Prologue
W hat 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
2 Cabinet Office, Common Assessment Framework CAF 9, September 2010, version 1.4