Get Ready to Change to a Smart Public Sector

As a leading Microsoft cloud provider to Local and Regional Government, Paul Scaling from the Phoenix Public Sector Team, outlines his thoughts around ‘getting ready internally’ for the move to a cloud-based solution.

“As we all know councils are faced with a range of challenges around providing services to us their citizens. These can be around employment, public health, social care, data, housing and much more. Citizens want and expect all services to be freely available but with budget cuts, council chiefs are having to get smarter and look at modernising their IT. The challenges of doing more with less can no longer be ignored and must be addressed.

I wanted to share with you my experience of working with senior council leads around the ‘Digital Modern Workplace’. I have been working with a number of senior stake holders within different councils about having the right structure for digital leadership and asking the question, do they have the right people in charge to manage these processes.
The key element is to put in place the right digital leadership groups or sometimes for a smaller council the correct individual to move a council forward. Some of the larger councils have several people working in this area, from Digital Champions and Chief Digital Officers to Business Transformations Specialists.

The next steps are to start user profiling internally to identify the needs of certain departments and job roles. Understanding the needs of your staff and knowing which people need which technologies to fulfil their roles is key – the ability of being able to unlock productivity and meet the accessibility needs to staff members with challenges is paramount. Another important aspect is gaining trust in the change to new technology and the adoption of it. Culture change should not be under estimated.

In addition, you obviously need to know what the cost will be, the procurement routes to take and then the number of workshops to fully understand the technology required to deliver the desired outcomes. Once all of this has been thought through then you can start to grasp the digital agenda and be at the forefront of spearheading transformation within your organisation.
Phoenix has just been named the 2019 Microsoft Global Modern Workplace Transformation Partner of the Year – this is an award that we are very proud of and highlights that we have the knowledge and experience to assist you in your transformational journey.”