Leeds City Council Chief Digital and Information Officer Dylan Roberts Interview - Developing 'City as a platform'

Leeds City Council CIO's 'city as a platform' concept integrates cross-agency partners to deliver overall outcomes for the public benefit

Leeds City Council Chief Digital and Information Officer Dylan Roberts is responding to cuts to council budgets by harnessing the power of technology to deliver public services in a new way. "We need to flip our thinking altogether and think about how we affect better outcomes for people," says Roberts, a high-flyer in the 2017 CIO 100.

"It's about integrating information technology with partners across the city around the needs of some of our citizens. But in particular, it's about how we can get citizens themselves to become more self-sufficient through using consumer-based information and technology to look after themselves or even look after their own communities."

His strategy to support them is the 'city as a platform', a holistic concept focused on achieving overall outcomes for the community rather than delivering discrete services. The concept combines the citizens and their concerns with the digital technologies and information available from different sources across the city to develop new capabilities to solve its problems...