How well is Digital Transformation (and GDS) performing in the public Sector?
John Mortimer
We help you reshape your organisation where people thrive and organisations succeed through empowerment, team working and being closer to your customers
Matt Edgar writes an interesting post about a topic that I believe is of the most important to anyone that works in change or in leading the public sector. Why? Because it helps us to answer the questions:
Looking at this, not from a technology standpoint, but from a wider systemic lens, we find that we have several measures that we can use to identify success and learning.
The Past
If we look at the history of public sector IT transformation, the pattern is not a great one. There're the flagship horror stories with regard to financial performance:
From a value position, UC has caused untold damage to society, is a major cause of homelessness demand to LAs. And its use is out of reach to the those most in need, causing such hardship and suicides.
Digital by Default is used to reduce transactional cost and is often used as an excuse to reduce contact centre and direct citizen engagement. This drives up failure demand. It also alienates people who have complex needs, reading to an increase in need for those same people.
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There are of course thousands of IT projects, but the transformations led to a mixed bag of outcomes with little understanding of value. The main aspects seem to come form automating back-office processes.
Today
What we have learned?
Even with the reports that came after each one of the project above, the learning has focused as a technological one. Therefore the wider system learning has failed to be passed down to learn. And what is that learning? From a systemic perspective lets have a look at the three we started from:
And Matt does mention "?for the most part the centre’s attention remains on transactional national services."
The 7 Lenses
The gov 7 Lenses document highlights the core of the problem. That IT and digital transformation is focused on itself. I still cannot believe that the document misses the true nature of its reason for existing, the fact that the service design has to add value. We do not even measure that!
Digital transformation is not there to exist for itself, it has an important purpose that lies outside the technology.
Futures | Transformation by Design | Design Leadership. De-risking Transformation - leveraging Design with impact at scale
1 年Brian Hoadley commenting to disucss
I facilitate meaning: design research | strategy | systems | communities
1 年Often it's a commissioning problem, not a practitioner problem. GDS aligned service designers often know this, and try to push for this from different vantage points. No one talks about it more than the industry itself, believe me. In fact, the original thinking behind GDS was to use the digital as a wedge to then try to transform the operational backend of brownfield services as well. Digital transformation is rarely just about digital; it creates a rare opportunity to face stagnated officials with how the old ways of doing things are not efficient, or human centred. And when done well it works really well. But it's not always given the space to achieve that. Famously as well a discovery that finds out that a digital solution is not preferable is a successful discovery. Still, the way that the work gets packed out means that it's sometimes hard to push that point. Usually the project that have failed were the ones that didn't really follow the GDS model, or have done it just as a box ticking exercise rather than allowed it to really be transformational. It's not a disciplinary problem necessarily though, but often client maturity problem still. Things are improving though. Matt does in fact address that in the post:
Deputy Chief Digital and Information Officer at Ulster University
1 年Strongly agree John. Many Digital transformation initiatives are based on a mechanistic process of ‘Digital’ strategy development and implementation. This continues to stumble when applied in public sector organisations. There needs to be more systemic thinking applied to Digital initiatives. Much of the theory and practice of Digital/IS/IT/IM strategy does not address the dynamic nature of human action and change.
We help you reshape your organisation where people thrive and organisations succeed through empowerment, team working and being closer to your customers
1 年There is an assumption that people want digital services? Yes, for the highly transactional ones. But the majority of the resources used in gov are in complex people based services. There is no demand for digital series there.
Experienced Senior IT and Business Change Leader
1 年‘Transformation’ isn’t always positive … https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/frank-mcgeady-mbcs-citp-1b930b23_digital-transformation-digitaltransformation-activity-6976238167796371456-ola7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios