Page 34 - Procurement guidelines for smart sustainable cities - A U4SSC deliverable

The absence of DDaT roles, generally recognized as being due to not having the financial resources,
has been mitigated by regions where user research and insights work is carried out across multiple
authorities. This enables them to adopt a user-centred design (UCD) approach to services even
when they do not directly have user researchers employed. Collaboration is key within the Local
Digital Declaration and our analysis found that signatories to the declaration had a higher maturity
score than those that did not.

The majority of the top-scoring authorities had a dedicated Director for Digital or an elected
member with responsibility. However, it is rare to see this and it does separate the high maturity
authorities from the low maturity ones. While visible leadership could be either elected members
or officers the presence of a dedicated accountable elected member is unusual. However, the
top five local authorities all had an elected member portfolio for digital. Authorities that could
demonstrate visible leadership scored 50 per cent higher than those that did not.

There are various factors that can affect an authority’s digital maturity; however, the theme running
through this work was how important the right people are. The right people are those who are
able to see the benefits of wider collaboration work and have sufficient and visible leadership to
be accountable for the transformation journey. When this happens, there is a real possibility of
seeing a jump in digital maturity.

Having carried out this analysis, we could start to see the limitations to local authorities on being
able to build out their own new services and why they have become reliant on their large suppliers
and legacy systems.

Next steps

GDS is now able to direct its resources in a more efficient way having carried out the analysis. To
do this they will:

• Share their findings with local authorities so that they can reflect on their individual circumstances
and work out how they can incorporate the findings to support their transformation.

• Look to see how they can work with suppliers to start using digital standards and common
components, to allow lower maturity authorities access to services that they can quickly bring
onboard when they do not have the skills required internally to build their own.

If you would like to view the full results of the digital maturity analysis, including a video, please be
informed that this has been published on the GDS GitHub .
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20 Procurement guidelines for smart sustainable cities | May 2023