Skills development

New technology means new ways of thinking and working and new skills will be needed

The August 2010 Socitm Insight briefing on Digital Inclusion contains the following paragraph:

“Finally, public sector workers must have a good understanding of what technology is able to do, and are not digitally excluded themselves. We cannot emphasise too strongly how investment in this area pays back, not only in developing digital capability in the community, but in exploiting technology successfully to deliver services at lower cost.”

To support this, a programme of workshops should be undertaken to educate key staff members and to furnish them with tools and knowledge to disseminate the skills to their teams and throughout the organisation.

Communication

Staff will need to be trained in communicating effectively with customers.

Communicating with the public should no longer be mediated only by a Communications Team trained in marketing communication techniques and processes.  Communicating with the public should instead be more widely distributed around the organisation.

As well as providing more staff with the skills and tools to engage customers in conversations and understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of conversing publicly, staff must also be given confidence that they will be supported if mistakes are made.

Capacity building

 

The new role of the council will require new knowledge in order to make good decisions

In order to build the capacity within the local authority to make good decisions about the use of the web you should:

• understand the areas of knowledge identified in this strategy
• identify suitable individuals and teams to take responsibility for gathering and disseminating knowledge
• allocate time to those people to allow them to:
  • identify and join the networks that best hold the required knowledge
  • absorb that knowledge
  • institutionalise that knowledge through distillation, documentation and dissemination