Digital transformation in the public sector: the first step
Blog post as part of assignment 1 for Digital Transformation class at the MPA in UCL IIPP with David Eaves and Mike Bracken.
The digital transformation of the government is a topic that has increased in the last ten years or so. The searching interest in words such as digital government or e-government has grown in this period. The digital government also significantly grew as a term included in books and articles, the year the UK Government announced the creation of the Government Digital Service as part of the Cabinet Office to put “the user first and deliver the best, low-cost public services possible. To deliver this vision and the government’s digital priorities requires a new streamlined, agile organisation and an operating structure with an integrated, flexible team of skilled staff.”?
The formula above mentioned (new streamlined, agile organisation and an operating structure with an integrated, flexible team of skilled staff) is precisely the most difficult part to implement in the public sector, mainly in contexts where concepts such as digital, agile, prototype, iteration or SCRUM are aliens to it. Traditionally, the nature of government operations has been dominated by terms related to procurement, budget management, expense categorization, policy formulation, and politics. This language barrier represents a significant challenge in embracing digital transformation, as it necessitates not only a technological overhaul but also a fundamental shift in mindset, routines, and vision. Delving deeper into these challenges, it becomes evident that the path to digitalization in the public sector is fraught with cultural and structural obstacles that extend beyond the mere acquisition of technology.?
In most countries, the people pushing for a digital government could struggle in many more ways to implement such policies, for different reasons:?
Any government can acquire technology, and hardware, build a new office, or open a new unit. But to digitalize the public sector and make intangible (digital) the tangible (paper), first one must change the intrinsic: mindset, routines, and vision.?
When did the public sector become a tortoise??
As Patrick Dunleavy argues, the private sector acquired Information Technologies when they got commercial use: the digitization of financial systems in the 60’s to the emergence of e-commerce in the 90’s. Before that, the public sector was the big player in IT, where projects were larger compared to business uses and technology was much more expensive not just to produce, but to manage.??
Dunleavy, citing the Mintzberg model of “machine bureaucracy”, mentions that the IT specialists in the public sector sit in one element of the machine: the support services. In my experience, this is true, especially in governments where “digital” is not a strategy: IT departments are in charge of making sure the digital infrastructure functions (repair or replacement).?
I consider that the public sector was left behind for different reasons:?
1- Regulate the new. The Internet became a new sort of space that had to be regulated. This word (regulation) now is related to complex laws on the systems of self-driving electric vehicles, but no more than ten years ago the Internet was still no man’s land where almost everything could be published, or sold, where everyone with some pretty basic skills could claim to be anyone as something such as digital identity was impossible to verify.??
2- The digital becomes the prototype of usefulness. The private sector saw the emergence of figures such as Donald Norman and Bill Moggridge, both of whom since the 80s started talking about interfaces, mapping, and users. Don Norman related interface mapping principles of the physical world to the digital sphere and became in the 93, the first User Experience Architect at Apple. Moggridge designed the first laptop computer and got “sucked down into the virtual realm, concerned only with how I interacted with the software, and forgetting the existence of the physical object”.?
Nowadays, governments try to regulate huge digital monopolies while the private sector already had conversations on skeuomorphism years ago, even in design languages and systems. Some of these concepts have already been adopted by the public sector (yes, the GDS again).?
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Step by step.?
The problem with the digital is its condition of transformative or disruptive. This means that after the boom of digital services, especially public services and the emergence of gov.uk, many other governments started efforts to transition to that space. Mostly, they start with infrastructure (digital and physical), entering a world of goals with no clear processes on how to achieve the goals through the people working within government:?
No wonder why most chapters of the book that describes the digital transformation strategy of the UK through the Government Digital Service delves more deeply into humans (teams, mindsets, routines, negotiation) than into a simple path of buying technology and hiring external IT experts. The transition of public services to a digital space goes beyond that even creating an expert unit within the UK Government: the GDS made a huge effort through the GDS Academy to train different public servants to transition to digital.?
The US Government 18F unit, in charge of helping all levels of the US Government with digital transformation, uses a unique process for digital transformation in the American public sector (Model-Pair-Coach cycle) to build capabilities in the public sector first. They work with a partner (ie. federal or local public agency) for a fixed period, so the partner has to become a product manager that ensures the government’s mission is supported by the technology; ownership of the product vision, roadmap, and strategy should never be outsourced to a vendor. All phases centre around people:?
Two fundamentally different spaces.?
While the prevailing narrative often casts the public sector as the slow tortoise to the private sector's agile hare in the digital domain, this comparison overlooks the nuanced dynamics of technological adoption. Looking ahead, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the expanding frontier of cybersecurity are set to redefine this narrative. These future trends hold the potential not only to accelerate the public sector transition to the digital but also to address longstanding challenges related to efficiency, transparency, and public engagement.?
To compare both sectors in the same terms of digital adoption is simply biased. Fundamentally, they are both different animals:?
The public sector has a different sight from the public (if something bad happens, you are responsible), while the private sector can fail again and again (is a business, it’s natural to fail);
The public sector as an entity has much more responsibility than the private sector, even in the most liberal regimes. One has to at least collect taxes and keep the territory safe.?
At a strategy level, both sectors are fundamentally different, and this is well stated by Geoff Mulgan in The Art of Public Strategy, who mentions that the private sector starts with organisational capabilities and how those can be used to produce something new. The public sector starts the other way around, with goals (ie. to digitise the public services), and then enables departments and deploys resources in terms of people and capabilities to achieve the goal. This means that the public sector has to adapt itself to a vision, and move all the bureaucratic machines towards the same objective, and to do that the first step is people: from the expert SCRUM master and the extremely good user research to the non-digital specialist in public service, who are stepping up to learn new skills, challenging the notion that the private sector dominates in the digital arena.