Using the CDDaT framework for council leadership and strategy

Introduction to use cases

This guidance is for senior leaders focused on bridging technical silos and aligning digital capabilities with organisational sustainability, service improvement and reform.

The guidance provides a practical toolkit for communicating the "story" of CDDaT to non-technical stakeholders and political leaders by translating complex functions into plain-language skill families and strategic pillars. By adopting the framework, leaders can reflect on their digital maturity against the LGA Maturity Index and demonstrate how technical capabilities drive the council’s core strategic objectives. Finally, it defines the specific qualities required for digital leadership, reframing the role as a strategic translator who connects technical possibility with real-world resident outcomes.

Using the framework to understand the CDDaT landscape

Why this is important

Many councils identify challenges in clarifying the purpose of various CDDaT areas to non-technical stakeholders. When IT is discussed only in terms of abstract concepts or individual job titles, it can be unfairly framed as a support cost rather than a strategic engine for service improvement. This communication gap makes it difficult to secure investment, leads to siloed working, and prevents the council from seeing how different technical functions interlock to provide resident services.

How to do this using the framework

The framework is designed to provide a bridge for communication. By moving the conversation away from jargon and toward the collective capabilities required for a resilient council, you can demonstrate exactly how digital functions keep the council running. This allows you to identify where the organisation may be weaker, helping to unlock targeted investment and reframe CDDaT as a core driver of financial sustainability and value for money.

The following provides an overview of the ten CDDaT skill families and how they fit together in practice:

1. Coding and Development: This group builds the council’s own digital tools and applications. By writing custom code, they automate manual tasks and create services that fit the council's specific needs.
2. Data Strategy and Data Insights: These specialists turn raw information into clear evidence for decision-making. They ensure the council’s data is organised, shared safely between departments, and analysed to identify patterns and support forecasting.
3. Ensuring Quality Processes and Outputs: This family acts as the council’s safety net. They systematically test every new system or service to make sure it is reliable, meets legal standards, and works exactly as promised before it is ever released to residents or staff.
4. IT Service and Support: These are the people who keep the council’s technology running day-to-day. They manage the software and hardware that staff rely on, providing quick help when things go wrong to ensure that essential public services are never interrupted.
5. Managing Projects and Programmes: This group ensures that digital work is delivered on time and within budget. They evaluate which projects offer the best value for public money and oversee a portfolio of initiatives to make sure they all align with the council’s overall strategy.
6. Managing Security Risks: This group is concerned with protecting the council’s data and digital assets from cyber-attacks. They balance safety with usability, ensuring that even if a breach occurs, the CDDaT team is resilient enough to keep essential services, such as social care payments, running smoothly.
7. Supporting People: This group focuses on the human side of change. They design the training and strategies needed to help the workforce feel confident using new technology, ensuring that "digital-first" doesn't leave staff or vulnerable residents behind.
8. Systems Strategy and Implementation: This group builds the council’s digital foundation. They design the complex networks and infrastructure that allow different systems to "talk" to each other, and they work to retire old, risky technology that holds the council back.
9. Understanding and Meeting Users’ Needs: This team uses research and design to ensure services are built around the person using them. By making websites and forms easy to navigate, they reduce the need for residents to call or visit the council in person, and improve service efficiency.
10. Understanding What the Business Needs from Technology These translators bridge the gap between technical teams and service managers. They analyse how the council operates to find where technology can fix specific business problems, ensuring every digital investment is driven by a real operational requirement.

Using the framework to reflect on your council’s digital maturity

Why this is important

Digital maturity is often discussed in abstract terms, making it difficult for leaders to pinpoint exactly where investment or intervention is most needed. Without a clear link between organisational maturity and technical capability, it can be hard to build a business case for growth. If you can't define the specific skills that are missing, you can't prove how those gaps are hindering service delivery or financial sustainability.

How to do this using the framework

The framework serves as a practical tool for reflecting on the digital maturity of your CDDaT function. By using the skill families as areas for reflection, you can move beyond anecdotal evidence to pinpoint exactly where a lack of specific skills is hindering progress.

To assist with this, we have aligned our functional groupings, The Planners, The Builders, and The Guardians, with the LGA Digital and Technology Transformation Maturity Index. This creates a direct bridge between your skill resourcing and your organisational maturity, providing a clear roadmap for where to target investment to reach the next level of maturity.

It is important to note that this is only for reflection, rather than objective benchmarking, which would require a more in-depth approach. The framework is also designed specifically for the CDDaT function rather than the council as a whole.

Using the framework to communicate the strategic value of CDDaT

Why this is important

In a complex local government environment, the strategic impact of digital and technology functions can sometimes be obscured by their highly technical nature. When these capabilities are primarily discussed in terms of operational maintenance or infrastructure, it can be challenging to clearly articulate their role in driving broader service improvement. This difficulty in translation can make it a struggle to demonstrate how technical expertise directly supports the council’s core mission, organisational sustainability, and the delivery of essential resident outcomes.

How to do this using the framework

The framework bridges the gap between technical expertise and corporate strategy by showing how specific capabilities drive strategic success.

1. Use the "Strategic Objective Alignment": We have aligned the skills in this framework with the strategic objectives defined by the LGA. You can find these pre-mapped connections in the Strategic Objective Alignment tab of the full CDDaT framework (Excel version). This alignment provides a ready-made "translation layer" that explains how the technical skills directly supports strategic outcomes.
2. Perform a "reverse search" for skills: Instead of starting with the technology, start with your council's goals. You can use the framework in reverse. Select a specific strategic goal (e.g. "SO1: Reduce manual or transactional tasks for the workforce, creating efficiency savings and enabling a focus on more creative tasks"). Filter the framework by that objective to see exactly which technical skills are required to meet it.
3. Map local council objectives: While the LGA alignment provides a national baseline, we recommend mapping your council’s own unique strategic objectives onto the framework. Take your Corporate Plan or Digital Strategy and identify the "building blocks" (Skill Families) required for each priority. This creates a link between your council's goals and its technical people. It proves that without the right technical capabilities, the strategic vision cannot be realised.

Using the framework to define digital leadership qualities

Why this is important

Defining digital leadership in local government involves a balance between technical awareness and the ability to influence corporate strategy. When the focus remains primarily on technical proficiency, the broader interpersonal and political skills required to lead transformation can sometimes be overlooked. This can result in a disconnect between technical capabilities and the specific operational challenges of the council, making it more difficult to ensure that digital initiatives are fully aligned with the needs of residents.

How to do this using the framework

Use the framework to define digital leadership qualities, allowing you to demonstrate what effective digital leadership looks like and why it is vital to the council.

To define the role of a digital leader in local government, we must look beyond technical proficiency and focus on the intersection of strategic "soft" skills and CDDaT expertise. This approach combines the LGA CDDaT Framework with the LGA/Solace Senior Leadership Development Framework.

The primary skill of a CDDaT leader is the ability to understand others. Because the CDDaT function is often viewed through a narrow lens, it is the leader's responsibility to deeply understand what different council services do and how technology can support them. For example, a CDDaT leader must listen to the specific challenges of Children’s Services, such as case management burdens or data fragmentation, and suggest solutions that truly unlock those problems. They then share a vision that brings these service leads on board as partners.

Crucially, a leader must demystify CDDaT, using plain language to show how digital tools solve real-world problems. They must remain acutely aware of resident needs and digital inclusion challenges, which often dictate the speed and feasibility of transformation. Furthermore, they require the political skill to bring elected members along, demonstrating how CDDaT skills benefit the council, the organisation, and the wider community while balancing the complexity of "place."

In this context, a leader may possess a broad "Awareness" of many skills across the framework, combined with "Expert" level depth in specific strategic areas. Some skills in the CDDaT framework naturally lean towards leadership, such as Strategic Planning, Governance, and Benefits Management. However, these must be underpinned by the eight core themes defined by the LGA and Solace:

• inspiring place and systems leadership
• developing shared vision
• navigating politics and the political interface
• leading a high-performance culture
• ensuring good governance, resource management and ethics
• acting with integrity and authenticity
• self-reflecting and taking care.

Effective CDDaT leadership is the purposeful combination of these core leadership behaviours with a strategic selection of technical skills.

Further use cases

The CDDaT framework is a foundational resource that can be adapted in various ways to meet the unique strategic and operational needs of your council. These further use cases are intended to inspire creative applications of the framework, helping you address a broader range of leadership and organisational challenges.

• Align regional partnerships: Use a shared language of capability to align with external stakeholders and simplify cross-authority resource sharing.
• Lead the AI transition: Align your technical capabilities with the strategic and ethical requirements needed to support an AI-enabled workforce.
• Inform long-term resilience: Identify where specific technical expertise is critical to maintaining statutory services to strengthen your council’s business continuity planning.

If you have used the framework in creative ways to support your council, please get in touch to share your experience with the sector. Send your use cases and case studies to [email].