Woking Borough Council Digital Action Plan
The Woking Borough Council Digital Action Plan was updated in January 2025, and is focused on delivering digital outcomes.
Workstream 2: Give our people the tools they need to do the job
Intended outcomes
- All council staff have access to work devices that are modern, fit for purpose and help them do their jobs, as well as being easy and enjoyable to use.
- Council staff can work from anywhere, with an equally good experience. This includes reliable systems access, sufficient bandwidth and telephony, with the right assistive technology for those who need it.
- Move application hosting to the cloud, so that people can work together and share and store data efficiently, no matter where they are.
- Council technology provides demonstrable value for money, with the right tool for the job, and integration points between services which allow them to easily speak to each other.
- Our people feel confident using modern technology, are aware of its risks and opportunities, and are able to fully participate in agile delivery and service design.
- Staff can find the information they need about the council quickly and easily on the intranet.
- Our senior leadership exemplifies digital thinking, empowering their teams to get closer to resident experience and use technology to experiment.
Now: Reactive IT
- Technology choices are led by business decisions.
- Service leaders do not consider technology implications of their decisions and do not see themselves as delivering digital services.
- Digital Services team are caretakers of technology systems and infrastructure.
- Digital Services team react to services and provide what they ask for with little opportunity to challenge or advise.
Next: Strategic IT
- Technology decisions are based on business needs.
- Digital Services team are owners of technology decisions and build strong relationships with service leaders to understand their needs.
- Digital Services team build digital collaborative behaviours in the wider organisation.
Later: Integrated IT
- Business decisions consider technology from the start.
- Service leaders fully own digital services.
- Digital collaboration is embedded in everyone's way of working.
- Digital Services team are partners of service leaders in providing digital services.
Progress so far
- Microsoft 365 and Teams rolled out.
- Laptops, docking stations and Bring Your Own Device rolled out, with mobile phones and tablets rationalised.
- New intranet on Sharepoint.
- A range of new internal forms.
- Updated digital service desk software and ways of working.
- Finance, planning, environmental health and HR system upgrades.
- Combined Cyber Security and Information Governance Group formed.
2025-2026 priorities
- Remove desk phones move to headsets.
- Remove ‘thin’ clients (mini desktops).
- Come out of Citrix virtual environment and have all applications cloud-hosted.
- Move to ‘out of the box, unless’ approach to procurement (otherwise known as adopting suppliers' vanilla offer, reducing bespoke requirements).
- Housing system upgrade and ways of working.