Digital Landscape Review
What was the goal?
The aim of the Digital Landscape Review (DLR) was to develop a better understanding of existing digital public services in Wales to:
- identify where we could link up teams and services
- prioritise areas for development and investment
What problems could the project solve for people?
Services did great work to keep running through the pandemic, and teams had to revolutionise almost overnight how they worked. Three-quarters of the public sector services the DLR team spoke to are now online in some form. The DLR team discussed with service teams how well their services met the needs of the people who use them and how they aligned with the Digital Service Standards for Wales.
The data we gathered will help us prioritise our work and provide support where it will have the biggest impact for people – service users.
Who was involved in the review?
A very diverse range of government departments from areas such as mental health, through substance misuse, early years education and environmental protection; sponsored bodies such as Natural Resources Wales and the National Library of Wales; local authorities and health and care organisations.
What did CDPS do?
Discovery and alpha
Through the project’s discovery and alpha stages, the DLR team:
- identified several hundred Welsh public sector services
- spoke to hundreds of people within more than 30 public sector organisations
- ran workshops to reveal common problems across services
- devised criteria to help us prioritise where our support could have the greatest impact
From the resulting evidence, more support was needed to help organisations adopt and embed the Digital Service Standards for Wales. Other broad challenges included:
- designing bilingual, Welsh-English services rather than simply translating English to Welsh
- encouraging widespread use of service analytics
- embedding good cybersecurity and information security
- broadening user research techniques beyond surveys
- making services broadly accessible, so no one gets left behind by digital transformation
- building better, digital forms – not paper-emulating PDFs
- encouraging a culture of continuous improvement, even when the service is live
On to beta
In beta, the team gathered more data on services across Wales to give us a fuller picture of where our support could really help.
We spoke to new organisations and service owners, as well as filling in gaps in data we gathered in our alpha phase.
How did this project help to deliver the digital strategy for Wales?
The project helped to deliver upon three of the strategy’s missions:
Mission 1: digital services
Deliver and modernise services so that they are designed around user needs and are simple, secure and convenient.
Mission 2: digital inclusion
Equip people with the motivation, access, skills and confidence to engage with an increasingly digital world, based on their needs.
Mission 6: data and collaboration
Services are improved by working together, with data and knowledge being used and shared.
The Digital Landscape Review team worked in the open. Watch our project updates on YouTube.
Blog posts
Which local authorities can show the digital way? – published 5 August 2022
Shared or common? Using the same software in Wales – published 27 July 2022
7 practical challenges for digital services – published 18 July 2022
Removing blockers in beta: next steps for Digital Landscape Review – published 18 March 2022
Digital Landscape Review – an insight into recent discussions – published 3 December 2021
Digital Landscape Review – end of discovery findings – published 11 October 2021
Digital Landscape Review – learning from the international landscape – published 15 September 2021
Digital Landscape Review – engaging with service owners – published 9 September 2021
Digital Landscape Review – beginning to zoom-in to the details – published 11 August 2021
Digital Landscape Review: what is it? – published 3 August 2021
