“It’s the upfront funding costs”

A few participants talked about the challenges with finding the upfront funding to do digital transformation in the public sector. Support with understand funding available was highlighted as a need.

It was also mentioned where there is funding available to support digital transformation, it can feel disjointed where various different organisations are trying to provide support - “What we keep saying is that these things need to be brought together into singular work streams rather than lots of different work streams, because effectively that dilutes the limited resource that we've got on the ground even further trying to meet all the different objectives of the different work streams that are coming through” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).

“A central strategic approach to something like IoT with funding streams aligned to then support local authorities with singular delivery I think would be really welcome and that could be something really tangible that would have a massive impact.” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).

“It's always the revenue that public bodies are really struggling for”

As well as the challenges with upfront costs, some participants also talked about supporting ongoing costs being a struggle - “You might have implemented it externally using external money, but there's always an ongoing revenue implication to it, and I don't think that's being picked up or highlighted enough when you're bringing stuff in.” (Digital and technology lead in a Local Authority).

“How do we make the case for change”

Participants talked about the need for support from CDPS to explain the business case behind investing in digital to support net zero. It was mentioned that “any return would have to be quite swift” however, the “actual payback on a net zero intervention could be quite long term” (Service Manager in Central Administration).

A parallel was drawn between this work and some work by Public Health Wales a few years ago - “They did a range of short concise briefings about the return on investment. So if you invest now in the public health of children, one example was weight bearing exercise to strengthen their bone density, the return on investment is x by the time they're in their 80s. They'll have better bone density, fewer breaks, fewer costs on the NHS in terms of hip hop operations and broken legs and all that sort of stuff. They did all the research and put it together in a nice package. That might be something that CDPS could do with net zero and digital.” (Service Manager in Central Administration).