Exploring how we help the public sector become digitally sustainable

Our discovery on net zero last year, produced 6 recommendations. In this initial phase of work, we decided to focus on 2 of the recommendations: 

Recommendation 1. Raise awareness (webinars) 

Recommendation 3. Help people follow best practice (summarising and simplifying guidance) 

The aim of this phase was to validate our assumptions about how best to help the public sector in Wales become more digitally sustainable. 

We believe there is a lack of knowledge among public sector practitioners on how they can reduce their digital carbon footprint, and that existing guidance on how to do so is not being engaged with to a sufficient degree. 

This is important because reaching net zero is a crucial objective for Welsh Government, as mentioned in their public sector net zero 2030 roadmap, and better use of existing digital technologies has the potential to make an enormous contribution towards this goal. 

We proposed a series of solutions to help users better engage with existing guidance and improve their understanding of how to make their own services and organisations more digitally sustainable. However, we decided that before we could start building and testing these solutions, we first needed to measure the level of interest in this topic in general because we saw a potential lack of engagement as the primary risk factor. We ran a webinar on digital sustainability, which would help us determine whether there's a user base for digital sustainability, while also implementing recommendation 1 of the discovery (raise awareness). 

We also decided to produce a summary of sustainability content as a hypothesis based on the discovery findings we wanted to test, and since we were running an event on the same topic, it provides us with a potential pool of users on which to test this hypothesis and see whether it meets a user need. 

We ran a webinar on digital sustainability to help people learn more about the role of digital in reaching net zero.

Our aim was to raise awareness on the importance of digital sustainability, the impact it can have on reducing carbon emissions, and what we as individuals can do to help, and build our user base to work with to identify user needs.

If there is sufficient interest, feedback from the event will help to determine areas where we could offer continued support for both public and private sector users. 

During this phase, we tried to make sense of all the available content on digital sustainability on the GOV.UK website. 

We started by identifying all the relevant information and sorted it into categories – policy, reports, guidance, making note of which government department the information is published by. 

What we found is that this body of work is quite confusing as it’s not easy to see what information is relevant, what should be followed, and in what order. 

There’s also no clear way to navigate to all this information directly on the GOV.UK website. 

We’ve mapped out a user journey that would help people better understand this information and put it into practice. 

Our next task is to restructure all the information we found in a way that better enables users to follow this journey. 

Our next steps are to create a minimum viable product of simplified guidance and begin testing it with users. We will also run a workshop across the organisation to get alignment on what Net Zero means for CDPS, what we're doing, and who's working on it.