Digital Transformation Strategy

There’s been a number of local government strategies released recently around Digital, Cloud, Technology and IT or a combination of them all. Most of these, if we’re honest have been very poor. They lack any kind of information to be a real strategy that delivers results.

A strategy is, ‘a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim’. Therefore this is the most basic starting point, that it is a plan of action. What you are going to do. It is not a collection of buzzwords aligned to current themes within the industry, which many local government strategies fall foul off.

However, key to the strategy is actually the part about achieving a long-term or overall plan. This is where most IT (be it technology, cloud or digital) strategies go wrong. The reason for this is that they are often writing a strategy on the long-term aims of the IT department and not the council. This is where the buzzwords come in, but in delivering outcomes to departments, these buzzwords should be no more than guiding policies.

At its most basic level, IT is a service department. It is there to serve the rest of the council. Its role is to help make the council better at what it does. Therefore the IT strategy has to be a plan as to how IT will help the council achieve their aims. Or simply put, why you are going to do what you are going to do!

The starting point in writing an IT strategy is to find the other strategies or plans that that relate to the council. These could be be around growth, lower costs, better customer service, service transformation, better quality housing, the list can be endless. All council’s will have a corporate plan, and service plans underneath this. It is ITs role to then accelerate the journey to delivering these plans.

So there’s your starting point. How is your IT strategy going to help the business achieve or accelerate its plans? When you look at it from this perspective then the IT strategy becomes much easier to write and much more relevant. Even if you have to pick one core outcome, or one core outcome per department, you can really narrow down your focus to give the strategy real meaning.

I’ve seen IT strategies that don’t have any references to the wider council plans; one’s that don’t have any form of a plan and ones that are being written despite the council service not having a plan (in this case a transformation plan). How can you possibly write a strategy for a service department when you don’t know what the plan for the council is?

So please, if you’re tasked with writing an IT strategy of whatever kind, ensure that you’re writing it to serve the council and accelerating achieving their goals. And if you don’t have a relevant council or department plan as a starting point then either write these first or at least interview senior staff that you can reference back to. That way you can then align all your projects back to a bigger plan and explain to the business how you are helping them achieve their goals. 

The strategy can be easily structured:

1) What do you (the department) want to achieve?

2) What is stopping you achieving this?

3)What are you going to do to bridge the gap?

4)What policies are you going to work to?

Find the technology and tools that are going to solve the problems that are stopping you achieve your outcomes!

Oh and if you need help, then I’m here…...

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