Forward ever backward never: public sector digital transformation

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JAMES BUCKLEY: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this webinar from Made Tech, as part of Digital Innovation week from digital leaders. The title of this webinar is Forward Ever, Backward Never: How we transform public services.

How this session will run: We expect this session to last about forty to forty-five minutes, and we hope you enjoy what we have to say. We are going to have a panel discussion. We will do introductions in a moment. We will give you the topics and then discuss them with some examples that we have put together for you. If you have any questions throughout the talk, please use the contact details provided at the end of the session, or alternatively leave a comment on the chat. We will contact you after the event.

Introductions, here we are. My name is James Buckley. I am the Head of Practise for Digital Transformation here in Made Tech. I have many years’ experience in the public sector and I am delighted to be with you here today. I will pass over to Thom.

THOM BECKETT: Hi, I am Thom Beckett. I am a Lead Consultant in the Digital Transformation Practice. I have also got lots of experience in central government and just came from the Central Digital and Data Office in the Cabinet Office.

TIM BARDELL: Hi, my name is Tim Bardell. I am the Executive Director of Capabilities here at Made Tech. That means I look after all of our delivery practises. I have many years of experience of being both a customer of transformation, and also of delivering transformations as a consultant. Hopefully, we can bring some of that out in the conversation.

JAMES BUCKLEY: Great, thanks guys. Let’s have a look at the agenda. We’ve broken the agenda down for the talk today into a number of sections. We are going to do an introduction first about what is transformation, talk about definitions and what some of the features of transformation are. Then we’re going to talk about what we call the burning platform. What we can achieve when as we describe it, the guard-rails are taken away. Why do we have boundaries, and what are the pros and cons of those?

Then we’ve got an interesting section where we will talk about journeys and talk about delivery life-cycle examples. So, the two that we are really interested in talking about today are both around health and justice. We’ll talk about some of the complexities and approaches there. There are two very interesting examples, we feel. They are in very different states of maturity.

Finally we will conclude and wrap up, and we’ll talk about some of the great things that we do here in Made Tech, and how we can help you with your transformation journey.

To kick off, defining transformation.

TIM BARDELL: It’s always important to really think through what we mean when we start talking about transformation. There is always a temptation to think of it as making minor changes, as modernising rather than creating a step-change in the experience for citizens, the efficiency of processes. Maybe that’s something we can delve into a bit, and talk about some of the challenges that we know we are facing across the entirety of the public sector, in terms of the transformation that we need to create.

So what kind of challenges are we seeing in terms of the public sector, and where we need transformation?

THOM BECKETT: We know the public sector is under the cosh at the moment. We know that governmental departments, their budgets are really under pressure. We are hearing about cuts in the regions of about 15% per year for the next few years. We want to talk about digital transformation in that context. We want to look at and point out some opportunities to maximise budget allocation on the brink of where we are economically, and what that could look like.

If we talk just a little bit more about how we define digital transformation, and what we think some of those features are. Tim, from your perspective?

TIM BARDELL: For me, transformation is always about creating that step change. The challenge that I find is in making sure that as we are making those changes, the stakeholders actually see change happening as we go along. So, it’s not years ahead, it’s how do we create that momentum of change? How do we create that transformation journey? Rather than it just being an end point that is some time out in the future. There are a number of areas where we can go in terms of tackling that, in terms of looking for opportunities and driving growth. What are some of the things we’ve seen in terms of our transformation journeys?

JAMES BUCKLEY: Absolutely. For me it’s about driving growth. It’s about taking this whole system, enterprise view, not just taking it as digital doing it to the rest of the business. It should be about digital enabling the rest of the business. Getting those sightlines right, looking at some of the approaches on how we define our vision and mission. Intelligent decision making and what are the insights for that. How we integrate processes, technology, and talent, always with talent. A huge feature within the public sector at the moment, we know this. There really is a struggle going on and huge turnover of really capable digital staff.

JAMES BUCKLEY: And what is it that we’ve seen that sets the tone in correcting that change? Thom, you’ve got a lot of experience in that space.

THOM BECKETT: Yes. I would say that when we are looking at a digital transformation, you have to know where you’re going. What is the aim of the transformation, and how will you know when you’ve been successful? I think a lot of the time in the early stages of one of these projects, it’s about being clear about that. Sometimes people can assume that they just want everything to work right, but actually you have to make decisions in a digital transformation.

You might need to weigh one target against another. It’s only when you’ve got that clear vision and mission at the beginning that you can then start setting the route that you will take to get to the promised land.

TIM BARDELL: And I guess also, through the lens of different stakeholders within that because articulating it in terms of a cost saving may be really important from a department point of view, but not so much from an end user point of view.

TIM BARDELL: Absolutely. The end users will be focused on making their lives easier, making their jobs more effective, those types of things. But you are right, you can save money and give people that better life experience at the same time.

JAMES BUCKLEY: Moving on, we want off the back of that to talk in a little bit more detail about what we call the burning platform. In this section we thought it would be really helpful to use some case studies as examples to highlight this. We talk about things like, what if we didn’t have all of that assurance and approvals that we have to work our way through in delivering complex transformational change?

We’ve got some examples here that we want to talk about. It gives us a flavour of it. I know, Thom, that this is an area that you are particularly interested in. The pandemic was a big driver, wasn’t it?

THOM BECKETT: The pandemic was a huge driver. It was almost overnight that we had to set up brand new processes, systems, approaches to deal with very quickly changing a situation. In central government, that meant there was a real need to look at the assurance that was in place already, and see what we could take away to speed up the delivery of that type of process.

An example of that was the way the wage subsidy scheme, the furlough scheme, that was set up in six weeks. It didn’t go through a load of assurance, it didn’t go through multiple stages, there weren’t loads of boards signing everything off all the way through the journey. It just needed to be delivered extremely quickly.

That carried on with other similar sorts of pandemic-related services such as the coronavirus job retention scheme and the self-employment income support scheme. The job retention scheme, something like sixty-one billion pounds was claimed by 1.3 million employers. That supported 11.5 million people.

I think all of us will remember Eat Out to Help Out, as well. That was eight hundred million pounds paid out for the hospitality industry. That was 161 million covers in those restaurants.

All of these things were delivered in periods of weeks, in an extremely difficult environment.

TIM BARDELL: Is the lesson that we should just do away with governance and assurance and just let rip?

THOM BECKETT: I’m sure that would be a lot of people’s view, and I’m sure they would be pleased if that were the way that it worked. You can see that with something like GDS, as well. GDS had to respond to the pandemic. They don’t – I’m not going to say that GDS doesn’t have governance but the people who update the information on gov.uk don’t need to go through hundreds of different areas. That gives them a responsiveness that is really beneficial. But you are right, Tim. There are reasons why that beauracracy is there. It’s not there just to frustrate and annoy people. It’s there for a really good reason.

More recently, there is another example where DLUK were working with rehoming people who were coming over from Ukraine. The team needed to be empowered to make decisions quickly. That gave them the space to be able to deliver an NVP within a couple of weeks, which is astonishingly quick. If you were going to go through a lot of assurance, you wouldn’t have that ability to deliver something within that speed.

We at Made Tech provided six SC people to deliver that within five days. There is a need on some occasions in government to do that quick response. Actually, it’s not always the case that you need to respond at that type of speed. Speed is useful, and certainly within a project we have sprints because if you get the momentum, you can deliver quickly. But it’s not always the case that removing these guidelines is the best solution for absolutely everybody. There are pros and cons to beauracracy. We talk about the cons all the time – it will slow me down, I need to get this thing signed off, I need to take it to a board, and I need to write a big, long business case – all of this stuff is a frustration. But it’s worth bearing in mind that in this digital world that we live in, a form of beauracracy is agile working.

It’s things like scrum and Canva are forms of beauracracy, but they are ones that teams can see are enabling them to do the work effectively. Whereas, when we think about beauracracy it’s often something that comes from outside and tells us the way that the world should be.

Actually, that type of bureaucratic process can give you the empowerment within your programme to deliver what you need to do. So, you are asking permission to move along but once you’ve got that permission, if you’ve asked for it right, if you’ve asked for what you actually need to deliver, you can get that empowerment and you can use the good advice that you might be getting from that assurance process. It enables you to do something better than you would otherwise have been able to do. It introduces this, an interesting point about complex programme delivery in the public sector. In fact, very often people will say we need to be agile, we need to be a lot more agile because we’ve got too much waterfall beauracracy. Actually, you described it really well when we were chatting about this earlier, Thom. The money part of it is quite waterfall. You have a lot of assurance and approvals because you are spending a lot of public money. You can still have within that process in a complex delivery, agile delivery where teams can engage really well with users, move at pace, and fail fast. That’s what it should be all about. Yes, absolutely. It’s using the beauracracy to give you that empowerment that you need to be successful. If we think about the pros and cons of beauracracy, we often think about all of those cons, the slowing down of delivery, but actually there are pros to that beauracracy as well.

In a large organisation, you can’t get everybody into a single room and have a stand-up meeting every morning and make quick decisions because lots of people need to be involved. So, you bring that beauracracy in, in order to help you be able to make those decisions.

When I think of service assessments as well, we think again of that bureaucratic process as potentially slowing you down at the end of alpha, at the end of beta. But actually, that’s an assessment in which a lot of that team are speaking on behalf of the user. It’s bringing the user’s voice back into that service.

If the team has been doing a load of user research, then they are happy to talk about that. They love talking about the user’s voice. It’s great having somebody who understands that. But if they haven’t been successful and they haven’t been speaking to those users, we need to understand that so that we don’t put something out in front of the public that hasn’t had that type of transformation.

That comes back to the point I touched on earlier which is that in any of these big transformation programmes, having those regular stakeholders seeing change happening is really important. What you’ve just described is exactly that. Creating that overall framework and then the guiderails are there to get on and deliver and have those very quick deliveries that the stakeholders can see.

You don’t want the beauracracy to be involved in your day to day running of the programme. That is the beauracracy not operating well. But there is a check at the beginning and a check at the end that can actually empower you. Because you’ve then got the permission to continue with the programme. You’ve also got the stamp of approval at the end that you have been successful, and you’ve delivered what you said you were going to deliver.

JAMES BUCKLEY: Moving on, we want to talk about some of the journey examples now, don’t we. The examples that we mentioned at the start, that we are really keen to have a chat about now. Two examples using health and justice. They are quite different as citizen journeys, and they illustrate potentially truly transformational change opportunities. The first one is when somebody has a baby. Looking at all the different parts of that journey from baby to grave, you might say. Looking at the different sorts of services that people will need as that child grows up, what are the different organisations that get involved in those journey steps?

For example, looking at from NHS, local authority point of views and all the DWP services to support new parents from when they leave hospital and they are registering a birth, to all of the DWP benefits and support services that they should have access to. For me, certainly, part of the difficulty with this journey is that it is very much pull not push sorts of services.

There is a difficulty because unless you are quite adept at navigating and understanding where to find the information, you don’t know what services you are entitled to. What are the solutions here to improve this journey, and what are the potential benefits to society? That is something that we want to explore in a bit more detail. So, looking at registering a birth, what are the different stages here that you’ve got? If somebody leaves hospital, a new parent with their child, what are the things they need to know, and how do they find that out?

THOM BECKETT: I think a lot of the time, they are just given paper at the hospital that tells them you need to register here, you need to register here. It’s thinking about this from the user’s perspective. It feels like it’s very disjointed. There are these local authorities involved, there’s DWP involved, there is HMRC involved. All of these different touchpoints with different organisations. As a user, I shouldn’t need to know about all of those different organisations in order to do this large life event.

It should be a push. You know I’ve had a baby, government, so why don’t I know what the next steps I need to take are? You’ve surely got all of this information together, why can’t you support me in this way? But as we know, actually, this information is all stored by the government, but it’s not all stored in one place by the government, with easy access to everybody. I guess that’s the challenge, because they don’t know all the things that they need to know. Then that carries on through life. It’s a while ago since I had to register the birth of my children because they are now in their twenties. But equally, as they have gone through growing up and becoming adults, there is a whole lot of terminology that they just don’t understand. They have been lucky that I have been there to explain a lot of it to them, but there are a lot of people growing up who don’t necessarily have somebody to lead them through that. That’s where that joined-up journey, that push, as you say, rather than pull, is so important.

JAMES BUCKLEY: It’s very important because we talk about what are the economic benefits here, what are the better life chances for children and underrepresented groups? Particularly, we’ve got vulnerable groups of people in society, people who need to register with the home office for immigration and asylum, those applicants. How do they access the services that they need? How do they know how to register for schools and what relevant benefits do they need?

Even as a child gets older, registering for an NI number. How do they apply for a driving licence? So, it goes on. So, there is a lot of joined up opportunity in this scenario. We think there is a lot of transformational opportunity built in there.

TIM BARDELL: That is true transformation, that ability to be there when the person needs it, that is transformation.

JAMES BUCKLEY: The other example we wanted to touch on was criminal justice. This is quite a different sort of case study. There has been quite a lot of work that has been going on across the criminal justice organisations for some time. I think a lot of lessons have been learned over quite a number of years. It’s slow, it’s difficult and it’s very expensive. I think a lot of the CJOs of justice organisations have found that over quite a period of time. If you look at the life cycle of a crime and the agencies involved in the stages of a criminal case, from arrest to charge to prosecution, a case going into the court system, whether a defendant is convicted or acquitted, sentencing, probation, prison services if appropriate, and what about the victim in all of this? Victim services? How does the data for a case get shared with the right agencies and parties to the case at the right time, to action each stage of that?

What we know about what is happening at the moment, we know that there is a digital case file sharing that happens from police to CPS. Lots of us will have heard about the links that CPS have into HMCTS, and the building of the common platform that has been progressing over some period of time in the court service.

The common platform is a digital case management system. It allows all parties in a case secure access to case information in one place, including judiciary, defence parties, the CPS themselves, court, and probation staff. Looking at that journey for a criminal case, what do we think are the benefits to society going through that journey?

THOM BECKETT: This system has obviously been running for hundreds of years in various different ways. What happens when that gets easier and quicker? There are things like getting justice faster, especially with the sort of court backlogs at the moment. That’s a really important point for government at the moment. Things like tackling crime. There is an economic benefit, and you can save a lot of money.

There is a strong case for this transformation to be made, but it’s not an easy thing, and it can be very expensive and time consuming.

JAMES BUCKLEY: So, we understand that there is really great progress being made in this space already. I understand that in the next year or so, all courts in England and Wales will be using the common platform. There will be a rollout of enhanced features for case progression as that happens. Digital policing are working with lots of CJS partners on joining up systems to enhance or video-enable justice and make more of these national systems suitable for mobile use, for officers on the streets. Access for checks, to the advisory system for dangerous offenders. There is lots of this really great work that is going on in the background and it is truly transformational.

TIM BARDELL: Obviously, we’ve got a long history of working with the public sector. Getting those transformational aspects of this in place. So, rather than it be just about technology, it’s about the overall journey or the overall transformation for whichever stakeholder lens we happen to be looking at it through, is really important.

We’ve got lots of experience with many of the agencies that we’ve been talking about today. What do you think the main things are that we can bring through in some of these challenges that we talked about earlier?

JAMES BUCKLEY: Absolutely, this is what we specialise in, this is what we know. We’ve had many years of experience in trying to understand what better public services look like. We’ve worked with large Whitehall departments, local authorities, NHS organisations. We’ve been involved and are still involved in lots of these systems, in for example, digitising planning reform, in systems to support international trade with DIT, in shaping great local services such as the housing repairs online service. In the NHS, joining up systems for GP services. We are helping to make all sorts of things better for citizens, across health, housing, crime prevention, safer prisons, the DVLA, a whole range of local services. Including systems in supporting and making better weather information and data available at the Met Office.

We love to talk to our customers, existing and new. We offer a service to explore the challenges that our customers are facing. We very often do workshop sessions to help to find the problem and offer a constructive solution. We’d love to talk to you.

This is how you can contact us.

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