Theme 3 - Digital Office
We will adopt a digital culture and ways of working that lead to service improvements and enhanced operational delivery, equipping our agile workforce with the technology and training they need to deliver where it needs to be delivered. We will embrace smarter working and create a digitally enabled workforce that is focused on delivering outcomes with bureaucracy minimised through automation.
Our staff are passionate about their work. They want to do the best job possible for our customers and to enable them to do that our technology offer will match that ambition. To create our digital office, we will use management information more effectively, further embrace smarter working, provide a wider range of devices to work from, embed our digital skills programme and improve and streamline our estate of business applications.
The outcome aims of this workstream are that:
- performance is better managed across the council, its partnerships, and contracts
- staff can focus on complex decisions, as repetitive and time-consuming tasks become automated
- our staff can work in the most appropriate location for the tasks they are doing rather than in a fixed office location, with the requisite that location of work creates the best possible outcome for the service user
- our staff are digitally capable of performing the roles expected of them
- our technology enables our staff to be more collaborative and resilient
- our staff become more efficient due to their use of improved devices and applications that meet their business needs
To do this we will:
- enable our staff to focus on higher value activities through embracing the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and digitising forms and business process through our Digital Efficiencies programme
- build on our use of digital meetings and associated technology to increase collaboration between teams, increase efficiency and reduce the level of printed paper
- ensure that our staff are equipped to do their jobs effectively by regularly reviewing their needs and refreshing the equipment they use, when required
- review the applications used by our services and consolidate where appropriate.
- continue our digital skills programme to ensure that our workforce is digitally capable of delivering the tasks that are expected of them
- standardise and automate our approach to cross-functional using, sharing, and enhancing the value of data by standardising data sets, the use of automation and streamlined processes
- create and utilise management dashboards to make virtual real-time information available to support better and quicker decision making
Digital Office – progress so far
So far:
- we have equipped our staff, so they can work at the best location for them to ensure that the services they provide meet the highest possible outcome expectations
- through our Smarter Working programme we are aligning our accommodation to enable our staff to work more collaboratively, reduce silos and create a platform of openness by ensuring adequate physical 'team time' for creative value and innovation generation which can be lost via purely digital means
- we have launched our Digital Academy to help upskill our employees at all levels, so they can utilise our new technology and apply it in the workplace
- to enhance our Smarter Working credentials, we have implemented Oracle Cloud platform and are implementing the Microsoft 365 suite of applications
- to ensure these new digital technologies are embedded within the organisation our Digital Academy and skills training syllabus is embedded in the Corporate Training programme
- to provide a better online computing experience for all our staff and visitors we have built a new high quality Wi-Fi service
- we are investing in a new future-proofed Wide Area Network to ensure we have the same digital capability at all council sites
- to achieve savings and efficiencies by freeing our staff to focus on more complex work, we have invested in a robotic process automation platform that will automate some less complex, labour-intensive processes
- we have introduced the 4Me enterprise service management tool for seamless collaboration between internal customers and the IT Service – this enables staff to self-serve their requests, removing the need for paper forms and reducing the number of telephone calls to the service desk, which is freeing staff time up to focus on other tasks