Assurance for National Digital Programmes
What is Digital Assurance?
Digital assurance ensures the quality, reliability, and performance of digital products and services. It involves processes and practices to confirm that software, applications, websites, and other digital solutions meet quality standards and provide a positive user experience.
How Does the Digital Office Support Local Authorities with Digital Assurance?
The Digital Office collaborates with Council ICT, Digital leaders, and Security Officers to provide independent advice on implementing national digital programmes across the 32 Councils.
The Digital Office leads the Local Government Digital Assurance Board to provide collective technical leadership for designing local government digital services. The Board meets every 6 weeks and focuses on:
- Architecture: Promoting, setting and agreeing data and technology principles, standards, and reference models for local government. This work is supported by the Enterprise Architecture Group and the Data Standards Board.
- Assurance: Convening Digital Assurance Groups for national programmes impacting local government digital services. These groups bring together relevant stakeholders such as sponsors, data professionals, IT managers
- Technical Review: Ensuring technical designs meet Council requirements and standards.
- Risk Identification and Mitigation: Identifying and preventing potential costs and risks.
- Independent Assessment: Providing unbiased appraisals of options in complex technical and commercial environments.
By aligning national digital initiatives with local government needs, the Digital Office helps prevent duplication and facilitates the smooth implementation of digital programmes.
What current National Programmes is the Digital Assurance Board supporting?
The Digital Assurance Board is supporting the following National Programmes:
- Common Components: Work with Scottish Government Digital teams to create register of common technical components and their capabilities to provide Scottish Public Sector development teams with a clear view of tried and tested solutions to incorporate into delivery programmes.
- Community Health Index in Local Government: The Local Government CHI programme, led by COSLA’s Health and Social Care Policy team and the Digital Office, aims to standardise and modernise CHI use within local government. This supports integrated health and social care, improves outcomes for service users, eliminates system duplication, reduces repetitive.
- Council of the Future: To-Be State: The Digital Office is leading the creation of a Digital To Be State for the SOLACE/Improvement Service Transformation Programme. The goal is to provide a clear vision for a future, digitally enabled local government, serving as a planning guide for Councils and the sector overall. The initiative is split into two parts. The first part is the development of the ambition, the second is an implementation strategy which will provide practical tools and guidance that can be used to realise the ambition.
- Health and Social Care Dashboard: Work with NHS partners to corporate key local health and social care data metrics into the NHS key performance indicators toolset.
- Public Sector Reform Clusters: The Digital Office is part of a broad coalition of partners looking at streamlining the processes, technology and service delivery around licencing services in Scotland.
- Visitor Levy: The Digital Office is working with COSLA policy teams and the Improvement Service on developing national common components to support the roll-out of Visitor Levy across Scotland.This includes digital application aspects, consultation approaches, scheme viability modelling, and common service designs.
Digital Assurance Board Approved Resources
The Digital Assurance Board has approved resources to support digital assurance processes at various levels (technical design, project design, quality assurance, vendor assurance) within local authorities. Access the available resources using the link below. If you would like to find out more about the work of the Digital Assurance Board, please get in touch with the team at info@digitaloffice.scot.
