Growing the economy, improving housing, cleaner and safer neighbourhoods, net zero: Burnley Council’s priorities for the borough are wide ranging and require long-term planning and investment. Our digital strategy needs to help the council deliver on these priorities more quickly and more effectively.
In today’s digital era, citizens increasingly expect seamless, personalised digital government services on par with their experiences as digital consumers. At the same time, the council has limited budgets to work with.
The Council’s Medium-Term Financial Strategy requires the council to deliver significant savings to achieve a balanced budget. Use of transformation reserves to deliver digital service improvement must, therefore, achieve efficiency gains as well as improvements in user experience. In other words, investments must reduce our costs or help to free up staff time for other higher value tasks.
There are benefits to this: if we invest in technology that helps our staff to direct and orchestrate their workloads without recourse to repetitive data entry, we might also see an increase in job satisfaction which in turn supports the retention and development of talented staff.
Our strategy describes where we will invest in new technology, how we intend to bring data together for actionable insight, how we will grow and upskill our staff, and how we will encourage all parts of the council to innovate using digital services.