Understanding your starting point for creating or improving your digital services is important. This will help you guide the direction and strategy for overcoming constraints.

You can use these questions before deciding on a digital or technology project. You can also use them when you map what you currently have or decide whether to build, buy, or share.

We’ve designed these questions to help you assess behaviours within your organisation. Your organisation might do them never, rarely, sometimes, regularly or all the time.

Assess your response to changing technology trends

Think about the digital maturity of your organisation. Does your organisation:

  • have a leader responsible for technology, such as a Chief Technology Officer or Chief Digital Officer?
  • have an open culture that values digital ways of working, sharing experiences, collaborating with other organisations, and reusing good practice?
  • apply agile methods to digital projects, including testing what you’ve built and iterating your work based on regular feedback with users and other useful data?
  • help staff to develop digital and technical skills?
  • have a published strategy for digital transformation for the next 2 years?
  • have a mature approach to using and managing data, including data tooling, governance and ethics?
  • have a mature approach to technology procurement and working with technology suppliers?
  • use G-Cloud, Digital Outcomes and Specialists, or other central government frameworks for technology procurement?

Check your staff’s digital skills

Think about recruitment, training and development:

  • have staff at your organisation been offered training focused on developing their digital skills in the last 12 months?
  • what percentage of your organisation’s staff have completed at least one training programme focused on developing their digital skills in the last 12 months?

Evaluate your technology systems

Think about the systems you currently have.

  • How much of your digital budget do you spend maintaining legacy technology systems that may need updating or replacing? Consider if they are either:
    • an end-of-life product
    • out of support from the supplier
    • impossible to update
    • no longer cost effective
    • above the acceptable risk threshold
  • What percentage of your services are currently cloud-hosted? How many services do you host on your on-premises data centres, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud?
  • Over the last 6 months, has your organisation implemented new technologies to deliver service areas, such as social care, schooling, housing, planning or business support? If so, how many service areas have new technology?
  • Does your organisation have a dedicated budget for introducing new digital systems? This could include internal facing technology and software, as well as services for residents and businesses.
    • What is the budget for new digital systems?
    • How much of your total digital budget does this allocation represent?
  • What integrations exist? What will you need to integrate with if building or buying something new? Will you need to develop custom APIs? Are open data standards in place?
  • How cyber resilient and secure are your systems?

Consider your working methods

Thinking about how your services and projects are delivered:

  • how often do you share best practice with the wider local government sector, for example by hosting online webinars, publishing blog posts, or sharing digital resources?
  • what percentage of the technology is open source?
    • have you ever shared the source code with other organisations?
  • how many times per month does your team host meetings to internally share knowledge, skills and best practice about digital topics?
  • do you test digital services for accessibility and inclusion, such as testing with a wide range of users, and assessing against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2)?
  • does your organisation use the Government Digital Service (GDS) development lifecycle?
  • over the last 12 months, how many new digital projects launched by your organisation have become live services, including alpha or beta? Do you have a single view of your organisation’s digital projects?

What you can do next

Now that you have a better understanding of the technology landscape in your organisation or service area, you can identify any opportunities and constraints. You could include criteria when making a case or resourcing projects to ensure they contribute to improvement in these areas.