Agenda item

This report provides committee members with an update on the activities and progress of Technology & Digital over the last 12 months.

          The Head of Technology and Digital was invited by the Chair to present his report to the committee. He advised members that the report before them was an annual update that provided some highlights of the activities from the service over the last 12 months. The team had focused a lot of development time on rewriting all of the councils e-forms after the current supplier pulled out of the market. The team had continued to roll out other software projects alongside this work, including the roll out of a new cleansing application. He confirmed a number of major infrastructure upgrades had also been completed, to time, quality and budget. The council’s website remained the most popular customer access channel that sees over a million visitors a year, the team continuously review ways to make improvements using user feedback.  The Cybersecurity landscape remains an area of concern, and the team constantly review emerging threats and new ways to improve our defences. He stated that Members would have noted from the report that the team have a number of back-office challenges to overcome over the next 12 months, particularly around a number of current key suppliers that had pulled out of the market, he reassured the committee that a plan had been put in place to address and resolve these challenges.

         The Chair then invited members to ask questions of the Head of Technology and Digital or make comment on the report. Councillor Turner then advised the committee that he had asked the officer if he could expand on what work for the website was still required in advance of the meeting. The Head of Technology and Digital then provided the committee with his written response where he confirmed that work on the website would never stop, the team were continually improving the site based on user feedback, site analytics and customer journeys. The team were passionate about ensuring the council’s website was usable by as many people as possible including those with:

• impaired vision
• motor difficulties
• cognitive impairments
• learning difficulties

He explained that at least 1 in 5 people in the UK with a long-term illness, impairment, or disability with many more having temporary disabilities. The Council did not want to exclude anyone from accessing its services; for some the digital world was the best way for them to do that, and for others it may be the ‘only’ way they could.

As new content would be produced for the website by various department across the council, the team would not only review the writing style (the language used must be understandable for all reading abilities and councils often use their own jargon that no one understands except people that work for a council) but also the structure of content to ensure it was published as accessible content (e.g. screen reader and voice recognition compatible).

When the website was built, an independent audit was carried out and that provided insight to see real people with disabilities undertake certain interactions. Which really bought home that by making changes the council could make people’s lives better and support them doing the things they need to do, that a lot of us just take for granted – so we made those changes.

As the council’s e-forms were also being rewritten and as part of that work the team were ensuring they were all accessible too. He stated that if ‘wanting to help all our customers’ was not compelling enough it was also a legal requirement for public sector websites to meet certain accessibility standards which the council does and passed the last Government Digital Service (GDS) audit. Finally, he advised that the council’s website would never be ‘finished’, or work stop because our passion is to continually improve what we can offer. 

It was then asked if there were any concerns regarding cyber-attacks, specifically in relation to the middle east and Russia. The Head of Technology and Digital explained that the council did see these types of attacks coming in from all over however, it didn’t matter where the threat or attack was from, the team and council were always mindful of them. Finally, a concern was raised regarding to the number of suppliers that had removed themselves from the market, the officer was asked, how long did the council have these contracts in place and if this was normal as it seemed concerning. The Head of Technology and Digital confirmed that the contract lengths did vary, in terms of the e-forms we had had that supplier for a long time, however the team took the approach to rewrite these using open-source technology so the council would not be reliant on an external supplier in the future.  In terms of some of the other systems in place they are mostly long contracts, as it was expensive to replace these systems. He advised that it was unusual to get that many suppliers pull out at once, but the sheer scale and number was bigger issue that was being managed.

          After the debate had concluded the Chair checked that there were no other comments or questions to be raised, members then noted the report.