The roadmap to smarter local government transformation

Our CEO Martin Neale recently shared his thinking on local government transformation as part of techUK's Local Public Services Innovation Focus Week. We're re-sharing it here - the original piece is below, with thanks to techUK for hosting it first.

Local government has spent years being asked to transform how it delivers services, while facing pressures that leave little room to do so. Rising demand, constrained budgets, workforce shortages, legacy technology and growing expectations from residents all compete for attention.

Councils are already investing scarce time in understanding their services, costs and systems. That work should create an evidence base they can keep using as priorities change. Every new programme should build on that knowledge, rather than commission its discovery again.

The government’s review of Local Government Reorganisation illustrates how quickly the context for transformation can change. Councils still face the same demand, financial pressures and service responsibilities while decisions about future structures are reconsidered. Timelines can change, but the underlying pressures facing councils remain, and so does the need for transformation.

As you read this, a council’s technology debt continues to accumulate. Inefficient processes continue to generate avoidable work. Fragmented systems continue to make it harder to understand what services cost, where demand is coming from and where change is needed.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to deliver transformation, but to build the capacity to keep improving, regardless of the wider political calendar.

You can't transform what you can't see

Keeping services running is essential, but continuity alone is not a transformation strategy.

Councils need to understand what is happening underneath their services: what is driving demand, where resources are being used, which processes create unnecessary work, and where technology is creating friction rather than removing it. Without that visibility, councils risk managing symptoms rather than causes.

The issue is that the information needed to answer those questions is often spread across financial systems, case management platforms, workforce records, contracts and customer interactions. This makes transformation decisions more complicated than they first appear, as it’s harder to see the extent of their impact. A change to one service can affect demand elsewhere. Reducing activity in one area can create additional pressure somewhere else. And a technology decision can have implications for workforce requirements, costs or service delivery.

This matters particularly in demand-led services such as adult social care, children's services and homelessness, where changes in demand, workforce capacity or service design can have significant financial and operational consequences.

The starting point for transformation should therefore be forming a current, connected understanding of how the organisation operates. That will give leaders a stronger basis for deciding where change is needed, what it could achieve and what wider impact it may have.

Fragmented data is the real transformation blocker, not budget

Building that connected understanding has traditionally involved bringing together information manually through reports and spreadsheets. Yet, by the time each component has been pieced together, that information is often already out of date.

This is where AI comes in; AI can help reconcile information from different sources, flag gaps, identify patterns, compare scenarios and help explore the potential consequences of different decisions, providing full visibility for officers and elected members. For example, analysing resident interactions could reveal that repeated contact is being driven by a process elsewhere in the organisation. Looking across operational data could highlight where manual intervention is creating unnecessary cost or where demand in one service is being generated by another.

Councils can act now by bringing contract values and renewal dates into one view, identifying duplicated software and examining processes that generate repeated contact or manual rekeying. These findings can inform improvements to current services and future operating models, whatever organisational structure follows.

This provides the potential to make transformation more responsive. Rather than building a detailed picture for one programme and then starting again for the next, councils can make greater use of information they already hold as circumstances change.

It can also change how councils think about technology investment. The starting point should not be “What system should we buy?”, but “What problem are we trying to solve?”.

Priorities, not projects: Building a holistic transformation strategy

A transformation strategy is not a list of separate improvements. It should set out how different changes across the organisation connect, rather than treating each improvement as a standalone project. It also requires a clear view of priorities and judgement about where to act first. Councils cannot transform everything at once, so they need to identify where change will have the greatest impact, what can realistically be delivered and where dependencies or risks need to be addressed first.

This is where a stronger evidence base earns its keep, helping leaders make those decisions, understand how different initiatives connect and assess whether they are delivering the intended results.

A holistic approach therefore gives councils a way to move from individual opportunities to a coordinated programme of transformation, while retaining the flexibility to adjust priorities as circumstances change.

Whatever happens with reorganisation, that underlying job doesn't go away. Councils that build this capacity now won't need to rebuild it from scratch under a different timetable.

Ultimately, the aim is to give councils the insight and capacity to make better decisions, improve services and use their resources effectively, to survive its next deadline and continue to keep improving long after that deadline has passed.

By Martin Neale, Founder and CEO at ICS.AI. Originally published on techUK, 16 September 2026. Read the original on techUK's site.

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