Building lasting public sector transformation

Promoting accountability, developing digital skills, betting on data and embedding policy in delivery are some of the public sector transformation points discussed at the Government Transformation Summit in May 2023.

An effective digital transformation strategy

CDDO’s transformational goals for 2025 and the government’s challenges getting there was the focus for Ian Southward, our Chief Commercial Officer, who delivered a talk on the opening session.

Ian also discussed in detail the National Audit Office’s report on Digital transformation in
government: addressing the barriers to efficiency. Some of the advice shared on the session included:

• Build consensus amongst key stakeholders for enduring decisions
• Map out the end-user journey is a key focus – not just digitally but across all channels
• Find out the state of your data, and where it needs to be
• Adopt lean principles to choose the right delivery method
• Skills, skills, skills: what do we have and where do we need to be?

Delivery and skills gap: the focus of digital transformation strategy

The day was full of great keynote talks, conversations and panel discussions. In the afternoon, our Head of Central Government Tom Taylor joined representatives from Estonia’s and Sweden’s governments, CDDO and MOJ to discuss accelerating delivery.

Topics covered included:

• Organisation challenges: digital/tech teams divide, the digital skills gap, resistance to change and lack of leadership support
• Cross-agency working: user end-to-end journeys, siloed teams and lack of comms.

We’ve also hosted a discussion table on “accelerating transformation delivery”. The conversation focused a lot on public sector transformation and practical solutions to accelerate adoption in teams:

• How we can work around barriers to deliver transformation more effectively and at a quicker pace
• Contextualising transformation with examples – what does delivering transformation look like and what does that mean for public sector departments
• Operational models to deliver transformation

You can find out more about our thoughts on the discussions at the event in the article “What are the biggest barriers to delivering digital transformation for government leaders?“.