Rewiring Whitehall: The next steps in digital government

It’s 25 years since then prime minister Tony Blair launched a strategy to digitally modernise government. There have been many digital transformation strategies in Whitehall since, but how much has truly been delivered, beyond improving the technology utilized internally and having better websites?

Have public sector leaders spent besides much of that time focusing on the “digital” and not adequate on the “transformation”? Has technology truly changed how government and public services work? If not, why not – and what do we request to do differently from now on?

Computer Weekly late had an chance to put these questions to a panel of government IT leaders at an event organised by the digital squad at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), hosted at Amazon’s London office in Shoreditch.

With a fresh government in place – 1 that has promised to “rewire Whitehall” and destruct the “glaring technology gap” between the private sector and public services – can we anticipate to see the pace of change accelerate at last?

The panellists were:

What follows is simply a summary of highlights from the debate in consequence to questions posed by Computer Weekly.

Has technology truly changed how government and public services work – and if not, why not?

Rich Corbridge: It’s the transformation bit, the cultural bit, the moving of the massive ships that are the departments that make up government – that’s the hard bit. The tech has got easier to get right. The legacy IT hasn’t got easier to drag along with us. Big, old organisations drag the legacy behind them, and that makes transformation more difficult.

Whether it’s the data in there, the tin that’s there, the age of it – erstwhile it just works, then building the business case to modernise it so that transformation becomes quicker and cheaper, is rather hard due to the fact that [the legacy IT] is bomb proof. It works – it does what it’s expected to do. So, [people think] let’s leave it for the next 20, 30, 40 years, doing what it’s expected to do. It’s a hard business case to get through.

Gina Gill: We give ourselves a hard time sometimes about progress. We could and should celebrate success more than possibly we do. I came from financial services, and they went from branch to telephone to online banking, and they would have called that transformation. I would have called it transformation erstwhile I was there. But I look back now and think, was it really? We were delivering the same thing, just through different channels.

Where we request to be – where banks have realised they request to be – is to think about the full service journey, from a user perspective. Think about how you transform the full thing, and put technology as a secondary consideration. As Rich said, the tech should be the easy pitch. The hard bit is, what is the user request and how do you make this service meet that request – not just add a bit of tech to what you’re already doing?

Craig Suckling: quite a few what needs to shift is the cultural aspect. What does it mean to have a digital mindset? It’s not focusing on building shiny fresh technology, it’s focusing on what are our user needs, and working from that to identify the best solutions – method as well as looking at policy and cultural things that can be utilized to fix and make improvement.

It besides requires broadening the aperture to think about not just the function a peculiar department plays, but about the services that go across departments. As a citizen or business, I don’t care which department you gotta go to. I have a peculiar need, and if that stretches across departments, the solutions for that should do so, right?

We should be careful, especially in the planet of artificial intelligence (AI) today, that we’re not building technology for technology’s sake – that we’re building it with a mindset for longevity so we don’t, in 10 years’ time, have a fresh legacy that we’re trying to rip up again.

Data plays a very large function as well – data is inactive the biggest impediment to cross-governmental work, data is inactive the biggest impediment to collaboration, to productivity across departments. We do request to have a focus to open access to data to aid drive that transformation.

These are all good things, but you’re not the first generation of digital government leaders to identify these problems. What’s going to be different this time?

CS: We’re at a point now in which we’re truly seeing exponential acceleration of technology in general, and the rate of change and the chance that brings is very different to anything we’ve seen in Parliament. If we look more globally around the macroeconomic or geopolitical and environmental space, there’s quite a few change happening that requires us to be more proactive and to realize how to manage that change – and technology has to play a large role.

So, there is an chance and a timing and a criticality around the pace of change. We’re besides seeing more of an anticipation for government to hit the same bar as we see in the private sector, and that will propel us forward as well.

GG: What’s different now, in the six or 7 years I’ve been here, is we have a much stronger digital capability than erstwhile I arrived in government. There is now upwards of 20,000 digital and data professionals in central government alone. That’s a immense leap forward from where we were even a fewer years ago. The conversation is happening at a different level than before.

There’s a different mindset developing outside of digital as well, in terms of that focus on users, which is crucial due to the fact that otherwise you can become an echo chamber of digital people talking to each other. If you look at DWP, you have Universal Credit, which is not just about the technology – it’s about the service, it’s about the way it’s organised, it’s about the roles, it’s about how teams work together. The concept of service ownership is starting to take hold.

And then the last thing I’ll say is that I met the new secretary of state in DSIT the day after the election, and he listed 1 of his 3 priorities as modern digital government, creating better user experiences and giving people their time back. That is different language than I’ve heard since I’ve been here.

RC: 20 years ago, we were the experts. People brought us into the area to tell them about technology – you were a translator. You go into a area now with a business problem, and you’re no longer the translator, due to the fact that what we do is being consumerised to specified a degree.

Also, the hazard has changed. At DWP, there has been a hazard around how and erstwhile should we do digital. That hazard is turned on its head now – what if we don’t do digital? For example, we can’t keep on recruiting people to work in occupation Centres due to the fact that we’ve recruited everybody in this country who wants to do that job. We can’t keep increasing and increasing in that way, so digital solutions should be the answer to getting that right. The appetite is there.

We hear quite a few talk about ‘innovation’ in government. It’s a much over-used word that in Whitehall can mean ‘get free of legacy IT’, ‘spend more with startups’, ‘use tech to cut costs’ and many another interpretations. What should innovation truly mean across all of digital government?

RC: The innovations we’ve seen be successful are as much about how the relation with our business works and putting systems at the centre of what we do. That digital mindset is the lifeblood of facilitating the bright idea, the fresh innovation.

That’s been crucial in the past couple of years – to be open to innovation, alternatively of only the large [IT suppliers] coming in, and only erstwhile you’ve proven yourself for 10 years beforehand do you get in. We request to find ways to be more open to the fresh idea, and then find ways to bring our business with us and how we put citizens at the centre of what we request to do.

GG: If I had a magic wand, data is the thing that affects mindset, the thing that I would fix, due to the fact that everything else follows. I was talking at an event [recently] and individual asked the question: “Technology is changing all the time, so how do you avoid a situation where you’re solving a big, complex problem and it’s going to take 3 years during which you’re not delivering technology, which immediately becomes legacy at the time you deliver it?” My answer was that it’s not about the technology and that we request to halt focusing on the technology.

If we think about service delivery, and if we then think about how we make technology in a way that allows us to be continually flexible and continually responsive, that’s where we request to get to. Administrations change and policies change, but our ability to respond to that change is besides constrained at the minute and that’s a mindset, organisation, cultural, behavioural set of things that underpin being an innovative organisation.

CS: I worry that innovation starts to become a word that has a bad reputation. We’ve all been there where individual pulls out a fancy proof of concept and an executive buys into it wholeheartedly and says, “I’ll have that tomorrow, thank you”.

Innovation needs to be something that addresses forward strategy problems, and that requires a mindset. It requires diversity of thinking, it requires people who are technologists and data specialists coming together with people in legal, in ethics, in policy and research. So, you’re reasoning in a diverse full spectrum around what it takes to actually solve a truly meaningful problem, with longevity. That’s 1 thing that’s crucial to get right with innovation.

The second thing is, we should be careful not to make bottlenecks where central teams own innovation. most likely 10 years ago, there was that era of the guys who rocked up in jeans with flat whites and were “the innovators”. We request innovation to be democratised, and to have that, we request autonomy. That should be something that we empower all teams to grasp. It comes back to mindset. We anticipate everyone to do this, not a central squad to be the innovators, but to have autonomy with uniformity through standards.

GG: We go and see how different organisations work, and we spent any time with Octopus Energy recently. The thing that I left with was the mindset and the empowerment – the autonomy for people to be entirely liable for, in their case, client happiness. Within those boundaries they can do a lot and make decisions on their own, in a way that we would find somewhat scary.

The communicative that truly struck me was individual in marketing had a conversation with individual in client services who said, “I had this awful day, 10 people complained about the on-hold music.” So this individual from marketing said, “Let’s fix that problem.” So, seemingly now if you are on hold, they will play the number 1 song from erstwhile you were 14 years old, so by the time you get to the client service agent, you’ve got happy nostalgia feelings. It’s a small, simple thought due to the fact that people are so focused on the client and they think creatively about how to meet the need.

CS: I was with Gina that day – the next problem they had was people saying, “You answered besides quickly. I was enjoying the music.”

We have heard any large claims from politicians about the prospects for AI. erstwhile deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden said in 2023, ‘AI is the closest thing you gotta a silver bullet’ for improving productivity in government. We all know that’s not realistic – but what is the reality of AI in government and what are the early lessons learned?

RC: What we’ve done is taken solutions to problems where AI can help. Where we’ve been successful is chipping distant at that big productivity [savings] number. We are somewhat set up, culturally, to go and buy a solution that will fix the full thing. Actually, what we’re seeing is innovations through the usage of AI will chip distant and take minutes out of the hr – not remove the hour.

Our learning so far is 3 key things. One, don’t effort to find the end-game solution that fixes the full lot. Build acceptance that 10 solutions that save a fewer minutes or make us somewhat more accurate, bundled together is going to make us a better department.

Two, if you’ve got a burden of crap data, you’re going to conflict to make the AI much better than what you’ve got now, and most likely not better.

Three, there is inactive the polarisation of ideas and views of what AI will do, ranging from, “It’s the march of the robots”, to “We can all go home and put our feet up”. We’ll only find out the fact through investigating and learning and seeing how it works and seeing what citizens think of it, and seeing how it can free up humans to do the occupation that humans are better at. What I’m obsessed with is that AI is simply a tool in our bag of goodies to aid solve problems. Sometimes, the conversation becomes so obsessed [with AI] that it becomes the only tool that anybody’s curious in. It’s crucial that we accept it as 1 of the things we can do, not the thing we can do.

CS: We’re going through the classical hype cycle with AI, where we’ve had the heady highest of inflated expectations. Across government, we have 1 of the most valuable and under-utilised assets in data. There’s so much untapped value in our data, but we gotta usage it in a very trusted, ethical and safe way, and we request to make certain that it is in close proximity for AI as well. The more we can unlock access to data, the more we can deliver on innovation, the more we can aid to drive AI – not only across the public sector, but besides into the economy.

GG: Let’s focus on the problem we’re trying to solve. I remember getting an email from individual saying, “Gina, I think that we should do AI-powered prison visits.” What does that even mean? This [sort of thing] was constant. Now, I like to see it as an opportunity.

I spent years trying to have conversations with policy colleagues about digital and working more closely, then abruptly we’re the most popular people and everyone wants to realize AI. So, everyone gets a five-minute conversation on AI and then a big, much longer conversation on how we work collectively, together.

We besides request to be clear about where our red lines are. We request to be careful about the equality of data, but besides amplifying bias – in a government setting, that is peculiarly important. There’s quite a few things that we request to manage, as well as the opportunity. I’m a small bit cynical [about attitudes towards AI], but the chance will grow.

If there is 1 thing you could change to make government’s digital capabilities better, what would it be?

GG: The thing that I would change is to incentivise people. [For example] we request to incentivise people to collaborate. I came from financial services, where behaviour is driven by incentives – we don’t think about that creatively enough. What if you encourage departments to put together joint backing bids to fix an end-to-end service? What if we said we’re going to prioritise that over individual projects, peculiarly if it aligns to missions? Missions give us an chance to drive any of that thinking.

I don’t know if I’ll always convince HM Treasury colleagues of this, but what if we incentivise people to save money? [Currently] if you save money, you’ve got to give it all back, but what if you get to keep 50% of it to reinvest? Or if you have gain-share agreements where I say [to a department], “I truly request you to fix that problem over there, due to the fact that it’s causing me a problem over here”? How do I incentivise individual else to solve that problem, erstwhile I’m going to save money over here? You can share any of the savings. How do you make that incentive structure?

CS: A mission-based government helps go a long way in setting up the infrastructures for collaboration. Doubling down around incentives, collaboration in government needs to be a place where value is exchanged, but not everybody will benefit in the same way. For example, if I’m sharing data from DWP to HMRC. HMRC might benefit more from that than DWP.

How do we guarantee there’s incentivisation for value to be unequal, but it’s for the greater good of what we’re trying to solve. You request incentives to make value exchange an okay thing even if it’s not equal, and to incentivise people to think about that differently.

RC: In our organisation recently, we had a couple of large things that have gone well, and erstwhile we sat down afterwards and discussed the lessons learned, the common word was collaboration. We are disincentivised presently as a government. Citizens see government, but they don’t see that we are different departments, and trying to remove that disincentive is difficult.

Data sharing is simply a prime example. HMRC, as a made-up example, would benefit greatly from DWP passing them that data. DWP pays to make the strategy run through all the checks and measures so we can pass HMRC that data so they can make savings in their budget.

But we gotta pay – our budget is decreased to save money over there, so there isn’t an incentive to do that and it’s not easy to put in place. There isn’t individual going to kind that out tomorrow, due to the fact that it’s truly hard to get right. We know, as DWP, if we shared bidirectionally with the NHS and Department of wellness better data, then the journey for citizens going through [healthcare] would be a lot smoother and a lot little painful.