Our strategy
Our vision is:
Medway Waterfront university city:
connecting innovation, people and place, driving growth for all.
Our priorities
To achieve this vision, we will concentrate our resources on the:
- People - supporting residents to realise their potential
- Place - Medway: A place to be proud of
- Growth - maximising regeneration and economic growth (growth for all).
By doing this, we can create a better quality of life across Medway.
Our values
Our values underpin everything we do.
They guide our behaviour, decisions and choices in the way we design and deliver our services.
Our core values are:
- financial resilience
- digital enablement
- creativity and innovation
- tackling climate change
- working together to empower communities
- being child-friendly.
DDaT has a key role to play in supporting all our services to achieve our vision and priorities.
The key values directly relevant to this DDaT Strategy are:
Digital enablement
We'll use digital as an enabler of everything we do by changing the way we:
- provide services
- work
- communicate.
We'll reach out to residents and businesses who lack the skills, infrastructure, and confidence to go online by providing them with help and support.
Creativity and Innovation
We'll create a culture of creativity and innovation that will:
- build a legacy of local pride
- improve diversity and inclusion
- identify new ways of providing services around the needs of our residents.
Finance and business improvement divisional plan
This DDaT Strategy compliments the Finance and Business Improvement Divisional Plan, which contains the following Mission Statement:
We empower the organisation to understand the opportunities and risks that it faces. We use our data-driven insight to challenge colleagues and enable them to find solutions which turn risks into opportunities, and weaknesses into strengths; so that we can support the council to achieve its vision and meet its corporate priorities in a financially sustainable way.
You can expect us to lead with fairness, consistency and to embody the council values to which we subscribe. In return we expect commitment, professionalism and creativity.
The Finance and Business Improvement Divisional Plan contains 4 priority areas with 2 key objectives underpinning each priority:
Sustainable Finance
- To produce realistic annual budgets underpinned by sustainable management of reserves.
- To develop forward-looking financial plans based on robust data analysis, which deliver the Council Plan whilst ensuring our continued financial health.
Informed Service Improvement
- To develop and embed a culture of intelligence-led decision making and continuous improvement to ensure that proposed outcomes are delivered as efficiently and effectively as possible.
- To develop an excellent customer experience, adapted to the user's requirements.
Attracting and Retaining an Effective Workforce
- To attract and motivate the right people to join us.
- To engage and retain valued staff members whose value is recognised in contributing to an efficient and effective organisation.
Performance, Assurance, Risk and Governance
- To ensure that the organisation develops the policies, processes and procedures to protect the Council, its staff and customers
- To embed a culture where these are continuously reviewed and measured to ensure that they are fit for purpose.
DDaT has a key role to play supporting all services within the Finance and Business Improvement Division to achieve these objectives.
This DDaT Strategy is vital to achieve the objective of Informed Service Improvement.
UK Government: Transforming for a digital future: 2022 to 2025 roadmap for digital and data
Medway is committed to working more strategically with government, and partners, to make best use of national data to inform out service design and decisions.
Our DDaT Strategy also aligns with the Central Government’s roadmap for digital and data 2022 to 2025.
Their vision is that the UK government will be a transformed, more efficient digital government that provides better outcomes for everyone by 2025.
The UK government are following very similar principles and objectives for their Digital and Data Roadmap:
Exceed public expectations
We'll create user-centric policies and public services that are:
- more efficient
- fit for the digital age
- centred on user needs
- deliver the right outcomes.
Equip civil servants for a digital future
We'll upskill civil servants in digital capabilities and digital delivery, with access to the right data and tools to do their jobs effectively.
Enhance government efficiency and security
We'll create a more joined-up and efficient government that uses common building blocks to deliver services quickly, cheaply and securely.
We'll enable and encourage digital innovation.
Being data driven
The recent Corporate Business Intelligence Review (CBIR) has highlighted the need for us to have a renewed focus on data and become a truly “data driven” organisation.
This would mean:
- optimising the use of data
- using analytical techniques to develop insight for decision making at all levels of the organisation, including:
- strategic or operational insight
- performance management
- advanced analytics (predictive and AI)
- streaming sensor data from out Internet of Things (IoT) smart city devices.
Being data driven enables the efficient production of up to date, interactive, and easy to use insights, with appropriate governance in place to ensure it is always available to the right people at the right time.