Woking Borough Council Digital Action Plan

Intended outcomes

1. All council staff have access to work devices that are modern, fit for purpose and help them do their jobs, as well as being easy and enjoyable to use.
2. Council staff can work from anywhere, with an equally good experience. This includes reliable systems access, sufficient bandwidth and telephony, with the right assistive technology for those who need it.
3. Move application hosting to the cloud, so that people can work together and share and store data efficiently, no matter where they are.
4. Council technology provides demonstrable value for money, with the right tool for the job, and integration points between services which allow them to easily speak to each other.
5. Our people feel confident using modern technology, are aware of its risks and opportunities, and are able to fully participate in agile delivery and service design.
6. Staff can find the information they need about the council quickly and easily on the intranet.
7. Our senior leadership exemplifies digital thinking, empowering their teams to get closer to resident experience and use technology to experiment.

Now: Reactive IT

• Technology choices are led by business decisions.
• Service leaders do not consider technology implications of their decisions and do not see themselves as delivering digital services.
• Digital Services team are caretakers of technology systems and infrastructure.
• Digital Services team react to services and provide what they ask for with little opportunity to challenge or advise.

Next: Strategic IT

• Technology decisions are based on business needs.
• Digital Services team are owners of technology decisions and build strong relationships with service leaders to understand their needs.
• Digital Services team build digital collaborative behaviours in the wider organisation.

Later: Integrated IT

• Business decisions consider technology from the start.
• Service leaders fully own digital services.
• Digital collaboration is embedded in everyone's way of working.
• Digital Services team are partners of service leaders in providing digital services.

Progress so far

• Microsoft 365 and Teams rolled out.
• Laptops, docking stations and Bring Your Own Device rolled out, with mobile phones and tablets rationalised.
• New intranet on Sharepoint.
• A range of new internal forms.
• Updated digital service desk software and ways of working.
• Finance, planning, environmental health and HR system upgrades.
• Combined Cyber Security and Information Governance Group formed.

2025-2026 priorities

• Remove desk phones move to headsets.
• Remove ‘thin’ clients (mini desktops).
• Come out of Citrix virtual environment and have all applications cloud-hosted.
• Move to ‘out of the box, unless’ approach to procurement (otherwise known as adopting suppliers' vanilla offer, reducing bespoke requirements).
• Housing system upgrade and ways of working.