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The future model of local public services
The future of local public services is increasingly shaped by the need to deliver better outcomes for citizens and businesses within tighter financial constraints. A clear shift away from organisation-centric delivery towards outcomes-focused, place-based models.
As the size and capacity of the public sector reduces, no single organisation can meet complex needs in isolation. Instead, services must be designed and delivered collaboratively across health, local government, housing and the voluntary sector, with a stronger emphasis on prevention, early intervention and whole-person support.
This shift requires a move to multidisciplinary approaches, where teams from different organisations work together around the needs of individuals, families and communities. These approaches operate across different levels:
- Macro (system or regional level, commissioning and shared platforms)
- Meso (place-based level, integration and delivery across organisations)
- Micro (community level, hyper-local interventions often involving families, third sector and independent providers).
Understanding and aligning activity across these levels is critical to delivering joined-up, effective services.
DDaT must underpin this shift and is essential to enable shared insight, coordinated delivery and seamless user experiences across organisational boundaries. This includes:
- The ability to share and interpret data effectively,
- Provide interoperable platforms and
- Support multidisciplinary teams with the tools and information they need.
Without a deliberate DDaT operating model that aligns to place-based delivery, the ambition for integrated, outcomes-driven public services will remain difficult to achieve.
Place-based, multi-level operating model in practice
Effective DDaT operating models in local public services must reflect how services are delivered across macro (system), meso (place/organisation), and micro (community) levels.
Delivering better outcomes for people increasingly depends on coordinated working across these levels, rather than within organisational silos.
At macro level – mayoral combined authorities or integrated care systems
There is clear value in operating at scale:
- Setting strategy and direction
- Defining architecture and standards
- Commissioning and prioritising shared investment
- Establishing shared platforms particularly data and integration capabilities
Shared data platforms are most effective at this level, where scale enables better insight, interoperability and value.
Success depends on co-development with meso organisations, ensuring that system-level decisions are grounded in local reality and gain the necessary adoption and legitimacy.
At the meso level – place or provider organisation
Accountability remains with providers for service delivery, local priorities and outcomes.
This is where services are designed, implemented and operated. Delivery happens with people, locally, through co-design and co-production with end users and communities.
At micro level – community level or third sector organisations
They are not considered a separate operating model layer due to their size and scale. meso organisations should design and govern operating models that actively include micro providers, particularly through multidisciplinary teams in product-oriented models, to ensure coordinated, community-level delivery and improved outcomes for people.
The highlights are:
- Top-down approaches alone fail to gain traction
- Bottom-up approaches alone lead to fragmentation
- The answer lies in a genuine “meeting in the middle”
- Regional data platforms to unlock insight at scale
- Collaboration of the willing across organisations
- A convening function to facilitate alignment rather than enforce control
In practice: Macro sets direction, guardrails and enables; meso decides, delivers and adapts locally.
This is not just a structural model; it is a relational model.
Strong relationships, shared purpose and clear roles are fundamental to success. There is also an important role for regional collaboration, sharing and learning, facilitated by independent organisations such as Socitm, LOTI and iNetwork.
It is also recognised that places differ significantly across macro, meso and micro levels, each with distinct needs, partners and delivery contexts.
As a result, funding for national priorities is most effectively devolved to the macro (regional) level, which can act as the conduit between national policy and local delivery. This ensures investment decisions are informed by a deeper understanding of local variation and applied in a way that is both relevant and effective.
Below is our optimal split based on examples of success and synthesis of input from the workshops to date:
NB. The workshops were explicitly designed to focus on what would deliver the best outcomes for people, setting aside organisational boundaries, control considerations and personal interests to enable objective, outcome-led design.
The challenge of organisational boundaries and control is real. While CDIOs often collaborate effectively at a technology level, this becomes significantly more complex when it extends to the integration of business capabilities across organisations.
Achieving the best possible future for local public services may involve creating shared capabilities across organisations, such as using one booking system for health and care appointments no matter the location. While modern technology, like modular, flexible architectures and shared data platforms, makes this feasible, success depends on more than just connecting systems and information. It calls for major changes to people, processes, and accountability throughout different areas and organisations.
These are the challenges future CDIOs must face with working alongside executive peers to shape and enable new, shared business operating models, not just technology solutions.
In this context, practical enterprise architecture disciplines become critical, providing the structure, standards and design authority needed to enable integration while maintaining coherence and control.
