For a Swedish municipality, we introduced a social sustainability perspective into a digitalisation project by conducting two workshops

The problem

• The Tomelilla municipality received funding to develop new, and improve their existing, digital and physical municipal services over two years. Consideration of social sustainability issues, such as digital inclusion, equality and accessibility, was a requirement for the funding
• Analysys Mason was commissioned to provide continuous evaluation of the project, provide strategic insights throughout and help incorporate social sustainability into the project

The solution

• We conducted two workshops with a perspective on social sustainability for a few relevant employees of the municipality to create a foundation for improvement
• The first workshop involved presenting our analysis and findings on equality, diversity and digital inclusion and how they relate to the municipality
  • we created an action plan with the participants on how to integrate the different perspectives into their daily activities, communication and the digital services
• The second workshop involved presenting archetypal personas to show how physical disabilities specifically can create a digital divide
  • each persona had representative goals and characteristics and could be used as a tool by all employees to see how to improve municipal services (digital and physical), such as e-services

Figure: Five personas to be used by the developers of the municipality with characteristics and needs

The result

• The mid-project evaluation indicated that some learnings from the workshops were beginning to be implemented for the development of digital services and work methods in the civic office; the final evaluation will be performed in late 2022
• Based on our suggestions, the municipality has created a process map to clarify ownership and responsibility for digital services, thereby ensuring social sustainability remains a priority