Transformation plan

Customer, digital and technology plan

Our customer, digital and technology plan for 2023/24 has a set of actions and projects in the next 12 months, which should reduce our budget while improving customer experience.  

It will provide the foundations for a longer term and comprehensive strategy for 2024 onwards. 

The plan was approved by our Cabinet on 6 June 2023.  

Planned work April 2023 to March 2024 

Alongside our everyday activities, we will take the actions below to make progress towards our long-term strategic objectives.  

We have prioritised these actions into 3 areas and have brought forward work that allows or accelerates budget reductions.  

It also recognises that there is some work that we must do, such as to meet compliance requirements and protect ourselves from cyberattacks. 

Customer

1. Move to a new customer service operating model that maintains customer service standards, but at a lower cost 
2. Review customer services operations for opportunities to reduce phone calls and visits to the Council offices, so that we can focus human help on where it is most needed 
3. Move more parking and environmental health-related work to Customer Services 
4. Consult service managers on opportunities to move further work from service areas into Customer Services (dependent on further technology improvements) 
5. Contribute to the design of, and transfer to, the future council offices 

Digital 

1. Transform our environmental health service to deliver a good service that meets statutory requirements at a lower cost 
2. Transform our housing options service to ensure future service sustainability 
3. Begin the research, design, and development of digital service for residents to tell us they have moved home. This service could include: ‘tell us once’ style customer experience, integrations with back-office software in multiple services, and upsell marketing. This could lead to an integrated customer record, opening more transformation opportunities
4. Deliver budget reductions by moving more notifications from letters to emails and reducing how much we print and post
5. A user research programme to learn how to adapt and improve our products and services 
6. Implement GOV.UK Pay to take payments online and through Customer Services to improve our PCI compliance 
7. Work with other councils to develop our ‘manage my taxi licence’ service 
8. A proof-of-concept data engineering and analysis project to demonstrate how we might use technology to understand our performance better
9. Research, design, and implement a new commercial office and meeting space service 
10. Continuous improvement of Customer Services’ technology to introduce more scripted process and integrations that reduce their training needs 
11. Continuous improvement of the council website to encourage more people to use our online services rather than call, email, or visit us

Technology 

1. Start to record staff and councillor satisfaction in their technology and technical support 
2. Maintain and improve our cybersecurity position through: 
   1. Continuing to improve how we protect our user accounts and devices 
   2. Making our users more aware of how they can contribute 
   3. Testing our incident response plan 
   4. Refresh and implement cybersecurity, information security, supply chain and patch management policies 
3. Move to modern service desk software to improve user experience and productivity and to implement more robust processes such as asset, problem and change management. A new solution will also provide the ability to produce analytics and statistics for decision making that hasn’t been in place to date. 
4. Move to new device management for public computers and mobile devices to provide better user experience 
5. Update our mapping software to maintain compatibility and access new features (ESRI ArcGIS) 
6. Reconcile our land ownership data to make sure it is properly digitised 
7. Subject to business case, work alongside our finance service to update and improve the user experience of our financial accounting software and move it to cloud hosting (Capita Integra) 
8. Subject to business case, work with our services on updating our regulatory services software and moving it to cloud hosting (Idox Cloud)
9. Refresh data centre and network equipment 
10. Agree information governance policies and, subject to funding, apply technical controls to Office365 
11. Move our applications away from Windows Server 2012 R2 before the end of support in October 23 

Please see the cabinet report annex for the full details of our Customer, digital and technology plan.