Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is undertaking scientific research on seabird populations to help understand the pressures and threats they face including seabird colony surveys, tracking research, an analysis of climate change, and other impacts. This research will inform the Seabird Conservation Strategy, as well as regulation and planning of marine developments and activities to minimise likely impacts on seabirds.

Marine Scotland has established a working group with Scottish Natural Heritage, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, RSPB Scotland and British Trust for Ornithology Scotland to develop the Scottish Seabird Conservation Strategy. The working group is presently developing sensitivity assessments and species accounts for the Strategy to provide the evidence base from which potential actions will be developed. A stakeholder workshop will be held before the end of 2019 to discuss the first draft of the Strategy. Following consideration of the feedback from that event and any amendments, I expect there to be a public consultation in early 2020.

There is no cost for tuition fees for Scottish or EU National Students. Students apply to the Student Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS) for means tested funding. In addition they can apply to SAAS for placement expenses which is also means tested.

There are no plans for the Scottish Government to introduce a bursary to enable students to be funded to study radiography.

The Scottish Government does not hold a central budget for the adoption and use of Cloud technologies. This expenditure will be managed by organisations and individual business areas.

As part of our ‘Cloud First’ strategy, we encourage the adoption of Cloud solutions and provide a range of support to assist organisations in moving their services to the Cloud. I also refer the member to the answer to question S5W-24038 on 29 July 2019.

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx

The Scottish Government’s ‘back office’ functions such as HR, Finance and Procurement offer a range of digital services across the organisation and some to other public sector organisations as well. These services have on-going improvement programmes that are supported by the Digital Transformation Division.

We also operate a central IT function providing network, desktop infrastructure and productivity tools (for example Microsoft Office). Again these services can be accessed through a digital channel and there is on-going work to develop and update the services.

There are currently active programmes developing public sector digital services that organisations can re-use as part of their digital transformation programmes, in particular a digital identity service and a payments platform. These are in their early stages and will complement some UK government shared platforms that are already in use.

There are some examples of ‘corporate licenses’ that the Scottish Government has access to, notably for Microsoft and Oracle products. Digital cloud services are now typically offered on a subscription model rather than buying a license and The Scottish Government are investigating how best to procure these services across government.

I refer the Member to the answer to question S5W-24023 on 29 July 2019. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx

The Scottish Government has set out the Digital First Service Standard that aims to improve the ways in which services are designed, developed and improved. Scottish Government’s Digital Assurance Office carries out assessments during the development of new services and provides recommendations to ensure that the standard is met.

The Digital Transformation division includes specialists in areas such as service design, programme management and technical architecture and makes these skills available to other parts of Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government published the Public Sector Action Plan on Cyber Resilience in November 2017 and has provided public sector bodies with an implementation tool kit, draft supply chain cyber security guidance, Cyber Incident Response guidance and a Central Incident Notification and Coordination policy to support a consistent approach to cyber security across the public sector.

More than 45 public sector bodies are directly provided with ICT services and support from the Scottish Government and 62 public sector bodies have received funding towards Cyber Essentials pre-assessments to promote consistency across the wider sector in securing public sector systems against the most common cyber risks.

Scottish Government provides support to public sector bodies directly through the activities of the Digital Transformation Division. This has delivered over 90 projects over the past three years.

Technical staff within the division use common templates and approaches to create digital system designs. A resources website and document repository including a number of these templates is also available.

The Scottish Government Digital Transformation Division is currently supporting 14 programmes of varying size across government.

Collaboration across organisations and sectors is critical to achieving our digital ambitions for Scotland. Our national digital strategy aims to create an environment and culture of partnership working, underpinned by common standards and robust governance and assurance arrangements.

The governance structures we put in place during 2018 strengthened strategic oversight of our digital strategy, and brought together individuals from a range of organisations and sectors, to pool their expertise, share information and collectively drive digital transformation in the public sector.