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Newsletter: Your guide to Accessibility Week

Close-up on a single. colourful carousel horse with Brighton Pier written on its saddle.

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

All set for Accessibility Week‘s daily webinars?

Do please scroll down to a) vote for your Partner of Year, and b) to nominate someone to join the President’s Team. Who’d be a great vice-president?

Nominate your next Vice-President

Our VPs are nominated and elected by you.
Propose an outstanding colleague who you think will add real value to Socitm – champion public services, continue to shape our priorities, help to respond to challenges, provide the benefit of their experience and expertise and ensure that we stay at the forefront of innovating and implementing positive change.
Submit your nomination.

Socitm Awards 2023: Partner of the Year

What do you value most in a partner organisation? Tell us and vote for your Partner of the Year for 2023. The winner will be announced at President’s Conference on Tuesday 14 June. Have your say.
Vote now.

Word salad

This week’s webinar is a particularly tricky one to try and summarise. It started with an impressive stat about the Ask ELLIS chat bot used by Lewes and Eastbourne:

Since it was installed (if that’s the right word) last year, ELLIS has managed 75,000 queries. Freeing people up to tackle the more tricky stuff.

This is the press release: AI powered assistant gives Lewes District and Eastbourne Borough Councils residents around the clock support

Wednesday’s hosts ICS.AI then demonstrated their phone AI – it’s at about 22:00 in the recording if you want to skip straight to it!

Or you can read the blog: Embracing phone AI in customer service: transforming support and enhancing user experience

Want to know more? Remembered something to ask? Get in touch with Aneeq Star.


Don’t forget their feedback survey – ICS.AI will be donating to the British Red Cross Ukraine appeal.

Watch the webinar

Recruitment and retention – what can work?

Most organisations find it challenging to recruit and retain technology and digital specialists. What works in other organisations?
When you join us in Brighton next month for President’s Conference, we’ll welcome VP Mark Lumley to the top role. For his day job, he’s the Director of ICT and Digital for the London Borough of Hounslow. In this recent report is a whole case study from Hounslow about their job application and recruitment advertising processes.
Log in to read the whole report. Register to make sure you’ve got a user account.
Read this new report

Registered for your free Microsoft training?

The Microsoft and Socitm Change Agent programme is returning in June.

It’s free for the majority of Microsoft Enterprise Agreement public sector customers. 

Co-host Andrew Boxall has written about what and who change agents are:
Digital public services: How to drive transformation with change agents.
Become a Change Agent! Grab your free training seat now. 

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.

Your new Leadership Academy Advocate of the Month is Clare Slater from Barnet.

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

Training next 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)
Wednesday 28 June: Programme Empowering Women

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

Socitm Advisory

Soctim Advisory has recently launched a new range of ‘as a Service’ offerings.

This week we will look at…Cutover Management as a service  

This service is designed to help organisations to structure when they go-live; the Cutover Manager is accountable for the delivery of work with set timescales.

Cutover as a Service is already being used by councils to: 

  • Lead on the planning of the cutover tasks in a cutover plan with specific timescales including technical, functional, operational, and business tasks 
  • Plans the resources that are needed as part of the cutover process 
  • Ensures the right governance and controls are put in place to line up with the project/programmes go-live objectives 
  • Access management strategy for terminations on old system to deployment of user  
  • accounts on new system 
  • Lead in the Integration strategy; final runs, deactivations, catch up and reactivations 
  • Data freezes/data cleansing 
  • Planning for blackout periods during transition when there is no system of record – business continuity, capture of business transactions 
  • Lead and plan cutover rehearsals to check the sequence of events and times for go-live  
  • Develops back out plans/contingency for cutover 

Find out more Testing services | Socitm Advisory or contact us at localgov@socitmadvisory.co.uk

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

May

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

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

Why are your projects always late – and what to do about it – an excellent episode of Freakonomics Radio!

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

Photo by Miles Storey on Unsplash