Digital Perth and Kinross 2023-2027

Digital Perth and Kinross (PDF, 1 MB) - our Digital Strategy for 2023-27 demonstrates our level of ambition for using digital, information and technology over the next five years to encourage a vibrant, sustainable local economy and make our services more personal, accessible, available and efficient for the people, communities and businesses who rely on them. 

Throughout this Strategy, we use:

• 'digital' to mean our wider culture and approaches for using new tools such as Internet of Things (IoT) and technologies to change the way we deliver our services; this encompasses our thinking around leadership, platforms and shared solutions, partnership working, customers, services, skills and channels;
• 'information' to include the data we capture and use across the organisation, the business systems in which we store it, how we keep it secure; and share it; this encompasses the wider aims of the Council's Data and Analytics programme and the drive for using consistent accurate data and business intelligence to target services at those most in need; 
• 'technology' to denote our core infrastructure including connectivity; datacentres; telephony; filtering and cyber security; our Microsoft 365 environment and computing devices; these are the foundations on which our digital ambitions are built

The Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things describes a network of physical objects - kitchen appliances; doors and wearable health monitors; 'things' - that are embedded with sensors, software and other technologies. These connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. The data collected via these sensors, cloud technologies and mobile technologies, can be combined and analysed to provide intelligence/inform better decision-making.

Key messages from this strategy are:

• Growing a culture of One Council digital leadership: recognising that digital transformation is as much about cultural and organisational change as it is about technical change.
• Securing and accessing our information assets: prioritising safety of our information by investing to stay ahead of cyber-security threats.
• Redesigning services around life events: listening to people and communities to better understand their needs and life experiences, and improving services to respond to that end to end customer journey.
• Automation driving design of fully end to end digital services: simplifying the customer journey, encouraging self-service; streamlining and automating back-office processes, and removing systems, duplication and manual effort where we can to free up staff for higher-value tasks that need empathy and human insight.
• Building partnerships: digital and data services are joined up horizontally, to give us common ground for partnering in meaningful ways across the Council, to tackle complex real-world issues.
• Digital is a driver for economic growth: encouraging adoption of improvements in fibre and the rollout of superfast broadband to stimulate growth in local digital business and visitor footfall; and attract new investment in green, high-quality commerce and jobs.
• Digitally savvy talent incubator: attracting, growing and retaining the talent and skills necessary for a sustainable, diverse local economy.
• People choose to use our digital services: services are accessible, relevant and easy to use; however they know assistance and alternative channels are available if they choose not to engage with us online.
• One front door: delivering a better customer experience, built on shared, data-driven knowledge of the customer and accessed via a single point of entry for all services.
• Better decision making/evolving services from reactive to proactive to prevention: using joined up data, analytics and business intelligence, to generate insights that inform prevention, strategic policy and improvement; target support and services more accurately to those most in need; enhance efficiency; and enable citizen self-service.