A Changing Nation - how Scotland will thrive in a digital world: progress report 2021 – 2024

4. Objective 3: Digital Government and Services

4.1 What was the aim?

The 2021 Strategy recognised that digital has the power to change the nature of government and how we deliver our public services. This requires us to reform how we design and deliver services and change the culture and structures of our organisations.

4.2 How are we delivering this?

Common digital platforms

Digital public services deliver better benefits when we collaborate across the public sector to deliver common digital platforms. Most public services – whoever they are delivered by – follow a similar pattern. And this pattern can be broken down into common ‘building blocks’. Users provide information to prove that they are eligible for, and gain access to, the service they need. The public body then facilitates access, for example by making a payment or issuing documentation. The previous design of services has tended towards bespoke solutions to common problems, resulting in siloed systems that exacerbate challenges in data sharing and service delivery.

In 2021 we committed to national and Local Government working together to create common solutions that can be re-used and deployed with ease across the public sector. This approach would reduce duplicative investment and operational costs; improve the customer experience; strengthen resilience by targeted investment in cyber defences; and enable greater innovation.

Our immediate focus was on the development of three platforms: an identity platform to enable users to confirm their personal identity securely to access public services in a digital way; a payments platform to process a range of financial transactions; and a cloud operations service to support the public sector to make efficient and secure use of cloud technology.

Enablers of this approach

In setting out this ambition the Strategy recognised that there were several enabling projects that needed to be put in place to ensure the success of our approach:

• to support organisations to deliver digital transformation we committed to a Digital Support Hub – a single point to access high quality guidance and tools;
• the Scottish Digital Academy facilitates digital leadership and a skilled digital workforce with a focus on courses covering a variety of themes such as agile methodologies, service design, AI, cloud, cyber and data. The Strategy committed us to growing and enhancing this;
• we committed to adopting the Scottish Approach to Service Design to ensure that services are designed around the needs of users, not from the traditional perspective of organisations. This ensures that services are seamless and easy to access, and that people are empowered to participate in the design of public services;
• we recognised the key role of data in digital transformation, with a focus on standardising data to make it easier to find and reuse; and working with organisations to increase their capabilities to improve data reuse. This aimed to increase transparency and trust, empower communities to take decisions about services that impact on them, and fuel innovation;
• we recognised that digital is evolving at an exponential rate, and the need to explore how new technologies such as automation can improve efficiency. We continued our commitment to CivTech, the world’s first Government-run accelerator for digital public services, to foster innovation and sustainability into how the public sector uses technology by openly sharing challenges and ideas to co-producing innovative solutions to old problems;
• we committed to build security into digital public services, to ensure their privacy, integrity, and availability. This aimed for consistency in how public bodies assessed cyber resilience arrangements; identified areas of strength and weakness; and took informed decisions on how/whether to achieve higher levels of resilience.

4.3 What progress has been made?

Common digital platforms

Common Platforms Key Achievements Include:

• 11 public sector organisations now using the Cloud Platform Service.
• Minimum Viable Service delivered for the Payments Service and on-track to go live in 2025;
• ScotAccount now a live service with Disclosure Scotland;
• Local Government ‘myaccount’ has 2.4 million registered accounts and live with 40 organisations.

Our digital identity ecosystem is increasingly mature, with different component services deployable for different identity and verification challenges across the public sector. Scot Account has been developed by the Scottish Government, and offers a user-friendly sign in, together with identity verification to the industry standard for digital identity verification services.

This level of verification is necessary for the delivery of certain public services and the prevention of fraud and identity theft. Adhering to this industry standard will also be key for potential future interoperability with UK Government services and the European identity wallet.

ScotAccount launched in February 2023 and is live with Disclosure Scotland, has a further pilot underway with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, and more public services are coming on board during 2024-25. Mysafe offers users the ability to store verified personal information for reuse in the future, and later this year our Mailbox and vouching solution will come online.

Myaccount is an authentication and identity verification service, which can be deployed in a variety of configurations to meet different organisational needs, requirements and is proportionate to the services citizens access. Developed by Local Government, myaccount has 2.4 million registered accounts, and is live with 92 integrations across 40 organisations, including all 32 Local Authorities. Myaccount is also integral to two national services, parentsportal.scot and getyournec.scot.

ScotPayments is a pioneering collaboration with public sector partners, reshaping payments processes across the public sector. Ongoing enhancements to the service include the implementation of the Confirmation of Payee feature, to further fortify fraud protection. As a robust Minimum Viable Service, it has efficiently processed over £22 million in outbound payments, using automated functions to reduce manual processing and mitigate the risks of fraud and error. The programme is poised to deliver substantial savings over a 10-year period, by streamlining processes, reducing system downtime, speeding up payment processing, and minimising errors by cutting manual steps.

The Cloud Platform Service will be offered as a live service from April 2024, meeting the performance and security needs of government and public facing services. This common platform service gives Scottish Government and Scottish public sector organisations simplified, secure and discounted access to cloud technologies in order to host their systems/workloads effectively in line with Scottish Government and industry standards.

In parallel there is a significant programme of work to introduce common digital platforms for Local Government; this includes MyJobScotland an online recruitment service for the public sector, the ‘OneScotland’ Gazetteer which provides records of addresses and streets across the whole of Scotland and a Shared Alarm Receiving Centre solution to support councils and housing associations with the migration to digital telecare.

Supporting organisations to transform

The Digital Support Hub currently provides a one stop resource for a growing range of guidance, articles, case studies and resources to enable public sector organisations to transform digitally. Similarly, within Local Government, the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government has created a central catalogue of digital resources containing case studies, blueprints, and guidance relating to issues such as leadership, skills, service design, and cyber security.

The Digital Programme has been established in Scottish Government to further address the key challenges of how we deliver on our digital ambitions and implement the culture change necessary to deliver successful public services in a digital age. It will change the way that Scottish Government ‘does digital’ by implementing a new operating model that drives efficiencies and delivers a better user experience.

It is comprised of several projects and workstreams that will establish new ways of working. This includes:

• a refreshed Digital Support Hub with a new shared model for how digital work is taken forward;
• a new Digital Scotland Service Manual aligned to the Digital Scotland Service Standards which will be hosted on gov.scot. The manual will include guidance on a wide range of topics to give organisations a clear set of principles to follow when designing digital services;
• we are also currently delivering workstreams on public sector architecture, managing capability via a shared model, user-centred design, commercial and purchasing and data.

By the end of this Parliament, we will introduce digital portfolio management to ensure better prioritisation of digital spending within Scottish Government and agencies. This will ensure we are doing the most important digital work; work that will have the greatest impact in terms of value, quality and reuse.

Digital skills and capability in the Scottish public sector

To date the Scottish Digital Academy has delivered learning to more than 14,000 people across 350 public and third sector organisations. It has increased the number of courses offered to broaden the depth and breadth of the learning offer; and now offers courses across a range of subjects including data, cyber, cloud, service design and agile.

Key Achievements of the Scottish Digital Academy in 2023 include^[17]:

• increased delivery of professional learning by 77 per cent;
• delivery of professional AI leading to 299 public/third sector leaders;
• artificial intelligence learning has been accessed by civil servants more than 439 times since it was introduced in November 2023.

The Scottish Digital Academy has also published on its website an approach on how it intends to measure the impact and value of its work over the next few years

The Scottish Digital Academy has also worked in partnership with the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, to deliver learning. For example, working with the Scottish Government Data Division and Perth and Kinross Council to develop an online learning resource to build data literacy across the public sector.

This partnership working is also helping councils across the board improve the digital skills of their staff. Our digital skills programme supports councils to understand their skills gap, adopt a digital competency framework for digital professions and develop specific learning opportunities where there is demand.

Putting users at the heart of service design

The Scottish Approach to Service Design is now well established in Scottish Government, for example in Healthcare Quality and Improvement and Social Security. We are also working collaboratively to develop a Service Design Champion course for councils and a Service Design Challenge process and training to build design capacity in Local Government.

Data

A 12-month Discovery phase is now underway to establish a roadmap to deliver sustainable data reuse across the public sector for AI, seamless public services and Scotland’s Census. This will establish a consistent approach to data management and analysis, recognising that data availability is a key barrier to public sector reform.

Key work to improve the foundation of how we use data include:

• a community of practice for Data Standards and Open Data has been established to encourage the public sector to publish more open data. It provides a platform for around 290 members to seek out advice and support, share best practice, find solutions to common challenges, and increase innovation;
• Scotland’s official statistics publishing platform statistics.gov.scot^[18] provides 300 free and unrestricted data sets at the highest level of openness from official statistic producers and public bodies across Scotland;
• a new data discovery tool Find.Data.Gov.Scot^[19] has been launched to make public sector data easier to find. The beta version, developed through a CivTech challenge, helps users discover hidden datasets using simple terms, provides feedback to data providers and can recommend datasets to users.

The Data Transformation Framework is helping organisations in the public sector to understand what ‘good data practice’ looks like.

This has allowed for the development of ‘foundations’ - Leadership, Strategy, Governance and Data Discovery. All need to be addressed for data transformation to develop successfully. Engagement is the cornerstone of the Framework, and one way this is done is through the data maturity programme, to help organisations open up discussions about data improvement and become data driven organisations.

Seventeen organisations have completed the programme and a further 17 are due to complete by June 2024, providing a growing alumni who share their experiences and develop shared thinking on best practice to develop data maturity.

More information providing an update on our Data Maturity programme and its development

New technologies and innovation

The Public Sector Centre of Excellence for Process Automation is delivering AI powered automation using robotic process automation, machine learning, and generative AI amongst other capabilities. This has now delivered over 70 automation programmes across the Scottish Government and public sector bodies, including Social Security Scotland, Scottish Public Pensions Agency, and the Student Awards Agency for Scotland.

CivTech's 2022-26 Full Business Case was approved by Scottish Ministers in May 2022, and includes the significant scaling of the programme, with up to £46 million allocated over the lifetime of the Parliament for the development of innovative solutions to public sector problems. The Business Case also includes work to instigate and develop a Scottish GovTech Cluster to foster partnerships and resources, and promote Scottish GovTech initiatives that transform public sector services.

Case Study – HomeLINK and Stirling Council

HomeLINK, a CivTech 3 company, worked with Stirling Council who required a solution to help improve services by better understanding investment requirements for their public buildings. HomeLINK developed a system that brought together information from all the existing smart connectivity technologies into one device and backed all that information up in the Cloud. HomeLINK are currently implementing the largest roll-out of IoT sensing devices for social housing in the UK.

They now work with around 600 landlords which is representative of 25% of all UK social housing landlords and expect to have installed around 1 million of their devices by 2024.

Cyber security

As part of the Strategic Framework for a Cyber Resilient Scotland we have refreshed the Public Sector Cyber Resilience Framework which was introduced to help public bodies to assess their cyber resilience and identify strengths and weaknesses. In support of secure and resilient public services, we delivered the Executive Cyber Education programme to senior managers and board members and delivered facilitated “Exercises in a Box” sessions.

The Local Government Digital Office and Scotland Excel are also working in partnership to put in place a procurement framework contract to provide an efficient procurement route to assured Security Operations Centre services for individual local authorities.