Digital Economy Business Survey 2017

Digital Public Services

The Scottish Government works with the wider Scottish public sector and the Scottish digital technologies industry to deliver our digital vision for Scotland.

The refreshed digital strategy Realising Scotland's full potential in a digital world: A Digital Strategy for Scotland describes the actions the Scottish Government and partners will take to create digital public services based around the needs of users (including businesses) to make the public sector more efficient. Actions to achieve this include introducing shared technology platforms, starting with common approaches to publishing information, applying for services, and making and receiving payments. Mygov.scot is a single point of entry for information about Scotland's public services for citizens and businesses which aims to ensure that businesses can deal digitally with the public sector in an effective and efficient manner, allowing time and money savings to be made. The aim is to extend the use of mygov.scot across the wider Scottish public sector.

This section looks at how businesses use Scottish public sector websites.

Figure 10: Use of Scottish public authority ^[5] websites in the last 12 months, by type of activity (%)
Base: All businesses (min = 3,258)

Business use of digital public services

• Overall, fewer businesses had engaged with public services online in 2017 (51 per cent) than in 2014 (63 per cent).
• The most commonly performed activity was 'obtaining or reading information' (35 per cent of businesses). This was also the activity that showed the greatest decline in use, having fallen from 49 per cent in 2014.
• 25 per cent of businesses had carried out a transaction digitally, a slight decrease from 27 per cent of businesses surveyed in 2014.

Business use of mygov.scot

• 34 per cent of businesses had used mygov.scot – Scotland's online public services portal – for business purposes over the past 12 months.
• The most commonly cited reasons for using mygov.scot included: finding information or advice (60 per cent) and applying for a service or entitlement (18 per cent).