Digital

Reflections on FutureScot’s Digital Scotland conference

January 19, 2026 by deborahamzil No Comments | Category Digital, Digital Strategy for Scotland, local government, Scottish Government

Becca Fairless, Head of Digital Strategy and Policy in the Scottish Government blogs about launching our refreshed joint Digital Strategy for Scotland at a recent digital conference.

At the end of  last year we published our refreshed Vision for digital in Scotland alongside our joint Delivery Plan for Sustainable Digital Public Services. We launched this at FutureScot’s Digital Scotland event which took place in November 2025 at Edinburgh’s EICC – with the Minister for Public Finance Mr McKee, Digital Office for Scottish Local Government’s Chief Digital Officer Martyn Wallace and Scottish Government’s Chief Digital Officer Geoff Huggins.

It was a good day. We had some interesting questions from the audience and plenty of engagement from those who visited the Scottish Digital Academy stand in the exhibition area. Lots of you want to know more about the plan and how we will deliver it. It’s always great to get out and talk to people who are delivering digital in the wider public sector or in the industry.

This year we enjoyed a change of format – rather than give a Ministerial speech, Mr  McKee participated in a fireside chat with Alison McLaughlin who chaired the day. During this, the Minister reflected that the Delivery Plan for Public Services demonstrates our commitment to working across the whole public sector because it isn’t just about what the Scottish Government is delivering or working on with the agencies, and that it sets out very clearly what Local Government will also deliver.

The Minister reflected on the importance of treating public sector data as a national asset to help deliver these ambitions, so that data allows us to tackle the big complex challenges that we face. Mr McKee also reflected that there is no point in putting systems in place to make data and digital more joined-up if we do not also make sure that our staff have the capability and confidence to understand how to interpret the insights that are generated to make it easier to deliver digital public services.

Your feedback suggests that this reflective format was very well received which gives us food for thought in how Ministers and others could engage at similar digital-themed conferences in the future.

Throughout the day, there were a series of panels and masterclasses, some of which involved speakers from both the Scottish Government and Local Government. One of the main talking points that emerged from these was the importance of having a strategy that’s not simply collaborative in its ambition but explicitly articulates partnership working as critical to its delivery plan for digital public services. Theo Blackwell MBE, one of the speakers at Digital Scotland, summed this up well saying that the refreshed strategy “makes the important shift to bridge central and local government. This is a UK first, in this level of detail”.

Partnership working was a recurring theme at the conference, and colleagues also referred to the need to overcome silos and work collaboratively across sectors and government.

The event closed with a joint session with the Danish Ambassador for the UK Christina Miskowiak Beckvard, and the Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government Joe Griffin. They participated in a fireside chat with a wide variety of questions from the audience.

You can read more about our collaborative work on the refreshed Strategy in the blogging we’ve done over the past year: refreshing the Digital Strategy for Scotland blog post series. Do look out for more blog posts here as we deliver the actions set out in the plan.

You can get in touch with us at digitalstrategy@gov.scot.

Tags: Collaboration, digital public services, local government, scottish government

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