Comment - Sam Bramwell, Solutions director, business applications for public sector, Microsoft

From where we were last year, before the pandemic hit, we have seen an acceleration in agility by local government. The opportunity and the need for technology to solve some of the biggest challenges local authorities have faced over the past year has resulted in a massive shift.

For me, the key message for local government – as we look beyond the pandemic – is not to lose that agility; to think about ways in which you can continue to adapt and move forward; to identify ways in which technology can support all the processes across local government.

The other part for me is ensuring we leave no one behind. The pandemic has identified that there is a digital divide. For those not connected to technology, maybe because they are older or do not have access to broadband or adequate connectivity, the risk is that we digitise everything without thinking about how we serve the needs of every demographic.

Councils have to think: “How do I ensure that everyone can get the same access to our services in the way that they want to?”

It is about understanding the citizen experience, using insight to understand what citizens need, where they get their information from, how they want to serve themselves and how they want to access information. And then serving that all in a timely manner and connecting everything.

Post pandemic, local government needs to start focusing on how it creates a seamless, intuitive, connected citizen experience.

When we were talking to organisations last year, some of them were doing Covid outbreak management on Post-it notes and Excel spreadsheets simply because that was all they had.

IT budgets are often one of the first things to get chopped but, as we look beyond crisis management to life beyond Covid, we have to make sure IT continues to be invested in and that technology remains a priority.

Finally, an important part of this technology and transformation agenda, for me, is around attracting skills. We should want our local authorities to become a place where people want to go and work and have a career; they should be a prime destination because they have and use the best technology, have the best training programmes, have a valuable social and community purpose and so on.

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and organisation to achieve more; at a national level here in the UK we want to ensure everyone can access digital skills. Post pandemic, I would love to see local councils become a hotbed and incubator for technology skills development, especially with the advent of low-code/no-code platforms, and to do this in partnership with their IT vendors and suppliers.

I very much hope that will be part of the post-pandemic technology conversation too.

- Sam Bramwell, Microsoft