• Public Sector
• Skills & Talent
• Government
• Transformation

Written by Sally Meecham, CEO, Centre for Digital Public Services, Wales

Commitment to supporting digital in Wales

In her draft budget for 2021-22, Rebecca Evans announced that CDPS has been allocated funding of £4.9m for the next financial year. This is brilliant news for digital public services in Wales.

There is now a really exciting opportunity to build on the first six months of CDPS and we will continue to work with colleagues across the public sector in Wales and our ever-growing network of partners, suppliers and stakeholders to deliver good, inclusive and accessible public services and ensure the people that design and deliver the services have the right skills, capability, ambition and support.

What we’ve done so far

Since the launch some highlights include:

• a ‘digital squad’ to work with three local authorities to make it easier to access adult social care
• delivering digital and service design awareness courses to more than100 public sector colleagues and elected members
• starting to build a digital public services community and host regular knowledge sharing seminars.

There’s been huge enthusiasm, challenge, and a lot of requests for us to do more over and above our original remit for the Alpha phase and most of all fantastic engagement and support. The fire has been lit!

Next

We’re now planning for next year, but we do know that there will be:

• lots more digital squads, working with all parts of the Welsh public sector. They’ll be designing user- led services, using an agile approach, being supported by digital experts and upskilling the teams and the organisation
• more training, which will include more training to public sector leaders, individual digital profession training courses, opportunities to shadow the digital squads and work with all levels of education on a pipeline of digital talent in Wales
• communities of practice across Wales and beyond. We want to get different professions to learn together, share experiences and knowledge. We include operations, policy, finance, HR/people and procurement in that mix. We’ll also continue to host and participate in knowledge sharing sessions and collaborate on standards for design, tech, language etc.

• help to join up digital activities across Wales and learn from what is happening across the globe

And on a personal note

For someone who has been a champion of good digital public services, properly skilled people, inclusion and the right organisation design for digital service delivery for 20 years and who lives in Wales and loves it I am really very happy to be leading CDPS as interim CEO. There is a lot to be done in the next few weeks, the planning, getting the people in place on the team, lots of procurement.. sorting governance, impact measures etc. And of course continuing with the delivery we’ve already started.

But it really is exciting, we’ve worked with absolutely brilliant people so far who have already made an impact in their organisations and there’s lots more to come.

You can follow our progress through our blog or get in touch at [email protected]

Originally posted here

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