Digital Inclusion Alliance Wales

Transcript

So, as part of Digital Leaders Wales event last week, of which we were a sponsor, we were invited to take part in a roundtable discussion as part of the launch event for the Digital Inclusion Alliance Wales – of which we are now the newest member of that network. 

How will this network help people? 

Obviously digital has been on the agenda for a number of years across the public and private sector and particularly it’s coming to stark contrast… stark focus I should say… the last sort of 12 to 18 months with Covid as more and more services are being shifted to digital delivery. We’ve seen schools, hospitals, private sector, third sector… lots and lots of things have been been moved to online – which on the one hand is really good, but actually what it’s highlighted is the challenges that a lot of people face across Wales with digital exclusion – so while while more and more people are doing things online what we’re finding is that those that are digitally excluded are falling further and further behind – so, so while online services is brilliant, what it’s doing is exacerbating the digital divide.

Why was this something Perago wanted to support? 

So, the network has laid out five key priorities which are: Embedding digital inclusion across all sectors. Mainstreaming digital inclusion in health and social care. Addressing data poverty as a key issue. Prioritising digital skills in the post-covid economy. And setting a new minimum digital living standard and adopting co-production approaches. And these these five priorities fit in perfectly with what Perago are about and the way in which we deliver our services. 

What do you think Perago can do to support that? 

When we look at the priorities the the two that are most aligned with the way in which Perago work are around digital skills and co-production so Perago take the approach to not only helping organisations deliver services, but also helping them improve their capability and capacity in digital delivery. And we work with a number of clients across the public and third sector in Wales supporting them to do this helping them to build that capability, helping them to identify the roles they require, the skills they require, and then supporting them in either up-skilling the staff they have today, or actively going out and helping them to recruit people so that when we work with clients and we help them to deliver services we leave them in a better place than where they started for digital delivery. The other key thing for us then is about the reason that we are here and the reason those organisations are there are to serve their users. And the approach that we take to this is user-led service design so we advocate an approach which spends a lot of time up front working with users, identifying those users of the service, working with them to understand the problems that they have with the service today, and to design that service in a way that will enable them to make more effective use of that service in the future. And when we talk about users we don’t just mean the end users of the service – we mean users at every step of that service delivery. So from the people in the street trying to access something online, through to the people in the back office that actually need to process those applications and transactions, how can we make that end-to-end user service as seamless as possible for everyone involved. 

How can people find out more? 

So, if anybody’s interested in becoming part of the digital inclusion alliance then um they should go and look at DigitalCommunities.gov.wales. And anyone that’d be interested in talking to Perago about the work that we do, how we can help you build your own capability, how you can start thinking about digital service delivery and user-based service design – then get in touch with us at Hello@perago.co.uk