Should 2022 be the year of a Government Data Driven Operating model?
Neil Bacon
Management Consulting | Digital Transformation | NED | HR Transformation | Target Operating Model | Strategy | Sales & Presales Leadership | Coaching | General Management | Managing Director | Cloud Practice Development
Recently I read a fascinating blog written by Jerry Fishenden who I have an enormous amount of respect for. His thinking is often both insightful and pushes the envelope for what Technology and Policy making in Government could and should look like.
In his piece he discusses the point at which technology and policymaking meet, or indeed do not actually meet but with the focus on Universal Credit. In this blog I am not going to further dissect what has happened with Universal Credit other than to highlight a few key elements that this piece will expand upon from an operating model perspective.
The first of those areas is his statement that without cultivating the right people, ideas and expertise, political parties will continue to struggle to deliver the promises that brought them into office—and technology will impede rather than assist them.
The second of the areas is the reality of how instead of taking only two to three years, Universal Credit is unlikely to be fully live?until at least September 2024 . That’s 14 years since the planning and implementation of Universal Credit started under the coalition government of 2010. And it’s 15 years since the Centre for Social Justice report, 17 years since David Freud’s independent report for the last Labour government, and 18 years since the proposals to improve PAYE. Worse still, the cost escalated from ￡2-3B to well over ￡14B of taxpayers money.
The second epiphany moment was becoming involved in Adobe’s own operating model called DDOM or Data Driven Operating Model.
The DDOM model simply uses data generated by its digital services to improve them and develop new ones in a perpetual feedback loop that leverages agile and lean practices to execute. For many years I have been advocating for data-driven decision-making to be leveraged within Policy making, but when you combine this into an operating model that stretches across central policymaking and then into each Government department at the Operating Model level it starts to become interesting.
I know that there have been many studies conducted about data-driven policymaking which include documents from 2017 Government Transformation Strategy to 2020 , more recent publications by the Institute of Government Policy making in the digital world and various pieces of material by the OECD OECD Data Driven Government , but perhaps the time is right to make a start, to actually implement a Data Driven Operating Model and Governance into the UK Government?
Why do I think the time is right is a question someone asked me today, well it’s very much to do with timing. At the time of writing we have about a week until Rishi Sunak releases the latest spending review and at a time with a backdrop of huge political pressure and turmoil.
·?????Huge backlogs in services across Education, GP appointments, Criminal Courts and both Children Adult Social Care. In some instances, like Adult Social Care, we do not have the data to understand how bad the problem actually is.
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·?????Inflation is rising at a terrifying rate – food, energy and many other parts of the supply chain are affected with some estimates suggesting the average household could be ￡’000’s of pounds worse off per year.
·?????Levelling up has not achieved what it set out to do and job losses are high.
·?????And most worrying of all is that the capacity of Government to achieve these things is highly strained.
Listening recently to Mike Driver, the CIPFA president, I have been struck by a couple of key points that he had made. The two that struck me were about whole system view and outcomes based – these led to me thinking about the points as interesting questions. How do you provide a whole system view while allowing the changes to still happen at the local level, which is key to success? How do you enable the system to make improvements across the system in such a way that not one initiative is totally standalone, but somehow still connected? How do you enable this system to connect itself to real, measurable outcomes?
Which leads us to my conclusion. In business the right blend of data driven decisions, the right focus on priorities, the ability to not focus or deprioritise areas that do not deliver value and most importantly align the whole system around a desired outcome can create amazing outcomes. I recognize that an outcome for a business is different to the outcome of a job centre or DWP, but they are still outcomes. We have never had a better opportunity to blend data, data-driven policymaking, data-driven decision-making and an outcome led system-wide approach to changing the way our Government delivers both the services and technology.
By bringing together within a new data driven operating model, at the very top, and aligning that operating model across the system we can align policy and technology and at the same time allow for the type of perpetual feedback loops that are needed across Government to create the type of data-driven culture that can and will deliver great things to both citizens and public officials alike without a massive overhaul of the entire system.
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Pharmaceutical & Technology Consultant
3 年Neil, thanks for sharing!