PublicTechnology.net

Scott Moore, business analyst for the Scottish Improvement Service, won a Socitm scholarship to research digital public service trend in Seoul during the summer. Here he looks back on he learnt during his summer investigating the city’s digital transformation.

MPs have urged the government to set a strategy to deal with the ethics and technology associated with rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics.

This week saw the official launch of the Singapore’s dedicated government tech agency GovTech. Rebecca Hill spoke to the organisation’s chief information officer Chan Cheow Hoe about the issues facing government digital services and how his team is addressing them.

RNIB inclusion guru Steve Tyler tells Gill Hitchcock that it makes sense for councils to build accessibility into their digital services. 

Scotland’s cities could improve “significantly” on the way they use technology and innovation to drive growth, a report from the CITIE partnership has said.

Local government digital officers have said that councils need to be more honest about poor products from big suppliers and work together to demand change.

The latest G-Cloud sales figures show a slight decline in monthly sales in July, with local government sales remaining at just 5% of all-time sales.

The idea that digital transformation will ever be finished is an “illusion” and government should focus on establishing long-term leadership to ensure evolution at a more organic pace, a Capita director has said.

Surrey and Borders Partners NHS Trust has launched a £5m trial of Internet of Things technologies to improve healthcare for people with dementia.

Councils must not let the local government Digital Service Standard become another set of principles that "gets shoved in a drawer” and isn’t made a reality, a conference has heard.

The Ministry of Justice has named the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s chief technology officer as its new chief digital and information officer.

Local government is struggling to keep up with the pace of change in technologies and true digitisation is at risk of being held back by poor leadership, according to Tower Hamlet’s head of ICT.

The Government Digital Service is to take ownership of the Department for Work and Pension’s Digital Academy to offer training to civil servants across Whitehall, as Cabinet Office says digital transformation strategy due by the end of the year.

The Government Digital Service has reiterated its commitment to the cloud and pledged to refresh its ‘cloud first’ policy and promote it more widely.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is conducting a survey of councils to find out what their information governance frameworks are like.

Mark Skilton of Warwick Business School says that the opening of Microsoft’s three UK data centres marks another step on the road to full public sector adoption of cloud computing in the country.

The government needs to offer tech specialists more freedom and creativity if it wants to recruit the most talented people, according to a recruiter in the Ministry of Justice.

The Ministry of Justice is seeking a chief information security officer and a deputy director of digital delivery.

An analysis has shown that the adoption of cloud computing varies widely across councils, with barriers including out-of-date procurement policies and reliance on in-house IT infrastructure.

The Government Digital Service has set out the requirement for councils wanting to join the first pilots of the local version of its identity assurance scheme, for older people’s concessionary travel and parking permits.

The Department of Health has announced an academy to train NHS staff in digital skills along with a suite of new digital services for patients in an effort to fast-track the NHS’ move to digitisation.