If there was ever any doubt about the important role digital would play in our future, the pandemic quashed it.
Digital solutions have underpinned a major part of our response, allowing us to be adaptable and agile in the face of this crisis.
During lockdown, we've enabled thousands of employees to work from home and rapidly created online forms so businesses can apply for vital funding to stay afloat.
Communities are now more reliant than ever on the services we’d already taken online, and key decisions are being made in virtual meeting rooms.
Online collaboration tools continue to help us rapidly respond to an ever-changing landscape and they allow our children and young people to continue to learn.
In a nutshell, digital innovation that might have taken months or even years to adopt has been embraced in a matter of days or weeks as we look to meet the need of the moment.
Looking beyond COVID-19
Although there are still many unknowns about our future, one thing is certain - we cannot lose the digital ground we have made over the past three months.
And the important role the refreshed digital strategy will play in our recovery was made clear at the first virtual meeting of the Digital Workstream Board on June 5th .
Caroline Binnie, Senior Responsible Owner, told Project Managers their lessons learnt throughout lockdown had to be reflected in the plan “so we can priorities our resources moving forward”.
She said: “It’s not a question of providing services as we did before. We need to look at how digital solutions can help our recovery because we’re not going back. We’ve seen the art of the possible and we need to reflect that in our refreshed strategy.”
Rebecca McDonald, Council of the Future, Change Manager, added: “We also need to put the onus on all workstream boards to ask themselves, are we maximising digital opportunities? We must tease out the big opportunities that link to our recovery and those that will provide savings, which is even more critical. Hopefully there is a real appetite to do that now.”
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