Sam Smith, Institute Director at Socitm, sets out how digital and data can drive sustainable outcomes across communities

The shift from smart cities to connected places continues to accelerate across our local public services. Going beyond urban boundaries and vertical silos to a truly connected place with a ‘whole system’ approach to service design and delivery. 

Services work together with integrated plans, prioritisation, policies and resources. Digital, data and technology (DDaT) are means to an end in this situation: with healthier people, more resilient communities, and more sustainable places the potential outcomes.

Using digital for your sustainability strategies and activities
At the heart of a connected place is a practical sustainability agenda: using data, IoT and AI to understand what’s happening, to act faster, and to target activity where it makes the biggest difference. 

Socitm’s Connected Places collection lists energy and environmental sustainability, alongside health, mobility and engagement, as a core component of your place outcomes. Making it clear that climate action is integral, not peripheral, to your digital transformation work.

Technology can enable community-led sustainable transitions
Sustainability is not achieved through infrastructure alone; it depends on people. Digital technologies can play a crucial role in empowering communities to participate in climate action, particularly when the impacts are felt at a hyper-local level.

Our communities are facing challenges from rising energy costs to worsening pollution, and digital tools that help us all navigate these pressures. 

What can this work look like?
When you integrate ICT and IoT, to collect and analyse data, you end up with examples such as: air quality monitoring; flood prevention and warning; “smart” bins that signal when they need emptying; and housing sensors that detect mould or support temperature monitoring for vulnerable residents. 

Individual and combined examples of this kind of integration, “whether it’s a hospital wing adjusting its airflow [or] a town hall automating its lighting” can also come under that category of the ‘smart space’.
And digital twins (a virtual representation of an object or system designed to accurately reflect a physical object) offer a way to continuously monitor data. The digital version can then be analysed, manipulated, and optimised. 

These are not abstract pilots; they’re targeted data uses that reduce emissions, improve wellbeing and cut waste. Find more environmental and sustainable case studies here. 

Your existing data, if you use it, can support: better resource allocation; improved environmental monitoring; targeted investment in green infrastructure; energy optimisation across public assets; and early warning systems for climate-related risks.

These tools strengthen our shared responsibility, making sure that sustainability is a community endeavour rather than a top down mandate. And ‘community’ here means within our organisations as well the wider external community beyond our (often virtual) walls.

The obvious missing element technology here is Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is ideal for adding to your mix of ICT and IoT for all the above use cases. But it comes with a big hit to sustainability for all of us. And balancing the benefits it offers (and we’re already using) with the impact of it in terms of resource use and carbon emissions is a work in progress for everyone. 

Sustainability also starts at home with your IT estate
How much attention do you pay to your IT lifecycle emissions and the responsible disposal of electronic waste to reduce environmental impact? 

Looking in to the details here really can help you to reach your organisational net zero ambitions. 

And this ties directly to climate goals and social value, through circular economy practices. The fusion of innovation and environmental responsibility is not only possible but imperative.

Using data to combat pollution, reduce emissions and identify energy opportunities delivers fair outcomes where we all participate and benefit.

Ethics and inclusion come into play here as well
Technology adoption and procurement should advance your social value and environmental goals, not just efficiency. 

Socitm frames “technology for public good” within a bigger shift to reimagined services as a whole; breaking down silos and prioritising outcomes for people, communities and places.

This puts ethics, accessibility and sustainability alongside innovation and productivity. Read more about the impacts of the 2023 Procurement Act here.

Your procurement and programme design can make this concrete by using established frameworks such as TOMs (Themes, Outcomes, Measures), and Doughnut Economics to rebalance social, economic and environmental foundations in digital strategies and contracts. 

Social value and sustainability go hand in hand
Ethical technology and social value are inseparable from environmental sustainability. Technology strategies shaped by social value frameworks create synergies that benefit both communities and the planet.
Models such as Doughnut Economics and other social value methodologies help organisations balance environmental limits with social foundations like equity, fairness, wellbeing and opportunity. 

These approaches encourage you and your colleagues to consider how every digital investment can affect: community cohesion; access to services; environmental health; long-term resilience; and local economic opportunity.

When sustainability and social value inform digital decisions – from procurement to system design – technology has a multiplier effect, improving both environmental outcomes and the everyday lives of residents.

Ethical digital transformation isn’t just about using the right tools; it’s about using them for the right reasons, in ways that uplift both people and the planet.

Social Progress Index
If you’re in England you can access a Social Progress Index (SPI) from Impera Analytics for your authority. An SPI brings together a rich variety of datasets – metrics, include health, noise and air pollution, rates of exercise and obesity, recycling and domestic violence. 

New insights are generated into the principal components of diverse social ecologies – relationships and root causes of persistent problems that undermine basic human needs, the foundations of wellbeing and access to opportunities.

Leadership throughout your organisation
Sustainable digital transformation is a people challenge before it’s a technology challenge. Both are, of course, complicated. 

You need to invest in the foundations (skills, capacity, infrastructure and data). While at the same time align your digital ambitions with organisational priorities and resilience. Achieving ethical, sustainable digital transformation requires investment in people. 

Our skills underpin all of this 
Public Sector Digital Trends reports from recent years emphasise whole workforce capability. It can’t only be about IT teams; it extends to service managers, commissioners and frontline staff. Digital leaders must develop the skills and confidence to integrate sustainability into technology decisions, while staff across your whole organisation need the capability to use digital tools safely, responsibly and effectively.

This includes: digital literacy; data awareness; understanding environmental impacts of tech; ethical use of emerging technologies; and cross-sector collaboration.

Sustainable transformation is ultimately a leadership challenge. And it requires long-term vision, clear priorities and a commitment to aligning digital investment with environmental and social goals.

There’s a lot to do and think about here! And it is not easy and you can’t do it alone.

Your (short) to do list
1. Get sustainability onto everyone’s brief. 
2. Operationalise social value. 
3. Invest in foundations. 
4. Lead across borders. 
5. Design for inclusion.

It’s not all about the gadgets and dashboards
Sustainable connected places are about creating the conditions in which people and communities can thrive – using digital, data and technology to reduce emissions, improve wellbeing and unlock inclusive growth. 

That requires you and your organisation to invest in the foundations, collaborate across borders, and measure what matters. 

It also requires a communications narrative that keeps the end user at the centre and treats sustainability as a shared, local endeavour. 

If we get that right, DDaT becomes the tool that help councils and partners deliver public good first.

Turning insight into action for greener, fairer, more resilient places. 

Further information
About Doughnut Economics: 7 ways to think like a 21st century economist

More about Themes, Outcomes, Measures (TOMs)

From Socitm:

Report: Maximising social value in procurement: Measurement and evaluation for buyers

The Connected Places collection

Briefing: Green and sustainable IT. Give your device a second life