on its Local Digital programme.

Socitm is part of the team working on this two-year study. Emails have been sent out to some members this week, to inform them of how they can get involved and support the study, along with more context and background to its aims and objectives.

For any further detail please email engagement director David Ogden.

Wednesday’s webinar with AWS

Supporting vulnerable residents with technology. Hampshire County Council’s automated callout system for wellbeing and care reviews.

Get ready for a full day of all things AWS on Wednesday 7 June
AWS Summits are free and bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Sessions for beginners through to experts will show you how to choose the right database, modernize your data warehouse, and drive digital transformation using AI.
Explore the session catalogue and register.

Watch webinar

Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs)

Data breaches are often in the news headlines, with reports of personal and financial information being acquired by bad actors despite the great endeavours of most organisations to secure their IT environment.
With people as citizens, consumers or patients becoming more aware and protective of their rights regarding their Personally Identifiable Information, and using GDPR legislation to check what information organisations hold, the volume of DSARs is growing by 66% year on year in the UK alone [1].

Find out more on how to resource against the volume and complexity of DSARs.

Don’t forget to register for your free training

You have a free place, should you want it, on next month’s Change Agent training programmes. [Change Agent for Managers starts on Wednesday 7 June.]

Run in collaboration with Microsoft, they’re not restricted to people and organisations that are Socitm members. They are free for the majority of Microsoft Enterprise Agreement public sector customers.
They do cover technology, and using new and different software, but this is aimed at the non-technical among us. You don’t need to work in the ICT team so please share this training with your friends in housing and planning and so on.

Check out the details

Training with Socitm

This year, you register for training using points instead of places. Not sure how it works? Send any questions to Dominika Szulim-Wronek.

Clare Slater took part in an Empowering Women programme last year. Although surprised that the trainer was a man, she enjoyed this “time out” to reflect and learn.

Share your training experience with us – fill in the short Q&A.

Training this month

Wednesday 7 June: Programme Change Agent (Manager) ( second day on Friday 16 June)
Monday 19 June: Programme Change Agent (5 days, finishing on Friday 23 June)
Friday 23 June: Webinar: An Introduction to Digital Accessibility
Tuesday 27 June: Webinar: Mentoring
Wednesday 28 June: Programme Empowering Women [CPD certified]

Once you’ve finished your training don’t forget to claim your CPD points.

Socitm Advisory

Win a Design Lab for your council

Pop by and say hello to the Socitm Advisory team at President’s Conference next month for a chance to win your own design lab!

Find out what it’s all about from the team and the day 1 presentation:

Service design doesn’t have to be difficult
But to do it well requires a holistic mindset that considers context, strategy, people, process and technology – as well as a whole lot of empathy and understanding.

Are you making full use of your membership?

As part of your membership you can receive between 2 and 12 hours of FREE consultancy advice per year. To make use of your inclusive consultancy hours, get in touch or log in to My Account.

Visit socitmadvisory.co.uk

Events from Socitm and partners

June

Missed a webinar? Past recordings are available to watch in the resource hub. Also, make sure to check out our regional events. There’s a mix of online and in-person meetings, so please feel free to join any that are outside your area.

Browse the events calendar

Digital transformation is enabling modernisation and improvement

Local authorities are going through a period of considerable change as they seek to deliver new and improved services for citizens whilst under continued financial constraints.

AWS has highlighted some of the best examples of modernisation and improvement being deployed by local authorities – of all sizes – in order to share best practice and point the way to easily replicable solutions.
The examples cover a broad range of services and are focused on a number of key priorities:

  • Transforming services around the citizen
  • Automating processes and innovating at speed
  • Repeatability and the value of sharing successes

Hopefully these topics resonate and that you find these customer stories useful as you embark on transformation initiatives of your own.

Read more

Thank you for reading (or scrolling) this far! Just one more thing…

So. Last week’s 2018 episode of the Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast was updated after the newsletter was sent! There is a new book from Zeynep Ton and a new episode [Making the Case for Good Jobs] to go with it 🙂

Do also listen to the recruitment and retention episode of Socitm Says 😉 It’s got VP Matt Lewis talking about career progression without line management.

Make sure you connect with us on LinkedIn and on Twitter to keep up-to-date with everything happening.

[1] Survey of 460 UK-based DPOs from the UK Data Protection Index, HR Magazine, 2022

Photo by Maciek Wróblewski on Unsplash.