Key enablers

Leadership and governance

Bradford District already has a mature and effective partner leadership and governance framework in place through the Wellbeing Board Governance Structure.

We will utilise this relationship and set up a Digital & Data Board with a clear terms of reference of delivery oversight and guide the further development and implementation of the strategy.

We will appoint a dedicated Digital Programme Lead to drive the agenda forward and report to the Digital & Data Board. Other resources will be identified and added as per project requirements. The Programme Office function will integrate with our Clean Growth Delivery Framework.

This is a multi-year, incremental journey in which a clear, compelling and shared vision of what a “smart future” looks and feels like for the district will emerge and we will ensure stakeholder engagement and buy-in.

We will seek to galvanise practical action and planning together with stakeholders across the district and ensure we understand the role that each of us needs to play to build successful and sustainable integrated systems.

Digital and Smart City project ventures are known in general to be characterised as fragmented, not part of an overall plan or capability. We also know from our research that most smart city pilots end with no sustainable plan to scale. Our efforts on pilot projects will be targeted and governed effectively to ensure they address real issues and add real citizen value.

Finance

We will establish a five-year financial commitment to continue to drive forward the Digital Strategy. We will ring-fence capital funds each year, with release subject to business cases. The provision will be modest to begin with (£500,000) to seed development of our smart city infrastructure and Digital Twin Roadmap. This will increase each year as we demonstrate progress and build confidence in the capabilities and their value to our citizens. The profile has still to be determined but we are aiming for a contribution of £3m to £5m over the next 5 years on the Digital Programmes.

This is just the beginning. We will look to work with our partners to optimise funding opportunities. We will proactively seek funding opportunities for our digital agenda from government and regional funds, and innovation research grants. We will consolidate funding across the various connectivity programmes to optimise value and impact.

We will seek private investment and sponsorship for our AI Innovation Partnership plans. This will include targeting foreign investment such as FDI investors who are looking for investment opportunities in citizen science and AI innovation programmes.

We will identify opportunities for commercial revenue generation associated with digital programmes and projects. Potentially this could be self-financing, for example leveraging Council owned ducting and fibre.

Planning policy

We have already established a dialogue between providers, developers, planners, communities and elected members to develop a shared position around connectivity. The Local Plan will look at the potential options for embedding digital, including designated areas for test beds as well as wider policies across the district over and beyond permitted development.

Using the Digital Twin application, we will develop 3D modelling process for brownfield sites and design and adopt an approach and framework for Digital Master-Planning to encourage developers to adopt. The tool will also be used for supporting ‘greening the city’ activity and the creating of community spaces. Furthermore, the Southern Gateway area of the City will be established as the city’s digital demonstrator.

Procurement

The Council and regional partners rely heavily on suppliers, particularly where services are commissioned. Legacy supplier relationships and procurement policies have raised significant barriers to digital and smart city developments in the past, for example around interoperability and access to APIs and data. We need procurement and supplier management strategies that act as enablers rather than blockers of more citizen-centric and integrated services.

Our research showed that from both the public and private sector sides of the market, there is strong evidence that traditional procurement of council services is stifling innovation and inhibiting the ability of local authorities and industry jointly to undertake real life

R&D and to pool intellectual property for mutual benefit. Equally, there is increasing consensus on new, smarter approaches to public procurement, which are already starting to develop and should be more widely adopted.

The Council takes an integrated view of its procurement requirements, aligned with smart city procurement principles. We will focus on procuring business outcomes, build open data into all procurements: be clear that all data is to be owned by the council and its district partners not the supplier, and establish clear requirements for the supplier to make data available via open standards and fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

We will incentivise innovation and collaboration: ensuring that contractual arrangements encourage collaboration with others to create new value, and the sharing of common assets.

We will avoid supplier lock-in, by integrating interoperability requirements into all ICT procurement, using commercial off-the-shelf products and open standards wherever possible, and factoring in the costs of exit from the outset.

The need to nurture an innovation ecosystem of suppliers should be a major theme of stakeholder collaboration. In reviewing procurement policies, the council will seek to align contracting principles with open, service-oriented, IT architecture.

We will select suppliers based on long-term value for money rather than price, and in particular based on our degree of confidence that the chosen suppliers will secure delivery of the expected business benefits. Where it is appropriate we will establish governance arrangements that enable a region-wide overview of major procurements by the council and its partners. We will explore the approach taken through procurement to help meet climate change and clean growth ambitions.

We will explore opportunities to help harness the capability of small technology businesses, identify the opportunities and routes to innovation partnerships within the procurement process.

Measurement and evaluation

We will work with the University of Bradford to develop a framework for evaluation and monitoring which can be used to evaluate projects during their lifecycle but also be used to help define the design and scope of future programmes and projects. We will establish a benefit realisation strategy to ensure a clear line-of-sight between actions and vision, and that the intended benefits from the smart city programme are delivered in practice. The strategy should be built around benefit mapping, benefit tracking and benefit delivery. We will establish processes to ensure that critical success factors are identified, measured and managed.

Brand and identity

Our research showed that having a strong brand and digital identity for your area can go a long way to supporting growth. With our stakeholder engagement and as the strategy roadmap progresses, we will commission a piece of work to develop the region’s digital identity and brand aligned to the digital strategy building on its known strengths.

We will identity a programme of events and activities around which to promote the strategy both amongst partners and stakeholders across the region as well as the wider global community.