Embrace the Ambition of the Local Digital Declaration

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The Local Digital Declaration affirms the UK’s ambition to realise its digital potential and deliver services that best meet the needs of its citizens. Six Degrees delivers technology services that enable Local Authorities to embrace the Declaration’s ambition.

Local Authorities provide crucial public services that support residents throughout the UK. Often at the front line of public services, Local Authorities play a key role in enabling residents to do the things they need to do on a day-to-day basis. The introduction of transformational digital technologies can help Local Authorities provide better services to their residents, enabling them to meet residents’ needs whilst protecting their privacy and delivering better value for money than outdated legacy systems.

Recognising this, the Government Digital Service (GDS), in a joint initiative with the UK Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and a number of Local Authorities from across the UK, has launched the Local Digital Declaration. The Local Digital Declaration is a set of guiding principles that will help Local Authorities of all sizes or capabilities to deliver digital services and platforms that meet the needs of citizens.

In this blog post, we will take you through how Six Degrees delivers technology services that enable Local Authorities to embrace the Declaration’s ambition.

Local Digital Declaration

The Local Digital Declaration affirms Local Authorities’ collective ambition for local public services in the internet age, and their commitments to realising it. Within the Declaration there are four key commitments:

Design services that best meet the needs of citizens
Challenge the technology market to offer the flexible tools and services we need
Protect citizens’ privacy and security
Deliver better value for money

There are a number of technology foundations Six Degrees delivers to Local Authorities today that allow them to meet these commitments.

Deliver services that best meet the needs of citizens

The latest technology is an enabler that allows Local Authorities to deliver services in an effective, efficient and intuitive manner. However, to unlock this potential Local Authorities must remove the technology silos and infrastructure dependencies that so often come with legacy on-premise infrastructures.

Six Degrees delivers secure, regulatory compliant cloud infrastructures that provide Local Authorities with stable foundations for their mission-critical applications. By transitioning to the right cloud platform for each workload, Local Authorities can establish the foundations that enable them to deliver innovative, performant resident services that are as easy as possible to engage with.

Offer flexible tools and services

Across the UK public sector, organisations are trapped in costly long-term support and maintenance contracts. These contracts are often highly inflexible, and prevent organisations – including many Local Authorities – from achieving the kind of agility they need to improve citizen services.

Six Degrees services are both technically and commercially flexible. We understand Local Authorities’ resident services drivers, and we also understand the financial pressures that can be prohibitive to change. Local Authorities that engage with Six Degrees benefit from quick decision making, appropriate commercial terms and technical excellence – key tenets of the Local Digital Declaration.

Protect citizens’ privacy and security

As technology becomes increasingly integral to peoples’ ability to do the things they need to do, data security becomes both more important and more difficult. All Local Authorities take protecting residents’ personally identifiable information (PII) extremely seriously, but in order to reduce the risk of data breach security must remain a consistent theme throughout their operations.

Six Degrees places cybersecurity at the heart of all its products and services. We don’t stop at delivering security point products and services; there is a strong cybersecurity seam flowing through our entire service portfolio, and this is backed up by our security certifications which include ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus. We significantly enhanced our cybersecurity capabilities with the acquisition of CNS Group in 2018, which enables Six Degrees to offer a broader set of defensive and offensive, consultancy-led cybersecurity services.

Deliver better value for money

With budgets stretched and political uncertainty threatening to put the brakes on spending, all Local Authorities are looking to achieve value for money wherever they can. The key is to achieve this value for money whilst meeting the needs of residents, in line with the ambition of the Local Digital Declaration.

Six Degrees’ cloud services are delivered with flexible contract terms that don’t tie Local Authorities into the unwieldy arrangements that many have become accustomed to. We also allow clients to quickly and easily burst services, enabling them to adapt rapidly to changing infrastructure requirements that can often result from real-world demands placed on Local Authorities. And what’s more, we provide granular detail on exactly what services are being purchased, giving our clients insight and control over exactly where their money is being spent.