The Improvement Service, the go-to organisation for local government improvement in Scotland, has spent the last two decades developing a suite of resources to help councils and partners deliver high-quality digital public services. These platforms deliver efficiency savings and improvements for councils, supporting sustainable frontline local services and producing better customer experiences.
mygovscot myaccount, the easy way to access Scottish public services online, and One Scotland Gazetteer, the definitive address register for Scotland, are the flagship platforms, underpinning other digital public services. mygovscot myaccount is now being used by more than 2.5 million people across the country, more than 50% of the eligible population, while the One Scotland Gazetteer is one of the most used datasets in Scotland and is fundamental to the service delivery of over 80 Scottish public sector organisations.
mygovscot myaccount provides people living in Scotland with the ability to set up an online account that can be used across multiple organisations and to access an increasing range of online citizen and data services, everything from paying council tax and applying for a National Entitlement Card (NEC) to accessing many of the Improvement Service’s data improvement and sharing services.
Improvement Service platforms use mygovscot myaccount to deliver identity verification and authentication, ensuring that security remains a high priority while making it easy for Scottish citizens to access services using just one login and password. These include online NEC applications through getyournec.scot, a digital relationship between parents and schools via parentsportal.scot and access to public information notices thanks to tellmescotland.gov.uk.
The Improvement Service has also developed a range of data services to collate, improve and share high quality data from local government, Scottish Government and a range of partner organisations.
Many of these evolved organically to meet local government and public sector demands as they arose. The One Scotland Gazetteer was created to solve the problems inherent in having 32 different solutions to the creation and sharing of important address and street data for the nation, while the Spatial Hub was developed to start capturing other important local government data, making it more coherent and usable by everybody for different purposes. This has now expanded to data from other public sector organisations.
Data Hub was developed to enable organisations to improve the data they hold about citizens and addresses so that it can be more easily joined together and analysed, while we also use a platform developed by TCS to capture important data, like Dog Control Notices, and for sharing sensitive data with authoritative parties via datapipeline.scot. All of these services can be repurposed and used for a wide variety of data solutions.
The expertise and experience of the Improvement Service makes us an ideal choice for those in the public sector looking to develop solutions to challenges in citizen and data services. Our excellent working relationship with our technological partners Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has helped us to develop new platforms and features and allows us to be ambitious when it comes to our future plans for the Digital Public Services portfolio.
