The UK London based digital government conference on Tuesday dealt with national and local digital government. In line with some of HIFA's objectives the "local Digital declaration" prioritizes the services to be designed around the citizen - not just the department that is delivering the services. Ambitions to provide transparency and information and policy plan sharing are prominent as are open standards, common technologies to reduce cost and interoperability. Presentation Slides - Digital Government (digital-government.co.uk) https://digital-government.co.uk/presentation-slides/
Local Digital Declaration Local Digital Declaration | Local Digital
https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/declaration/
Introduction
This declaration affirms collective ambition for local public services in the internet age, and commitment to realising it. It commits to working on a new scale, to:
- design services that best meet the needs of citizens
- challenge the technology market to offer the flexible tools and services we need
- protect citizens’ privacy and security
- deliver better value for money
This joint endeavour was initiated by the UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), the Government Digital Service (GDS), and a collection of local authorities and sector bodies from across the UK.
Our ambition
We want to co-create the conditions for the next generation of local public services, where technology is an enabler rather than a barrier to service improvements, and services are a delight for citizens and officials to use.
Our ambition requires both a culture shift and a technology shift, and we’ve agreed 5 principles to help us do it:
1. We will go even further to redesign our services around the needs of the people using them. This means continuing to prioritise citizen and user needs above professional, organisational and technological silos.
2. We will ‘fix our plumbing’ to break our dependence on inflexible and expensive technology that doesn’t join up effectively. This means insisting on modular building blocks for the IT we rely on, and open standards to give a common structure to the data we create.
3. We will design safe, secure and useful ways of sharing information to build trust among our partners and citizens, to better support the most vulnerable members of our communities, and to target our resources more effectively.
4. We will demonstrate digital leadership, creating the conditions for genuine organisational transformation to happen, and challenging all those we work with to embrace this Local Digital Declaration.
5. We will embed an open culture that values, incentivises and expects digital ways of working from every member of our workforce. This means working in the open wherever we can, sharing our plans and experience, working collaboratively with other organisations, and reusing good practice.
HIFA profile: Richard Fitton is a retired family doctor - GP. Professional interests: Health literacy, patient partnership of trust and implementation of healthcare with professionals, family and public involvement in the prevention of modern lifestyle diseases, patients using access to professional records to overcome confidentiality barriers to care, patients as part of the policing of the use of their patient data Email address: richardpeterfitton7 AT gmail.com
