Unmet Needs and Measuring Success
Considering the sensitive nature of much of the work carried out by local government and public sector services, it’s imperative that tech and CRM systems are secure, efficient, intuitive and reliable.
The councils we spoke to use tech for areas of their work where there’s no room for mistakes, such as:
A large amount of IT is outsourced to technology suppliers, but there is a strong presence of in-house technology teams that work alongside these providers. The IT teams' makeup differed from council to council, and in some cases, local authorities shared resources with other councils.
Our respondents told us all service areas needed digital support in some form, but five service areas needed support more than all the others. They had already been key areas of need before the pandemic, and it can be argued that Covid has increased the importance of these service areas.
The councils who took part in our research told us they had various “unmet needs”, where their technology partners were falling short, mainly:
The combination of these challenges means that councils often find themselves choosing the same suppliers again and again and using outdated systems that don’t connect well with newer technologies.
Unfortunately, measuring the long-term success of current technology was an area that the councils we spoke to weren’t confident about. Although the councils could highlight some indicators of success, they didn’t have clear thresholds or processes to actually measure if the technology was meeting those requirements.
We were told that “measuring long term success is a weakness of our council and local government in general” and “we are often required to develop things very quickly because of changes in legislation, this can make technology decisions shortsighted”.
To our respondents, long-term success would be measured by the following:
External technology services were universally considered as invaluable by the councils we spoke to, for saving time and money, and using automation to increase efficiency.