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Socitm, the association of IT and digital professionals working across local public services has announced its policy and research priorities and programmes for 2017.

In its latest briefing Review of 2016 and look forward to 2017 Socitm describes its priorities as:

• workforce diversity, including apprenticeships and women in IT
• service re-design and digitally-enabled transformation
• health and social care integration
• secure, open, shared systems.

These will be reflected in four Socitm Insight research projects to cover:

Modern IT/digital leadership: focusing on developing skills and capacity. One of the themes to emerge strongly from research with Socitm members in 2016 is the imperative for the sector to grow its own skills for the future, especially in areas like cyber security and digital transformation leadership. Embracing diversity is likely to be a key part of this.

Smart Places: extending research and publishing in 2016 to include environment, education, skills and jobs, social and community aspects, resilience and wellbeing, digital local infrastructure and technology.

Information assurance and management: adding new material to the online Cyber Guide launched in 2016, covering cyber resilience, the security information ecosystem, cyber security support networks, and data analytics/business intelligence.

Infrastructure: this will look at shared public services; dependency upon effective national broadband/connectivity; establishment of a Health and Social Care Network (and its relationship to the PSN); and progress towards secure, open, shared systems.

The briefing also describes outputs from Socitm’s research and policy programme in 2016. This includes more than 30 publications, three ‘deep-dive’ member surveys on spending, skills and security, the Better Connected programme, and reports (or rather, online collections of resources) on cyber security, smart places, location intelligence, and platforms for the future.

Further details of individual publications, research findings, and links to further information are available in the briefing.

This material has been produced thanks to subscriptions from public and private organisations that are members of Socitm’s Insight, corporate and supplier membership programmes, as well as councils that participate in Socitm’s Benchmarking the ICT Service. Research is also informed by learning from deployment of Socitm’s Digital Maturity Assessment tool, and the strategic and digital development commissions won by Socitm Advisory.

High-level outputs from some of the research, and access to email alerts about the ongoing programmes are available to all comers, via Socitm.net and Betterconnected.socitm.net. Other material is available to employees of Socitm-subscribing organisations only.

The briefing reveals the wide range collaborations that have also supported this output. Research and publications have been produced as a result of engagement with Department of Communities and Local Government, the Department of Health, the LGA, Solace and the Local CIO Council (LCIOC), SOLACE, iNetwork.

Work has also been produced with collaboration from the private sector, including a survey on mobile apps with CommonTime, and sponsorship and engagement from Intel Security for the Insight Cyber Guide.

Review of 2016 and look forward to 2017 is available can be accessed from https://www.socitm.net/publications/briefing-96-review-of-2016-and-look-forward-to-2017 Links to all Socitm’s research and publications can be found from https://www.socitm.net/publications/

To sign up for free alerts about Socitm research and other activity, go to https://www.socitm.net/user/register.

Further information:

Head of Research at Socitm: Dr Andy Hopkirk

Email: andy.hopkirk@socitm.net

Telephone: 01604 709456

Socitm Press Office 

Vicky Sargent 

Email: vicky.sargent@socitm.net 

Telephone: 07726 601139