Welcome to our newsletter, bringing you all the latest from the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government. In this newsletter, we bring you a detailed update on what has been happening across the Digital Partnership throughout the last month and details of upcoming activities.
If you have any queries regarding any of the content within this newsletter, please get in touch.
Bitesize Insight into Our Revised Digital Maturity Assessment (DMA).
The initial testing of the process and pilot, involving 5 councils is now complete. 26 councils have been working with us on the pre-requisite criteria (Phase 1) in preparation for the 2024 DMA later this year.
From the pilot, where councils varied their approaches between input from ‘all staff’ or engagement from targeted service areas, the initial insights are:
Average scoring based on 1,291 responses across 4 councils:
Vision and Strategy = 2.43/5
Digital Skills and Workforce = 3.12/5
Data and Technology = 3.00/5
Research and Analysis= 2.54/5
Overall average of maturity = 2.64/5
If you haven’t already contacted us to complete the pre-requisite criteria for your organisation, please contact Verity Hislop.
Data Priorities - What does this look like?
In response to recent feedback from several of you, we acknowledge the importance of enhancing strategic alignment within the Data community. With this in mind, we are eager to organise an in-person session to discuss and establish the key priorities for our Data community, as well as explore the most effective ways to support these moving forward.
For this session to be successful, it is essential to ensure adequate attendance and support from across the sector to enable us to take a more joined-up approach to measure impact.
Topics for Discussion:
Better Data communities
Health and Social Care Data Strategy
Data Maturity Assessment outputs
Data Landscape mapping
Improvement Service data returns and initiatives
Data standards
Smart Data Foundry
PHS and LISTS
Data Literacy
CHI
Squad formations.
Stay tuned to find out more and help shape this initiative. If you have any suggestions or agenda items you would like to be included, in the meantime, please do contact Verity Hislop.
Engage Process: Let the Collaborations Begin.
It's official – the centralised library for Scottish Councils is now live!
Recap:
Following our discovery workshop and the identified benefits of local authorities utilising Engage Process for mapping and sharing processes, we're thrilled to announce that, after compiling all your feedback, desires, and requirements, along with extensive negotiations and teamwork, your request for a shared repository for Scottish Councils is now live!
What does this revised opportunity entail?
Some key advantages include:
A dedicated Knowledge Centre featuring shared processes
Expert product consultants to aid in your progress
A 5% discount for Scottish organisations purchasing or renewing Engage Process
Framework to facilitate procurement
Now that we have a dedicated shared space for collectively mapping our processes, we have a favour to ask: For those who have already mapped processes using Engage, we'd love to connect with you to begin uploading and collaborating.
Could you please sign up using the form below to support this initiative and we will be in touch. We're excited to see the collective impact we can achieve across local government!
On April 24th, the Digital Office collaborated with the Scottish Government's Scottish Cyber Co-ordination Centre to host a tabletop exercise for the Forth Valley Councils. It was a successful day, generating engaging discussions, benefitting greatly from the pilot IASME Cyber Exercising training.
This exercise is part of a wider joint initiative to establish a Scottish Public Sector Exercising Cadre, who can deliver exercises within their own organisation, sector, and beyond. The training is tailored for business continuity practitioners and requires no detailed cyber background.
If you're interested in learning more about the training, the Digital Office can assist in connecting you with the Scottish Government for updates on future courses. Additionally, if you're interested in conducting a cyber security exercise for your organisation, please reach out to our Chief Information Security Officer, David Ritchie for support.
Collaborative Procurement for a Security Operations Centre.
Our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Dave Ritchie, is teaming up with Scotland Excel to drive forward the Security Operations Centre (SOC) procurement. This platform will enable participating local authorities to have 24-hour monitoring of all activity taking place on their networks and remote devices, detecting any potential breaches and enhancing their overall security.
Joining forces with Scotland Excel's new Digital Category Manager, Sam Whitehead, they are leading the charge to not only enhance the Security Operations Centre procurement but also to create digital collaborative ventures in local government.
Together, we're shaping high-level descriptions of SOC services to be shared across all councils, paving the way for smoother and more secure operations. Dave is dedicated to keeping Security Officers in the loop and welcomes anyone keen to contribute to this vital project.
National M365 Cross-Organisation Collaboration Programme.
Welcome to the monthly update on the National M365 Cross-Organisation Collaboration Programme! Here's a glimpse of our recent progress and upcoming plans:
Phase 1 Progress:
We're thrilled to announce that 21 councils are now fully live with Phase 1, with an additional 6 currently in progress.
Collaboration Expansion:
The State Hospital team has expressed interest in federating with the councils already live on Phase 1. Our team is actively exploring opportunities with PHS and NHS24 to facilitate this process and will be in touch with more information shortly.
Skills Hub Rollout:
As we rollout access to the M365 Skills Hub, supported by The Society of Personnel and Development Scotland (SPDS), we are delighted to share that we have an additional 14 local authorities interested in accessing and benefiting from the resources available. We'll be reaching out to each council within the next week to move forward.
Future Initiatives:
Over the past month, we've received numerous suggestions for initiatives aimed at further developing collaboration among cross-organisational health and care teams. To delve deeper into these ideas, we're gearing up for a workshop session with our Programme Board to review our learnings, discuss potential opportunities, reassess current objectives, and outline our future focus.
Get Involved:
Interested in learning more or have any questions? Please don't hesitate to get in touch with Monika Ivanova.
Edinburgh HSCP Begin Implementing the Shared ARC Platform.
On 29 April, the Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership began moving people who use their telecare service across to the new Shared ARC Platform - Chubb Cloud Care Control.
By 31 May, all 8,500 of their telecare customers will have been transferred across, marking a significant milestone in Edinburgh’s analogue to digital telecare transition.
EHSCP, Chubb, Skyresponse and the Digital Office are working in close partnership on the implementation, which will bring a range of benefits to people who use the service as well as Partnership staff and partners. These include quicker call connections times and sound quality, and the ability to explore new technologies and innovate more quickly.
To find out the latest from the Digital Telecare Programme, follow the link below.
As legislative stages conclude, Visitor Levy in Scotland continues its policy and implementation journey with the Expert Group now finalising a high level guidance suite for stakeholder testing. The initial draft recommendations of this guidance are now being incorporated into a National Information Model.
March and April workshops have now matured into monthly (strategic input/review) sessions and weekly operational collaborative sessions in collaboration with COSLA and the Improvement Service.
Workshop and Expert Group findings continue to be fed into a collaborative work proposal with this months focus shifting to governance succession as the Legislative and Expert Group activity channels wind up operations. For further information on this initiative, please contact info@digitaloffice.scot.
Upcoming Events
Registration now open for our First Digital Partnership Forum of 2024.
The Digital Office for Scottish Local Government host a Partnership Forum bi-annually, bringing together key colleagues from across the sector who are involved in or responsible for digital transformation in their organisation. This Forum will focus on Empowering Councils: A Digital Journey Towards Holistic Service Delivery.
Date: Wednesday, 5th June Time: 10am - 12:30pm Location: Microsoft Teams
Data Standards themed events taking place from May.
The Better Data Community has organised several data standards themed events starting today to help the public sector improve its data by developing knowledge for reliable and meaningful data exchange and collaboration.
By providing a space where the public sector come together, network and share knowledge, we hope the events will help attendees define the scope of data standards, promote the benefits of data standards and implement data standards.
These events include:
8th May 2024: Defining Standards in Scotland: Find out about the Scottish Data Standards Boards.
23rd May 2024: Networking Event: Selling Benefits and Your Experience.
28th May 2024: Workshop: A Toolkit for Selling Benefits.
6th June: Adopting Open Referral UK, TPX Impact.
19th June: Management and Publication of the NUAR Harmonised Data Model Geospatial Commission and Ordnance Survey.
Please check out the list of events in detail and sign up using the link below. If you would like further information on the upcoming events, please contact Smerah Akbar.
