Are our towns and communities ready for the digital revolution?

I am definitely more Uber than black cab. More Netflix than DVD.

I am waiting for the day when my phone alarm wakes me up earlier in the morning because all the data connectivity tells it that there are delays on my tube line and if I am to make my 9am meeting I had better get out of bed. I am fascinated by artificial intelligence and cannot wait to start experimenting.

But I realise that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. And that is especially true of local government, although it does feel like we are really trying. There are some great initiatives that councils are working on, both for their local areas such as Hackney council and Tech City but also within their organisations such as Wigan council and its ‘digital by default’ strategy.

In my authority, Harrow, we have used digital to improve our customer experience with a My Harrow account where residents can access council services online, saving them time and, crucially, saving us money. The key thing we have done is integrate everything at the back end. So, when a resident fills out a web form, that data automatically transfers to the right system. I have recently come across councils that have a public app that is not fully integrated so it generates a PDF and the data from that has to be manually inputted into another system so that it can then be used. I am not sure this extra layer of bureaucracy was what the digital revolution was supposed to create!

So it is clear there is still a long way to go. One of our challenges is our approach to big data. We are all told that the potential is huge. If we combined all the data we held on our residents with data from the rest of the public sector, we could have a huge impact on their lives, such as preventing crime by using data to allocate police resources in the right areas. Or managing traffic hotspots in order to improve air quality in an area. But this feels all too far away for most of us. How do we actually get there? The truth is that few of us really know how.

Part of the problem is that most of us do not have the skills and expertise to know what to do with the data we have, let alone how to combine it with data from other sources. That is true for councillors as well as officers. How are we to provide leadership on this area when most leaders do not understand it themselves?

Most importantly, though, we need to take people along with us. All our citizens need to understand the benefit of technology and why life is no longer just about picking up the phone and talking to someone. The pace of change with technology is fast and our challenge is to narrow the digital divide, not increase it. We must invest in skills and we need to make sure we do not create more isolated individuals cut off from society because they cannot keep up with the pace of change.

So how do we tackle these challenges? Recruit the experts, collaborate a lot more and take a few chances. And involve our citizens and communities in this tech revolution and show them the exciting potential that is out there.

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Kiran Ramchandani is performance, corporate resources and customer service portfolio holder at the London borough of Harrow

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Photo: David Papworth