Digital Strategy 2025 - 2029

Digital partnerships for the benefit of the county.

Our corporate strategy is rooted in a collaborative ethos that recognises Lancashire County Council as a part of a wider ecosystem of organisations working together with Lancashire 2050 partners to improve lives, communities and businesses across Lancashire.

Collaboration and working with partners are at the heart of our digital strategy.

We will do this in several ways:

Continuing to work with the public sector across Lancashire to share data and design services that benefit our residents – including district and parish/town councils, the NHS, and other central government departments.

Continuing to work with the public sector in Lancashire to share data and design services that benefit our residents – including district councils, the NHS, and other central government departments.

Collaborating with the education sector by supporting schools and colleges on apprenticeships, placements and work experience to guide local young people into meaningful work.

Building partnerships with our world-class universities and major Lancashire employers, to help develop the skills and talent that can contribute to our economy and fill the jobs of the future, with a particular focus on cyber security.

Working with local charities, voluntary organisations and businesses to support local residents with digital inclusion.

Ensuring that the commercial organisations the council works with, buy into our vision for Lancashire and help us to provide good quality services to the people of Lancashire, including contributions to good causes.

Digital inclusion

Being Digital is not about replacing our services with digital only options, it is about encouraging, enabling and supporting those who can use digital tools, or go online, to do so. To support this, we will continue to work with partners, charities and voluntary organisations on digital inclusion approaches. There are many people in Lancashire who do not have the skills, equipment or confidence to use digital technology. We will be working on a range of initiatives to support people by:

• supporting with assisted digital for our own services, and with public sector partners such as HM Courts and Tribunals and UK Visas and Immigration
• supplying devices, in partnership with Good Things Foundation
• distributing SIM cards to address data poverty, as part of the National Databank

We will use existing and new technology to enable people to access advice, support and information about our services and local services provided by others. We will use technology to make services easier to access.

To design this strategy, we engaged with residents across the county to get their opinions of where we can improve our digital services. We have used that feedback as the basis for this ambition and where we need to focus – starting with our website and our digital experience.

At the centre of our definition of digital, is the idea that, where appropriate, digital will be the channel of choice for residents who are able to and want to self-serve. Our research found that many residents want to be able to access services online but have to call our contact centre because our digital services are not intuitive or accessible.

We want residents to experience a smooth, joined-up experience when they engage with public services in Lancashire. We will do the hard work to make it easier for residents, by designing services that put people first, that re-use common capabilities and join up digital, phone and face-to-face contacts. We will also play a role in making it easier to join-up services between organisations.

We are already working on Assisted Digital initiatives that will help those that want to self-serve but need some initial support. We believe that by making it easier for residents to access council services digitally, our staff will have more time to spend with residents that need support for more complex and urgent services.

Drive innovation from data insights and artificial intelligence.

Data management

Over the next five years we will improve our data management processes, practices and ways of working across the organisation. We will produce a data strategy, outlining the culture, architecture, governance and skills we need to unlock the power of data and derive more value from the rich datasets we hold.

This will include evaluating our model for provisioning data to services across the council. One of the approaches we will look to introduce is a new innovative way to deploy data, where services can access centrally-curated datasets that give insight into service performance. This will help improve reliability, accuracy, availability and quality of data.

This will align to our work to capitalise on internal process automation, to drive through service efficiencies, we will redesign services and business processes so that we are designing with data in mind. It will also align with our efforts to upskill and train staff in digital and data, where we are building out our data academy to support colleagues across the council. This will have a heavy focus on data culture, so that our staff have the confidence to collect, share, and utilise data effectively.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We want to use emerging technologies such as AI to find creative and innovative ways to improve and redesign services. We are already exploring using artificially intelligent and automation technologies to improve service delivery to our residents.

We are starting to realise benefits from AI by improving residents experience, making it easier to find information, resolve queries and increasing access to services. They are also using AI to save time by making processes more efficient.

We have specific use cases we want to explore. We will run small, experimental projects to test their viability, and scale them up if they are beneficial. We will also introduce measures to ensure this is done in a transparent and ethical way. Throughout the duration of this digital strategy we expect to see real benefits from new technology, and we will develop a culture of responsible innovation to help us find creative and sustainable ways to improve services.

Technical foundations as a building block for innovation and transformation.

Key to our digital transformation is having the right technical foundations. Within the council that means having the architecture that enables us to design and build services that meet the needs of our residents and our staff. Externally, it means providing the physical infrastructure across the county to help businesses and people thrive.

Physical infrastructure across the county

Part of that is the council’s investment in public wi-fi and digital infrastructure across the county. From our previous digital strategy, we have:

• rolled out network infrastructure across the county to get more people, businesses and schools connected to superfast broadband.
• introduced the Gov Roam network, to make it easier for other public sector bodies to work securely and co-locate.

Over the next five years we will be more connected in the way we use our infrastructure assets internally, reducing the duplication of network infrastructure.

We will share more proactively with public sector partners to allow them to benefit from our investments and save money for the taxpayer.

Using the returns on our original investment, and in conjunction with Government led programmes we will continue to prioritise access to broadband for our hardest-to-reach communities. We will also continue to support local businesses to access the broadband connectivity and skills that will support their growth.

We will continue to use modern technology which improves the day-to-day lives of our residents. One way we are doing this is focusing on Intelligent Mobility to reduce road congestion, improve air quality and improve journey times when travelling around Lancashire.

This involves taking advantage of innovative solutions in highways and streets assets that enable us to make adjustments to traffic lights and traffic flow. We will look for funding streams from central government to further invest in state-of-the-art data intelligence and machine learning tools.

Technical architecture and governance

There are lots of digital tools and systems that we rely upon to deliver our services. Over the years we have invested in technology to meet specific needs or to deliver individual projects. Managing legacy infrastructure and applications is one of the biggest blockers to digital transformation across the public sector. The associated management and maintenance cost, security risk and architectural complexity can make it difficult and risky to make significant changes to services.

We currently have a large amount of applications for managing services. Some of these are industry-leading, others are legacy or bespoke applications that are difficult to support and maintain. We will rationalise around our core applications, aiming for greater re-use and interoperability, this will be accompanied by a move towards Software as a Service and cloud-hosted applications. We will strengthen our architectural governance to ensure consistency and alignment across the council with our systems.

We will improve our residents experience of interacting with the council through a digital platform that underpins our interactions, whether that is through telephone, digital or face-to-face communication. This will allow us to provide a consistent experience to residents, so they do not have to repeat information or feel as though they’re going round in circles. We currently have many disparate forms, portals and applications that are used to capture customer data. Over the next five years these will be streamlined and rationalised to provide a better quality service to our residents. As we change our digital and technical architecture, we will also be investing in our technical and digital teams to develop the skills we need for the future. This will help us remain up to date and also help us leverage modern technologies.

Digital skills, culture and ways of working

Underpinning our ambitions for digital is the way we work as one team, putting residents at the heart of everything we do. When we design new services, we will make sure residents are at the forefront of shaping our digital services.

We want to be inherently user-focused and collaborative in how we deliver digital services to residents, and we want to provide the support to staff and members within the council to help them build confidence and skills in digital and data.

We’re investing in design and user research skills to help ensure that where appropriate, the digital work we deliver is co-designed with partners and residents. This will make sure that we do the hard work to make services easy to use and accessible to residents, rather than designing services in a way that is easier for us.

Over the next five years we will advocate and promote agile delivery, design with users, and stress the value of multi-disciplinary teams and working in the open. This will help with the culture change to drive a more iterative, collaborative and transparent approach to digital that is not just the responsibility of the digital function.

Over the last period of the digital strategy, we have established a digital champions network across the council, to help share good practice and support colleagues to adopt digital ways of working. We will continue to support and build this network, so they are equipped and empowered to help promote digital across the council.

We will launch a digital skills academy, helping us to provide our colleagues with the support and training they need to use our systems and provide excellent digital services to residents.

Leveraging digital in social care

Many of our ambitions for the digital strategy cover all of our services but given the complexities and increasing levels of demand for our social care services, we have targeted activities and ambitions for how we can use digital to go even further in how we plan, manage and deliver social care

services over the next 5 years. Our work in this area ranges from fixing fundamental challenges and supporting our workforce, to utilising tech-enabled care and virtual monitoring.

We are upskilling our workforce to help them use technology more effectively, so that they can focus more time on delivering care to residents rather than performing administrative functions. We’re looking at voice-technology that can transcribe conversations so that social workers can focus on the person rather than the technology.

Within Social Care we have a programme of activity to improve and automate processes, and to ensure that how we work is better aligned to how our technology systems are designed.

We have bold ambitions within the social care sector, with the aspiration to be the leading council for tech-enabled care. We can use technology solutions to monitor things like hydration, medication, fall detection.

This will help give early indicators of when a vulnerable person may need support, helping more preventative delivery approaches. It can also empower residents to be independent for longer.

On a system level, we can be more targeted with our interventions by using data and AI to predict which residents will need support. Early intervention can reduce trauma for individuals and can be significantly more cost-effective to the taxpayer.