Contents

Project aim

The starting 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

The problem we're solving

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 significantly impact people – service users.

Partners

  • A very diverse range of government departments from areas such as mental health, 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

A summary of the work

Discovery and alpha

Through the project’s discovery and alpha stages, the Digital Landscape Review 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 most significant 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 and filled in gaps in data we gathered in our alpha phase.