Talking 5 with Local Public Services Member Jadu
We are delighted to have Chantelle Levoir, Vice President of Growth, Jadu as our guest this month. We talk all things partnerships, collaboration, and the role of SMEs in local government transformation as well discuss the notion of the community of the future!
Welcome Chantelle, firstly, tell me more about you, your career and how you got to this position today?
My background is in accountancy and in 2013 I was lucky enough to join Socitm as their Head of Finance. This was where I was introduced to the phenomenal work being delivered within the public sector. I was invited to join the board as Finance Director however, the more I was exposed to the work of digital and transformation leads across local government and the wider public sector, the more I wanted to be a part of the efforts to improve the delivery of public services. This led to my role evolving again in 2017 to become Finance and Operations director. During that time the WCAG 2.1 AA standards came into play, and I became very passionate about supporting public sector organisations to deliver accessible websites for citizens and, of course, that brought Jadu onto my radar. At the time Jadu had 7 of the top 10 most accessible websites in local government and 17 in the top 30! When the time came to move on from my role at Socitm I wanted to work for an organisation that felt as passionately about this as I did and I was fortunate enough that Jadu created the role of Vice President of Growth to allow me to continue to support the drive for inclusive online services.
What is the opportunity digital presents to local authorities?
My job at Jadu is to ensure that the award-winning products that Jadu has created continue to be developed to enable public service delivery to evolve and become sustainable, scalable and cost-effective. One way we’re doing this is through partnerships and integrations. We need organisations to be able to leverage what they have, create seamless workflows that output real-time data and information not only internally to the organisation, but also to the citizen. We want to empower citizens through our self-service platform, remove barriers between those delivering and consuming public services to increase customer satisfaction and trust. We have seen great examples of this in the likes of Swindon BC who have achieved a 92% customer satisfaction score whilst saving £30m over 3 years. Organisations are expected to do both and Swindon shows that it can be achieved. As an SME we continue to strive to work together to drive efficiencies like these in our sector and we are excited to be joining forces with techUK in order to find new collaboration partners who want to innovate for the public good.
As councils plan for recovery, reflect and rethink the future of local public services, what is your vision of the council of the future?
As we look to the future, I think it's about the council of the future and moreover, about the community of the future. We cannot underestimate the role that Parish councils, community and volunteer groups have played in our recovery, and I believe that everything that we do moving forward needs to be a solution that serves our locality.
As well as ensure communities are well served, Local Authorities also need to look to two key areas: Automation - to bake in efficiencies in how their services are delivered and ultimately, how their businesses are run; and Commercialisation - leverage digital to find new revenue growth and bridge the funding gaps that are starting to cripple delivery of public services. At Jadu we are focused on those two key areas as well as enabling communities through digital. We want to help our customers get the most from technology to create a more sustainable future.
If you'd like to feature in a future Talking 5, please get in touch with Georgina Maratheftis.
Georgina Maratheftis
Georgina is techUK’s Associate Director for Local Public Services
