The fresh Labour government’s mission-driven policy approach can help to concentrate public sector efforts on digital transformation, but the looming threat of austerity could also threaten the development of tech-enabled service quality.
Industry figures and public officials made the observation at TechUK’s , Building the Smarter State event in London on September 10 that while the government’s mission approach is a step in the right direction, new ways of working are required to successfully deliver digital transformation and IT projects in the context of novel austerity measures.
Prior to the general election, Labour outlined its plan to achieve” the largest Whitehall shake-up in decades” by breaking down departmental silos in pursuit of five new “missions”: kickstarting economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower, taking up our streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity, and building an NHS fit for the future.
Delegates from industry and the public sector stressed the value of mission-focused approaches in driving potential innovation and ensuring effective service delivery despite fiscal constraints, though modern transformation or technology is not specifically mentioned in these mission statements.
They noted, particularly, how the mission approach encourages greater collaboration across the government because it puts a strong emphasis on the goals that IT must achieve.
Gill Stewart, chief digital officer at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, for example, said the mission-focused approach provides an “overarching thread” that government bodies can fit their digital transformation efforts to. ” We’re looking at it from]the perspective of ] ‘ really, this is the core mission, and therefore what sits beneath that, and what are the outputs that we need to deliver in order to retain that mission?'” she said.
” I believe that should have a positive impact on solving problems, and I believe that as opposed to potentially being in a small silo, those barriers are being broken down,” he said.
Step change
Simon Bourne, general online, data and technology officer at the Home Office, also noted that he has already seen a” step change” in how the Home Office collaborates with policing and justice organisations as a consequence of Labour’s mission approach.
” What I’m seeing for the first time is the start of a truly rich set of conversations between the various justice systems and the policing ecosystem, about how we work together and what information we can share,” he said. ” It’s early days, but definitely moving in the right direction”.
While the mission-based approach encourages “more of a full system thinking approach” to problem-solving around online transformation, Karl Hoods, the group’s chief digital and information officer at both the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, believes that, in addition to attempting to do too many things, we must make sure that we’re focusing on things that we can deliver. It’ll come over to prioritisation”.
He added that having limited resources, it was essential to keep an investment in people and capability.
Bourne added that while the public sector must continue to advance transformation initiatives, it is obvious that they are operating “in a time of economic pressure” which makes this task much more challenging.
” I think that next gives us, collectively as the delivery ecosystem, a real challenge as to how we can keep delivering transformation that is even better, but to do that in a more thoughtful, clear, efficient, economical way”, he said. We all need to take a step back and continue on the growth journey while considering how to provide more for less.
Is doing more with less reasonable?
The director of the London Office for Technology and Innovation ( LOTI), Eddie Copeland, discussed how the previous round of Tory-imposed austerity had an impact on service delivery when he addressed a panel about the public sector workforce changes that are required to support digital transformation efforts.
Highlighting that London’s population has expanded by about 800, 000 since 2010, Copeland noted that in that same time, local authorities in London cut 54, 000 staff in response to a real-term budget cut of 21 %.
” Your ordinary London borough has about 3, 000 people, delivers 500 to 800 distinct services, is at the front line of delivering social care, climate change responses, homelessness responses, and cost of living and crisis responses”, he said. ” But, we have to innovate. We have quite some resources”.
He added that IT departments must now acknowledge that they can no more just slap innovative technology and data onto the outdated service models that have existed for decades, and that significant changes can be expected to occur.
” If online has to mean anything at all, it has to be about the historical change, changing the service model, changing the way we do things,” said Copeland.” Where I’m seeing this done well is in organizations that understand that,” said Copeland.
He made it evident, however, that in the face of cuts, convincing people in local government to implement comprehensive IT or organizational changes is challenging, which necessitates new ways of thinking about future service models.
Copeland added that while people with more technical skills are required, “outside-the-box” service design that starts with the needs of residents or citizens and proceeds backwards to deliver effective online services is more important.
Plugging cuts with tech
The extent of the most recent round of Labour austerity will not be known until the 2025 Spending Review is released, but a key question is whether the efficiency and productivity gains promised by new technologies like artificial intelligence ( AI ) will be able to fill the void left by potential additional job and funding cuts.
The British government’s deputy director of online ethics, inclusions, and assurance, Eilidh McLaughlin, responded to questions from Computer Weekly about how the latest round of austerity will affect the people sector’s ability to digitally transform.
She said that while it’s still possible to innovate, civil servants will need to be” a bit smarter” in using what they have already got. A better grasp of our personal data and how to use it a little bit more can help us be more selective with what we do, McLaughlin said. ” There’s a lot of challenge, but it’s our job as leaders to think of unique ways to bring our teams with us to overcome these challenges”.
Digital transformation does not necessarily require extensive overhauls of IT systems, according to Kamal Bal, director of digital at the Ministry of Justice ( MoJ), as some minor, ostensibly minor adjustments can still have a significant impact on how someone performs their duties.
” I think big-scale things that people will be asking for, which are multi-million pound projects over many years, clearly they’re going to be hard to get through, but I think there’s a large number of small things that will actually contribute to what a caseworker]for example ] would say is a transformational change in how they’re able to do their job”, he said.
But, Bal also made note of the realities of budget allocation, noting that while effective digital transformation initiatives will increase productivity in the public sector by eliminating the most laborious tasks, potentially enabling people to “do more with the same amount, or a bit more with a bit less,” it can be difficult to predict what kind of savings will be generated over the long term.
” What is that payback? How do we justify what we’re asking for? he said. ” That’s certainly what HMT care about when they come up with allocations”.
What function does AI play in the government sector?
While AI received a small amount of attention at the event, panel chair John Bleasdale, key architect of the government and public sector at Kyndryl, stated that the company has used its investment in” AIOps”- an approach that automates business operation actions and processes to free up 5, 500 employees from performing “repetitive toil and low value work,” which has added value by allowing them to acquire new skills and engage in more challenging work. He added that this has saved the business a couple hundred million pounds annually.
Around 40 % of UK government departments now employ AI to improve business operations, according to Kyndryl’s freedom of information data, and 45 % have plans to implement AI over the next 18 months.
In a follow-up interview with Computer Weekly, Bleasdale stated that the most successful use of AI would be the application of it to their business process elements, despite the majority of media attention given to generative large language models ( LLMs).
He added that it can be challenging to get a “full understanding” of how many of the common sector’s technology platforms operate because some of them are so large and old. Any attempts to modernize ca n’t be accomplished by simply looking at the code; instead, they typically need to reverse engineer and fully comprehend the business logic, which is rarely documented or kept up-to-date, he said.
” But for some of those large, long-running government services dating back to the 1980s and the 1990s, it’s very difficult to do that work”, said Bleasdale. But, I think that’s great, but where AI is discussed in context of, say, refactoring code and making it easier to understand or document code, I think that’s wonderful. However, I believe the ability to try to capture and document business processes and business logic around a large service will be really important.
Nevertheless, he noted that AI in the public sector presents challenges for its application in the private sector, in that it allows employees to perform tasks less expensively and that frees up those tasks.
” Whilst they could free up thousands of jobs, it does n’t do them any favours to make thousands of people unemployed”, said Bleasdale. So I believe they face very, very conflicting challenges, but the current spending review might make them extremely difficult choices it.
