Local Digital Dashboards Phase Two Begins

Jun 20, 2014

Phase two of the GOV.UK local performance platform was launched last week with the addition of three new digital transactions to the dashboard.

In March, Steve Halliday, head of ICT at Solihull Council and former Socitm president, announced that the representative body for people in public sector IT and the Government Digital Service (GDS) would be collaborating to deliver “local digital dashboards.”

The idea was to take local council “transactions” – such as Solihull’s “report a missed bin” – and add them to a dashboard where key performance indicators would be displayed.

Halliday has now revealed that the second stage of the project has begun at the GDS office in Holborn.

According to a blog post written by the ICT head, the objective had been to identify three new digital transactions to present on the performance platform, but reducing the selection to just three was a difficult tasks.

Halliday adds that the long-term vision is to display a large number of local digital transactions on the dashboard, but this will happen in “manageable steps.”

Phase Two Sees Both New Transactions And Expansion

The three processes chosen to appear on the platform were Warwickshire County Council’s Renew A Library Book, East Yorkshire’s Pay Council Tax and Cambridgeshire’s Renew A Transport Concession.

Besides the addition of three completely new transactions, the original missed bins dashboard will be expanded to represent other councils who offer the service:

Elements Of The Project Under Debate

Halliday’s blog post also claims that two other debates surrounded the launch of phase two – one of which was whether or not to include non-transactional digital services in the project.

For example, he says, applying for a school is a transaction and many people will explore digital channels to find out more about a school beforehand.

However, he adds that although most feel information provision is an important component of digital delivery, it is difficult to prove a user has found what they require.

The second debate Halliday speaks of is whether the digital dashboards should be limited to performance data associated with digital channel use or expand to service performance data as well.