Digital workforce

Digital teams are the cornerstone of building a digital organisation. They are not simply a rebrand of your existing IT department. Digital teams allow organisations to be responsive, open, efficient, and agile, and to successfully deliver ever more transformation services. The role of trust boards is to build and enable digital teams within their organisations. This may involve reviewing existing funding arrangements, how assurance is managed, what skills are valued and recruited, and how performance and progress are monitored.  

Read

• Building and enabling digital teams, executive summary (3 minute read) | Read the key headlines from our second Digital Boards leadership guide on how boards can build and enable digital teams. 
• Fusion teams at Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (5 minute read) | Chief digital information officer Toby Avery describes how his trust are building "fusion teams", bringing together diverse competencies to design new services.   
• Helping NHS boards take charge on digital (5 minute read) | Sonia Patel, systems chief information officer at NHS England, argues against delegating digital leadership to one CIO or team, and instead makes the case for boards to jump in, understand and take control of the talent pipeline for new digital skills.
• Building digital organisations, creating great teams and enabling transformation (5 minute read) | In this blog post, Public Digital director Chris Fleming, sets out eight key questions for boards to ask about progress building a digital organisation.
• Building and enabling digital teams (long read) | Our second guide, published as part of the Digital Boards programme, explores what good digital teams look like, how to build them, and where to start for boards who want to build their organisation’s digital capabilities. 
• Digital transformation is a leadership problem (3 minute read) | Mike Bracken, partner at Public Digital, argues that service delivery, and therefore team culture empowered and enabled by leadership, is key to successful digital transformation. 

Listen

• The Provider Podcast Season Five Episode Two (32 minutes) | Digital Boards: Lessons from clinical leadership | In this episode, Saffron speaks to chief clinical information officers Ayesha Rahim, Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, and Annalise McNair, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, on the importance of clinical leadership in digital transformation for NHS trusts and foundation trusts.
• The Provider Podcast Season Five Episode Three (25 minutes) | Digital Boards: Lessons from diverse leadership | In this episode, Saffron Cordery speaks with Shera Chok, The Shuri Network co-founder and chair, NHS Digital deputy chief medical officer and NHS England and NHS Improvement national clinical advisor, Patricia Miller OBE, Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust chief executive and board director for the NHS Race and Health Observatory, and Andy Callow group chief digital information officer at Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust  and Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust. They discuss why representation matters in digital and across wider services, what practical steps boards should be taking to improve diversity, the importance of inclusivity in the recruitment process, how the diversity of the workforce and wider communities is not represented adequately in its leadership and how this can negatively impact digital products and services which are shaped through a biased 'single lens'.

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