“In terms of digital maturity, we're not significantly progressed”

If digital transformation of services plays a key role in improving their relationship with the environment, lack of capability and capacity for digital is a blocker to this happening, as well as to the ability for organisations to apply digital technology to support specific sustainability driven initiatives.

“We're still very much in the throes of a of a cultural change program where the maturity is not quite where it needs to be”

Many organisations in the Welsh public sector are still getting to grips with building their digital capabilities - “Trying to design and deliver digital services publicly at pace is not something that I personally think we've quite got down yet” (Digital and technology practitioner).

Focussing on improving this is seen as the priority before additional sustainability layers can be added to it - “The focus needs to be maintained around that maturity first. I think once we then have a solid maturity kind of foot in, then we can start to look at why they're kind of strategic objectives coming into the mix.” (Digital and technology lead in Central Administration).

Some participants from organisations earlier on in their digital journey mentioned the general culture change needed with their teams to adopt new ways of working - “The problem I found with our organisation as well is we've got some people who are resistant to it” (Digital and technology practitioner in a Local Authority).

If more offline services are going to be encouraged to move to digital delivery, participants saw having the right skills to make the digital service high quality as an important enabler - “Making sure that the website was easily searchable I think is one of the the the key things that allowed us to reduce our printing”(Service Manager in Central Administration).

“Getting off that hamster wheel to do it, it's really hard because the BAU is so big”

As well as building the capability to create good digital services, capacity was a key challenge noted by many participants - “We we don't have the capacity to do the good work because we don't have enough people” (Digital and technology practitioner in a Local Authority).

Some noted the inability to focus on more ambitious and strategic uses of digital when the basics still needed attention - “Even like making our computers work is like really lacking. It's a bit broken to be honest.” (Sustainability lead in Health and Care).

This isn’t a new challenge but one that has been persisting in the public sector for a long time - “I don't know how to crack it, really, because it's something we've been battling with for a while now” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).