Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery

By Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett and Mike Bracken

The book is a guide to building a digital institution. This updated and expanded second edition explains how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to a new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913019419

Andrew Greenway

Andrew Greenway worked in five government departments, including the Government Digital Service, where he led the team that delivered the UK’s digital service standard. He also led a government review into applications of the Internet of Things, commissioned from Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor by the UK Prime Minister in 2014. He now writes for several UK and international publications on government and institutional reform.

Book preview

Digital Transformation at Scale

Series editor: Professor Diane Coyle

Why You Dread Work: What’s Going Wrong in Your Workplace and How to Fix It — Helen Holmes

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery (Second Edition) — Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett, Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore

Digital Transformation at Scale

Why the Strategy Is Delivery

Second Edition

Andrew Greenway

Ben Terrett

Mike Bracken

Tom Loosemore

London Publishing Partnership

Copyright © 2021 Andrew Greenway, Ben Terrett,

Mike Bracken and Tom Loosemore

Published by London Publishing Partnership

www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk

Published in association with

Enlightenment Economics

www.enlightenmenteconomics.com

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-913019-39-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-913019-40-2 (iPDF)

ISBN: 978-1-913019-41-9 (epub)

First edition published by

London Publishing Partnership in 2018

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

This book has been composed in Candara

Copy-edited and typeset by

T&T Productions Ltd, London

www.tandtproductions.com

Contents

Foreword to the first edition

Preface to the second edition

Prologue

Chapter 1

Testing times

Chapter 2

Why change?

Chapter 3

Before you begin

Chapter 4

Where to start

Chapter 5

The first team

Chapter 6

Preparing the ground

Chapter 7

Building credibility

Chapter 8

Winning the arguments

Chapter 9

Reverting to type

Chapter 10

Running the numbers

Chapter 11

Consistent, not uniform

Chapter 12

Setting the standard

Chapter 13

Finding leaders

Chapter 14

What comes next

Chapter 15

Successful successions

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Endnotes

Foreword to the first edition

Francis: if plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, you should be feeling very flattered.’

This email dropped into my inbox in early 2015. It was from Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister at the time of writing but then the communications minister. It referred to his recent establishment of the Digital Transformation Office, Australia’s equivalent of Britain’s Government Digital Service (GDS), and explicitly modelled on what we had created in the UK. This followed President Obama’s creation of a US Digital Service, copied from the same template.

In the lead up to the 2010 general election, I was leading the Conservative Party’s work in opposition on preparation for government. Britain faced a growing fiscal crisis with a budget deficit of over 11% of GDP. At the same time, the UK had become a byword round the world for costly government IT car crashes. There had to be a better way.

I wanted to ensure that the UK could be the most digital government in the world. That didn’t mean that it was enough to be able to download a form from the web, print it, fill it in by hand and return it by post. It meant the state offering services built around the needs of the user. I commissioned ­Martha Lane Fox to make recommendations on how we should proceed: to make government services that could be done online, be done properly online – digital by default. The rest is history. A single web domain for the British government, GOV.UK, replaced hundreds of separate websites. Scores of government transactions became digital by default. People who wouldn’t have dreamed of working in government signed up for the ride, proud to become public servants. In 2016 the UN ranked the UK first in the world for digital government.

Along the way, we learned about what you need to do to make difficult disruptive change happen in government. Some of it would seem obvious to anyone experienced in turning around businesses that have lost their way. Cumulatively, our efficiency programme saved over £50 billion in five years, mostly from the running costs of government. None of it was easy, and there is much more to do.

I am very proud of what the UK started. I hope this book inspires others to do the same.

Francis Maude

The Rt Hon. the Lord Maude of Horsham

March 2018

Preface to the second edition

It’s a cliche that technology moves fast, and governments move slowly. It isn’t that simple. The three years since we wrote the first edition of this book have shown that.

Many of the technologies that were hyped as breakthroughs back in 2018 – blockchain, robotic process automation, chatbots – have so far flattered to deceive, at least in terms of making a positive difference to the day-to-day experience of citizens or customers. Meanwhile, digital service teams working in governments around the world have responded at incredible pace to unprecedented global challenges. Their work may not have been on the frontline, but it undoubtedly saved lives and livelihoods.

From being a fairly niche pursuit followed by a handful of nations, digital service teams have multiplied around the world. As the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) passes its tenth birthday, the ripples it started can be found in places as diverse as Bangladesh, Madagascar, Germany, Japan and Peru. To our great surprise, so can copies of the first edition of this book.

In this revised second edition we have first looked back at which teams came through the pandemic most strongly, and why. In the new final chapter we’ve also reflected on the trajectory taken latterly by GDS – still a beacon for many working in digital services, both in governments and beyond – and what lessons that holds for other units as they develop and mature.

Given how many years have gone by since digital government was seen as new and slightly dangerous, a surprisingly large number of nations remain in the foothills. Getting to grips with new ways of working and considering user needs ahead of organisational horse-trading is a cultural shift as much as a technical one. That can take time, and a coincidence of fortunate circumstances to get started.

That said, many others have long since moved on from being scrappy start-ups to established scale-ups. They will face new challenges in their attempts to reform the public institutions they now recognisably belong to. Success will be what it has always been: doing the hard work to make things simple for the people they serve.

Prologue

What you are about to read may strike you as obvious.

Governments and big businesses have a habit of confusing complexity with substance. This is especially true when technology is introduced into the conversation. Large organisations have grown used to the idea that their world is uniquely complicated and special. The technology, processes and business models they use match this perception of their reality.

Yet the more layers one adds to an organisation, the shakier it becomes. A lot of big organisations have to work on things that are new or complex, and there is no escaping that. However, often they are doing things that have been attempted many times before. On these occasions, being capable of holding together something very complex can become a hindrance. Some people can hold a crumbling structure together long past its natural life.

We all end up counting the cost of complexity taken too far. This includes the UK government. In September 2011, it scrapped the NHS National Programme for IT. The £12 billion project was the biggest civilian IT project of its kind anywhere ever, for an organisation with the largest workforce in Europe. It’s difficult to imagine a much more complex challenge. Most of the money had gone straight down the drain. It was expensive and embarrassing. The failure was both political and technical. Worse, the NHS programme wasn’t unusual. The UK’s first e-Borders scheme, started in 2003 in order to collect and analyse data on everyone travelling to and from the UK, was cancelled after 11 years and an £830 million investment, leaving behind ‘highly manual and inefficient’ systems.¹ A government review in September 2010 of the performance of its 14 largest IT suppliers found that none of them were performing to a ‘good’ or better standard.² Rumours of a ‘Millionaires Club’, admitting contractors who had pocketed seven-figure sums, swirled around the doomed borders programme.

In response to this litany of IT troubles, the UK launched the Government Digital Service in 2011. The GDS was a new institution made responsible for the digital transformation of government, designing public services for the internet era. It snipped £4 billion off the government’s technology bill, opened up public sector contracts to thousands of new suppliers, and delivered online services so good that citizens chose to use them over the offline alternatives, without a big marketing campaign. Other countries, and private sector companies too, took note.

Faced with the digital revolution, many people working in large organisations instinctively see its consequences as another layer of complexity. To some of them, digital promises a better fax machine, a quicker horse, a brighter candle. In fact, digital is about applying the culture, practices, business models and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations. It is not a new function. It is not even a new way of running the existing functions of an organisation, whether those are IT or communications. It is a new way of running organisations. A successful digital transformation makes it possible not only to deliver products and services that are simpler, cheaper and better, but for the organisation as a whole to operate effectively in the online era. As a GDS veteran wrote, digital institutions are those that are open, responsive and effective, led by people who have at least ‘a basic level of digital competence, curiosity and confidence’.³

This book is best thought of as a set of guides for how to build a digital institution. It will explain how a growing band of reformers in businesses and governments around the world have helped their organisations pivot to this new way of working, and what lessons others can learn from their experience.

This is not the story of GDS. Hundreds of brilliant people contributed to digitising public institutions in the UK. Many of them didn’t work in GDS, or even for the government. Thousands more have contributed to similar efforts in other countries. No book has the space to give them the credit they merit. We haven’t named names here (other than in a handful of direct quotations) because that would have meant leaving deserving people out. This book also uses an inclusive ‘we’ throughout. Sometimes decisions at GDS were made by a leadership team or a product team, sometimes by individuals or by a collective. To those who should get a mention, we can only say sorry. Thank you to everyone who worked to make government simpler, cheaper and faster. You know who you are.

What follows draws on the UK government experience, but it doesn’t cover everything that happened there. There are many stories from that time that others can tell better than we can. For example, there is not a lot in this book about how digital teams working in departments and agencies went about transforming several of the country’s biggest public services. There is little about the quiet political conversations in the background that kept the wheels turning. There is a whole book to be written about how GDS changed the relationship between the state and its technology suppliers, and brought open standards to the forefront of how officials thought about delivering services.

These topics are very important, and they are mentioned in what follows. However, based on the experience of other countries and companies, they are areas where the best response is often determined by the specific context an organisation is facing. There are many paths to building an internet-ready institution. This book focuses on the actions any organisation contemplating a digital future needs to take. The first steps along the journey tend to be the hardest. The advice in this book should set you up to succeed. What that success looks like is up to you.

The organisations that struggle most with digital transformation are old, large, scared, defensive, encumbered by broken technology, and lack curiosity about what the internet age means for them. They fail their users, be they customers, citizens, employees, shareholders or taxpayers. Many of the examples in this book, given our personal experience, relate to national governments; businesses, charities and other levels of government should draw similar conclusions.

None of what follows should be puzzling, surprising or unexpected. None of the practical steps we advocate are unprecedented or radical. We hope the obviousness of it all might inspire readers to reflect on why their organisation hasn’t, won’t or can’t do these things.

Michael Slaby, the manager who hired full-time digital experts rather than jobbing IT contractors, and then put them at the heart of the team behind Obama’s two successful election campaigns, understood the nature of the challenge. Getting this right isn’t complicated, he said. It’s just hard.⁴

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1 https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/E-borders-and-successor-programmes.pdf

2 Cabinet Office, Common Assessment Framework CAF 9, September 2010, version 1.4.

3 https://medium.com/doteveryone/what-a-digital-organisation-looks-like-82426a210ab8

4 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/

Digital Transformation at Scale

Chapter 1

Testing times

We make sure technologies come to where people are, adapt to people’s needs, and empower people closest to the pain to be technologists. In other words, build competence not literacy.

— Audrey Tang, Digital Minister, Taiwan

Crises have a habit of exposing truths that we don’t want to see. Organisations can choose to confront those truths or ignore them. By accelerating trends that were already becoming clear, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many to bring that confrontation forward.

Some of the truths that the pandemic has shone light upon have been heartening. They’ve reminded us of the kindness and endeavour that teams are capable of when tackling collective problems. Others have been chastening. The pandemic placed a mirror in front of governments and organisations around the world, and people were not always impressed with the reflection. When new apps have flattered to deceive, or public services have failed to deliver, there has been public anger: anger that was not simply a failure of expectation management.

Part of this is rooted in cynicism towards politics and political figures. Part of it is because responding to global crises is messy, complicated and difficult. As citizens we all have to make allowances for things going awry, however frustrating or tragic the consequences.

Perhaps the lack of surprise was because we were finally seeing cracks that have been snaking through walls for a long time. The pandemic created a one-shot, once-in-a-generation high-wire test for the institutions we have all come to depend on. Some thrived, and some failed.

Many of the biggest winners during the pandemic – those who mitigated disaster or made fortunes – were organisations that were born on the internet. Digital commerce’s share of global retail trade increased from 14% in 2019 to about 17% in 2020. The lion’s share of this was won by companies that are less than 20 years old. Latin America’s online marketplace Mercado Libre sold twice as many items per day in the second quarter of 2020 than it did during the previous year. African e-commerce platform Jumia reported a 50% jump in transactions during the first six months of 2020.⁵ Cities buzzed with the delivery bikes of on-demand services. Online deliveries dropped onto doormats the world over.

Organisations who predated the web often found themselves missing out. They suffered the consequences of behaviour that had long since been baked into the organisation’s design: the difficult conversations not had, the investments not made, the complacencies untouched. When the stakes were smaller, so was the damage. The stakes got much higher in 2020.

The pandemic has affected every kind of organisation, but governments most of all. Questions about whether our institutions are fit for the internet era have become topical. Public procurement, government websites, service design and open-source software – issues that had been the domain of a certain kind of technocrat and very few others – became headline news.

In milder times, bureaucracies tend to get treated as being a bit like the weather: something to complain about on occasion – a force beyond our control. But in times of need, people look to their public officials and elected representatives for more. Buffeted on all sides by the pressures of coronavirus, the human frailties of governments bubbled closer to the surface. As the Washington Post put it in May 2020: ‘The [US] government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust.’ ⁶

This was not a conclusion unique to the US federal government. Having heralded the creation of a new Digitalization Promotion division, the Japanese government was mocked for posting a commemorative photo of the team’s first meeting showing more than two dozen people, lots of paper and not a single piece of digital equipment in sight.⁷ In Australia, a parliamentary committee found that the Victorian state government had made a ‘misguided and costly mistake’ in buying a $4.2 million IBM platform under the false impression that it included artificial intelligence capabilities when it had a ‘known lack of AI capacity’.⁸

These missteps could be said to be embarrassing, rather than completely unforgivable. Others, though, have been far more profound. Contact-tracing apps largely failed to deliver on their early promise. An Oxford University study that simulated the effect of a contact-tracing app on a city of a million people estimated that 80% of smartphone users would have to be using the app for it to suppress the virus. As of the summer of 2021 it appears that pretty much no country has achieved that level of take-up. In Singapore, only one person in three had downloaded the TraceTogether app by the end of June 2020, despite most workers being legally obliged to do so.⁹ The UK’s abandoned version of the app cost at least £35 million¹⁰ and Australia’s set the federal government back $400,000 for each of the 17 Covid-19 cases it had found as of January 2021.¹¹ The inadequacies of public services that were unable to cope with the pressure have caused distress, hardship and avoidable deaths across the globe. Above and beyond these human losses, the waste of cash, credibility and opportunity cost that came from saying ‘technology will save us’ further eroded institutional trust just when it was needed most.

But there were also moments of surprise too. There were times at which things really worked. The Institute for Government praised the UK government’s ‘decades of investment in expertise, digital tools and practices … clear political direction, and partnerships with external suppliers [that] allowed HMRC [the UK’s tax department] to quickly build three new services to support furloughed workers and the self-employed, and also helped the DWP [the welfare and benefits department] to ensure Universal Credit could cope with unprecedented demand’.¹² The NHS 111 Online service experienced a peak demand of 95 times its previous highest ever use, with over 818,000 people accessing the service in a single day. It stayed standing. Taiwan, which enjoyed a return to some form of normality quicker than most, released open government data and invited civic technologists to build answers to problems. And they did just that, developing an ecosystem of apps for everything from visualizations of how many masks had been distributed to contact tracing for nightclub goers.¹³ Taiwan was among a handful of countries that got contact tracing right, and did so quickly. South Korea and Vietnam also stood out as early exemplars.

Governments around the world proved they are capable of delivering a level of service to citizens that would be the envy of any internet-era business. They also proved that their chances of doing so are far slimmer if they haven’t already taken steps towards digitally transforming themselves. Success and failure did not come down to the actions of people working under intense pressure in the pandemic’s first frantic months. The heroic efforts of those teams were founded on