“Can you spout digital bollocks? London is hiring a chief digital officer,” wrote IT website The Register the day mayor Sadiq Khan launched his search for a digital guru for the capital.

The successful candidate (expected to be appointed later this summer) will earn £106,952 a year and according to the job announcement posted online in May, Khan is looking for someone who can turn London into “the world’s leading smart city – with digital technology at the heart of making the capital an even better place to live, work and invest”.

But with London already topping the European Digital City Index 2016 and a technology sector made up of more companies valued at more than $1bn than any other city in Europe, what will the new chief digital officer (CDO) do, joking aside?

Getting London’s local councils to work together will be a focus, says Martyn Wallace, CDO for the Scottish local government’s digital office. Appointed to the newly-created role in September 2016, part of his brief is to get Scotland’s local authorities to collaborate and one of his challenges is in changing their mindset around technology.

“One council said they had ‘done’ digital transformation, and I asked them and they said ‘well we’ve got a website’,” he says. Other councils are further ahead, telling Wallace they want to be able to use technology such as Amazon Dash to deliver repeat prescriptions to elderly people, for example. Wallace also advocates helping councils work in “agile” ways, a means by which digital products are created and go live quickly.

“We keep iterating, we ban the word pilots. Quite frankly there are more pilots than in British Airways in [the] public sector across the UK, so lets keep ... moving forward,” he says.

Whoever Khan appoints will need to lead London’s 26 borough councils and coordinate digital services, and a priority should be making public transport more efficient, according to Jacqueline de Rojas, president of industry body techUK.

“When you are thinking about smart cities and smart traffic management, you can’t really have cross-border issues. If you are going to have a better transport system, people don’t want to know they are going from Greenwich [borough] to Hackney. You’ve got to make sure everyone is working together and that is going to be part of a big skill set,” she says.

Transport for London has led the way with its Oystercard contactless technology, and making travel information open for others has meant apps such as Citymapper are available in London. Opening up data in this way will allow further digital progress, de Rojas adds.

She also advocates faster broadband to encourage flexible working so people won’t have to travel around the city as much, and would like to see council homes fitted with more efficient kit such as smart boilers that can predict which parts will be needed to fix them. Focusing on the needs of people will be key, she adds.

Dylan Roberts, chief digital and information officer at Leeds city council, agrees. “If I was Sadiq Khan, I’d be thinking what’s really important for any CDO. The focus is not on technology, the focus is absolutely around how you can facilitate, provide some leadership, provide the glue of pulling people together to effect better outcomes through the use of that information technology.”

Better outcomes means thinking about the effect on people’s lives, especially in the face of public sector cuts, and in Leeds this has included an emphasis on health, with the council aiming for the city to be “the best city to grow old in”. Roberts’ team discovered that transport is the number one problem for older people, and one way it helped people get around was by producing a countdown clock to alert people when their bus was due, based on pooling data from transport companies. Public services such as GP surgeries have used it to make sure older people can get around efficiently, resulting in the use of buses going up by 18%.

“People being able to get about means they are more active [and] getting to health appointments means there are fewer ‘did not attends’ and that is affecting a better outcome,” Roberts says. “But it’s also potentially helping a digital company in Leeds or anywhere develop a capability it can test with real cohorts of people.” London’s new digital head is also expected to work with the city’s startups.

London’s CDO will need to help the capital compete digitally on a global scale. Los Angeles, for example, has had a chief technology officer since 2014 resulting in a shift “from one of the poorest performers to one of the top cities in the world for open data, and bringing with it significant improvements to public services,” according to a paper scoping the London role published last year.

The role will undoubtedly be complex – with new regulations coming into force next year and digital adoption at varying stages in local councils, according to Camden councillor Theo Blackwell – and whoever gets the job will have to get their hands dirty. “The CDO job will be about setting standards,” de Rojas says. “It’s not about ego, it’s about efficiency.”

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