Explaining which skills are important at different stages in the digitalisation “lifecycle”
Strategic objective one: Reduce manual or transactional tasks for the workforce, creating efficiency savings and enabling a focus on more creative tasks
Which skills are especially important for achieving this objective:
Deciding on a strategy
To achieve this objective, councils need to understand their business goals, the organisation’s capability, the current services provided, users’ needs, available resources, and necessary resources.
Councils could consider developing the following skills to support them in this stage:
- Business Analysis: this enables councils to analyse business needs, to align technology solutions with strategic goals.
- Risk Management: this enables councils to identify and mitigate risks associated with new technology implementations
- Service catalogue management – this supports councils to understand which tools, systems, and software it already has
- Financial management – this enables councils to understand and control the costs associated with technology services.
- Business relationship management – this enables business areas to identify their respective and mutual objectives and ensure that solutions align with these objectives.
- Information governance – this enables councils to implement governance practices to ensure data quality and integrity in automated processes.
Deciding on a design
This enables councils to ensure that they are redesigning, processes, systems, tools, or ways of working to fit their purpose and use. To do this, councils will need to start from an assessment of the needs of their business, and their workforce and communities (“users”). This includes understanding users’ goals, and the ways in which existing processes may or may not be contributing towards achieving these goals.
Councils might want to consider developing the following skills to support them in this stage:
- Enterprise and business architecture - this enables councils to ensure that their technology strategy - their data, applications, ways of working, and technologies - align with business objectives.
- Innovation – this enables councils to identify ways to implement new and emerging technologies, products, services, methods, or techniques, so that the council can capture their benefits in practice
- Business process improvement – this enables councils to streamline or re-design business processes in ways which can meet business needs
- User Experience analysis – this enables councils to understand the context of use for existing processes, and set out goals for their improvement based on what the user is trying to achieve
- User experience design – this enables councils to create prototypes of new and improved processes, so that users can try them in practice. This helps the council to understand whether the new process enables the user to meet their goals.
- Solution Architecture - this enables councils to create detailed plans and specifications for solutions to address business problems, and to set out how the different components of the solution – such as hardware, software, and networks – will work together.
- Data architecture – this enables councils to design the overall structure of its data assets in a way that supports business needs. This can make it easier for datasets to be shared or joined up across a council
- Data engineering – this helps to ensure that the technologies for gathering, processing, and delivering data, support the services to access, input, and use data as intended. This can help to reduce the need for duplicate data entry
Transitioning to new ways of working
- Organisational change management – this enables councils to set out a strategy for supporting the workforce to adopt new ways of working
- Testing – this enables councils to test that new processes are performing as expected before deployment
- Project management – this enables councils to take a systematic approach to achieving specific objectives, and to establish the scope of work
Operating new processes and services
- Customer service support – this enables councils to support users with any issues in new systems or processes
- IT infrastructure management – this enables councils to monitor the performance of systems and services in relation to performance and security.
Continually improving
- User experience evaluation – this enables councils to assess whether new services are being used and are usable as expected
Illustrating how skills combine into common roles
Officers with the job title “business analyst” in smaller councils will commonly have the following skills:
- Business analysis
- Strategic planning
- Business relationship management
- Business process improvement
- Research
- Project management
- Product management
- Business modelling
- Enterprise and business architecture
- Systems design
- Innovation
- Methods and tools
- Testing
- User experience evaluation
Describing skills at different levels, from basic to advanced
Content authoring: the ability to plan, design, and create textual information, supported where necessary by graphical content
Basic: the ability to contribute to written content under supervision, and to save content in an appropriate filing system.
Advanced: the ability to write the policies, standards, and strategies which determine content standards across the council, and to support the council to implement these.
Illustrative case studies
Using data architecture to build a centralised data platform:
Example council aimed to enhance data utilisation for informed decision-making. Using the skill “data architecture”, the council was able to design a centralised data platform, integrating disparate systems for a unified view. This solution allowed the council to analyse trends, allocate resources efficiently, and respond proactively to citizen needs. Effective data architecture also helped to ensure data security, scalability, and user-friendly interfaces for staff.
Training and qualification pathways
Data analysis
The ability to systematically inspect, clean, transform, and interpret raw data to extract valuable insights, identify patterns, and make informed conclusions.