About the Croydon Digital Service

In my first post on this blog I announced the new Croydon Digital Service. This post expands on that introduction to say more about who we are and what we’re about, for the benefit of our stakeholders, potential recruits and the team itself while we’re still getting started.

The Croydon Digital Service is the team inside Croydon Council leading the digital transformation of the council’s internal systems and online services, and the digital enhancement of our borough.

We’re a major corporate function of the council, housed in the resources department (along with finance, procurement, HR, facilities management, and legal and democratic services). Like these other central functions, we work in close partnership with colleagues across the council to help them to deliver better outcomes.

Croydon is a busy and ambitious council, providing a wide range of services to a large and diverse population, in a rapidly changing borough. Therefore demand for operational support and transformation of digital, data and technology services is always high. We prioritise our work based on evidence of what will deliver the best outcomes for users – from maintaining and iterating existing systems and infrastructure, to experimenting with new technologies to deliver smarter services and enhance the public realm.

Our primary focus is delivering the Digital Strategy for Croydon (to be published July 2019 – sign up for email alerts from this blog to get updates and devise the strategy with us).

The strategy will set a new vision for Croydon to become a truly digital council and borough, and articulate how we’ll create the digital conditions necessary to deliver our Corporate Plan.

It will set out our direction of travel in relation to 3 strategic aims:

• Digital workforce. Optimising how the council uses digital design, data and technology to work efficiently, collaborate and innovate.
• Digital services. Transforming the relationship between residents and the council by providing online services so good people prefer to use them.
• Digital place. Maximising opportunities for digital, data and technology to enhance quality of life and economic growth in our borough.

We are a bold and dynamic team, passionately committed to improving quality of life for Croydonites, enhancing our town and borough’s reputation and supporting the local economy. We pride ourselves on being one of the best public sector digital teams in the country.

We work in multidisciplinary teams. We are agile in how we run our service overall, and adaptable in how we deliver improvements using a mix of methods, both through in-house delivery and by partnering with external organisations across all sectors.

We place user needs at the heart of what we do. All new and redeveloped services for residents are assessed against the government service standard. Wherever possible we ensure they are built using user-centred product and service design methods.

We work in the open, telling the story of our progress and learnings on this blog – which we share with our brilliant local tech community to tell the wider story of Croydon as the Silicon Valley (some say flyover) of South London. We engage actively with our peers in other councils, and with the private and voluntary sector, in exchanging ideas and collaborating on common goals.

How to contact us

You can reach us using the contact page of this site, find us in person at our regular croydon.digital events, or connect with me, Chief Digital Officer, Neil Williams or our Head of Digital Operations, Dave Briggs (and we can connect you to others in our team).

Want to join our team? We list all our job vacancies here. We also welcome speculative approaches from people keen to be part of the team. No agencies please.

Want to sell to us? We post our contract opportunities here. By July 2019 we aim to publish a live roadmap so prospective partners can see our forward plan of work and get a better understanding of what help we might need. See also general information on selling to the council here. We’re always interested in new urban technology ideas, especially from Croydon-based companies.