Stewart Hamilton
Written 208 posts
Communications and Engagement Officer
Reflections from SEPA’s Future Flood and Incident Messaging Service programme team
19th March 2025
Guest blog by Laura Johnstone, Continuous Improvement team, Digital Assurance Office. Introduction SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) is Scotland’s environmental regulator and the national flood forecasting, flood warning and strategic flood management authority. The Future Flood and Incident Messaging Service (FFIMS) programme was initiated in 2020 to replace the previous Flood Warning Dissemination System and digitally…
Design in Action (Part 3: Accessible design)
4th March 2025
Blog by Catriona Binnie, Senior User Researcher in the ScotPayments team, on the process the UCD team follow to ensure we’re building an accessible payments service for all public sector staff. We want ScotPayments to be easy to use for all public sector staff. Accessibility for our user base is key. What are we doing…
Iteration and continuous improvement – a Blockbuster story?
12th February 2025
Guest blog from Jayne Purcell, Service Design Lead, Social Security Scotland. Iteration and continuous improvement are words I hear a lot. What I have observed over the years is that iteration and continuous improvement usually means iterating and improving the current design, with not enough effort put into exploring the future and the vision to…
The Social Security Programme – approach to integrated assurance
5th February 2025
Guest blog from Lois MacFadyen, Head of the Digital Assurance Office. The Social Security Programme was set up to build and implement the new Social Security System in Scotland, making arrangements for the delivery of 17 benefits. The design and development work on the first end to end service started in October 2017 and the…
Planning – insights from the Technology Assurance Framework
29th January 2025
Guest blog by Laura Johnstone, Continuous Improvement team, Digital Assurance Office. Planning is one of the Scottish Government’s programme and project management principles and is described as ‘considering all aspects of our projects and continuously planning, managing dependencies, agreeing and refining evidence based assumptions, and reporting on progress against milestones throughout.’ Planning has been identified…
Statistics.gov.scot Improvement Project – Discovery
23rd January 2025
Blog by Auren Clarke, Senior Product Manager in the Digital Directorate’s Open Data Team, Data Division. I work in the Scottish Government’s Open Data team, and we are responsible for maintaining Scotland’s Official Statistics platform statistics.gov.scot. Last year, we gave an update on the work of the open data team – we are focused on…
Unlocking the Value of Scotland’s Data – Response to report published.
16th January 2025
Blog by Chris Bergin, Strategic Data Policy Adviser, Digital Citizen Unit. The Scottish Government has published its response to the report by the Independent Expert Group for the Unlocking the Value of Data programme. The programme is exploring how the public sector can responsibly unlock the value of the personal datasets they hold – securely,…
ScotPayments – Building our own in-house technical capabilities
9th January 2025
Blog by Megan Abbott, Lead Business Relationship Manager in ScotPayments, sharing an update on progress and how the team have been working on their own internal transformation by building in-house technical capabilities. Here at ScotPayments we focus a lot on how we are supporting the digital transformation of public services in Scotland. By thinking about…
ScotPayments Design in Action (Part 2: Inclusive Payments)
7th January 2025
Blog by Ryan Bowler and Fiona MacLellan to highlight ScotPayments UCD team deep dive into Inclusive Payments and why payment choice matters. Inclusive Payments We shared a post previously which introduces our User-Centred Design team and our iterative design process. Here we are with part 2 in our Design in Action series, with more on…
Foundations of the Digital State – Independent research report published
18th November 2024
Blog post by Becca Fairless, Head of Strategy, Policy and Communications, Digital Directorate. OverviewThis is a summary of the independent research report “Foundations of the Digital State” by Gordon Guthrie, a Digital Fellow of the First Minister’s Digital Fellowship Programme during 2023-2024. The research aimed to lay out a transformative roadmap for how governments imagine…