Overview

The UK government’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill aims to revolutionise regeneration across the country. As currently planned, the Bill will offer new funding for housing and infrastructure, and give authorities more control over their budgets and transport systems. The accompanying Levelling-Up Fund is one of five ongoing funding initiatives designed to help authorities boost their local economies.

But this new flexibility comes after a period of unprecedented spending – the pandemic cost local authorities £11.9 in additional costs and lost income, according to one estimate – and amid a cost of living crisis.

This means that while local authorities must be poised to capture opportunities to innovate, they must do with so with extreme cost discipline.

This webinar, produced in partnership with VMware, will investigate how the levelling agenda impacts IT service provision among local authorities and how an effective approach to cloud computing can help them balance flexibility and cost.

Speakers:

• Pete Swabey, Editor-in-Chief, Tech Monitor (Chair)
• Joseph Langford, Head of Strategy, UK&I, VMware
• Martyn Wallace, Chief Digital Officer, Scottish Local Government Digital Office

Overview

The ability to derive insight from data is essential to the success of technology initiatives. Leaders across the public sector are well aware that data analytics capabilities are no longer a ‘nice to have’, but an essential driving force for transformation. Yet data analytics projects continue to be hamstrung by persistent issues that are difficult to overcome.

Tech Monitor convened central and local government data experts to dissect how digital leaders in the public sector are super-charging their analytics capabilities.

Our expert panel discussed how public sector leaders can take their data – however messy, incomplete or imperfect – and turn it into transformational insights that ultimately create real change for UK citizens.

Register to watch now and gain practical insights into how these hard-won lessons can be applied to your own organisation.

Discussion questions

• What are the most pressing issues faced by public sector data leaders? How did the pandemic change the conversation around data analytics? Where are the current stumbling blocks?
• How can organisations overcome the enormous challenge of cleaning the data? Does this have to be the first step for any digital transformation initiative? If not, how should poor, incomplete or biased data be handled, to avoid drawing incorrect conclusions?
• What value is there in “democratising data” – making analytics available and accessible to departments outside of IT and technology? What are the challenges with this approach?
• How should leaders govern, control and monitor data science projects, especially if they are outside traditional technology departments? What is the right balance between empowering employees to solve their own problems, and maintaining rigorous processes that produce reliable, high-quality results?
• What does the future of data science look like for the UK public sector? Will data science become part of the skillset for most strategic roles?