Chapter 2
Before you begin
Before you can make a start on creating a digital institution, you need four things.
1. A crisis
If you’re reading this, your organisation is probably in the midst of a crisis. Actually, that isn’t true. If you’re really in the middle of a crisis, the chances are you won’t be reading this. You’ll be reverting to the patterns of behaviour your organisation or government has followed for decades, because that’s what humans do. There won’t be time for reading.
So it’s more likely that you’re just emerging from a crisis. That crisis almost certainly had a technology flavour to it. Maybe your IT has not been able to pay your employees on time, as happened in Canada, where 80,000 officials were paid the incorrect amount thanks to an IBM system failure.20 Maybe the world has realised you’ve spent many millions on a new IT system that doesn’t appear to work, like the Centrelink debt recovery system in Australia, referred to the government ombudsman after creating what a senior politician described as ‘summer from hell for thousands of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong’.21
Maybe your flagship policy has hit the rocks, as the UK’s Universal Credit did in 2013, forcing the department to write off at least £130 million of IT.22 Maybe you’ve been hit by ransomware, as 40 NHS trusts were by the Wannacry attack in May 2017, and been forced to cancel 6,900 appointments.23 Maybe your biggest new website crashed, like healthcare.gov in the US, forcing the president to attend a White House Rose Garden press conference to apologise.
Maybe people are angry, as they were with British Airways when a new IT system crashed worldwide for the sixth time in a year, causing more than 1,000 flights to be delayed or cancelled.24 Maybe people are disadvantaged, disenchanted or at personal risk as a result of your organisation’s failure, as happened to almost the entire population of Sweden in July 2017 when it emerged that an outsourcing deal between the Swedish Transport Agency and IBM Sweden had led to a data leak affecting almost every citizen, including security and military personnel.25
You may be thinking that the tried and tested response to this crisis is inadequate.
It’s also likely that this crisis didn’t come as much of a shock to you. It didn’t surprise you that a lot of money was wasted. It didn’t surprise you that, despite the warm words and years of work that went into designing and building that next big thing, the outcome for the people using it turned out to be deeply underwhelming. It didn’t surprise you that the organisation was unable to sort out the basics for its own staff.
To transform an organisation, you will often need storm clouds to gather. You need a crisis. In the commercial world, crises tend to focus the mind because they can be genuinely existential. Fail to respond, and all of a sudden your company name is no more than the punchline to a bad joke. Sony’s reluctance to develop a competent digital Walkman left space for Apple’s iPod. Video rental giant Blockbuster airily dismissed Netflix, then went bankrupt when it couldn’t compete. Many companies don’t heed the call – often those that have become so big they can’t imagine a world without them in it. All too often, the rest of the world has no such difficulties.
Ironically, companies tend to be most at risk when they are enjoying comfortable profitability. At that point, it is harder to see the need for dramatic change; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Complacency of this kind is only justifiable if your organisation is immune to fundamental changes in technology and society. There are few who can honestly say that now. As disruptors begin eating into profitability, companies find they have reduced room for manoeuvre for making the investments they need to pivot into new markets and digital ways of working. The opportunity has been lost. Talented people have moved elsewhere. Margins get thinner. All a company can do now is cross its fingers and hope the tide turns. Usually, it doesn’t.
Retrospective: Kodak
Kodak was once the most innovative camera company in the world. The company practically invented digital photography as far back as 1975. Their engineers held the patents. Their early camera prototype took photos of 10,000 pixels – extremely basic in today’s smartphone world, but revolutionary for the time. Having created this step change, Kodak then stuffed their new invention in the back of a cupboard. The company’s first digital camera didn’t reach the market until 20 years later.26
While the shift to digital technology and changes in consumer behaviour (photo sharing and printing, principally) were obvious trends to almost everyone in the photography industry, including Kodak, the company was too slow to make its moves. As far as most managers were concerned, Kodak was a film and printing business, and a successful one at that. This mindset stalled progress. More agile competitors got ahead, offering products that were better designed and met user needs in a far neater way than Kodak could achieve. The competition either set trends or followed them far more quickly and effectively than Kodak could.
The company’s executives knew these challenges were coming, but they became wedded to ‘how things are around here’. As Pete Pachal wrote, Kodak was ‘too scared to cannibalize its own business to progress’.27 Successful digital transformation required taking calculated risks when times were good. Kodak didn’t.
As this book was being finished in early 2018, Kodak decided to launch both its own cryptocurrency and a machine that you rent from the company for mining bitcoins. Some technology commentators blasted the idea as a ‘scam’ and a ‘desperate attempt to stay relevant’. Time will tell.
Governments are different. Some people argue, persuasively, that the internet presents a genuinely existential threat to what we traditionally imagine ‘the state’ to be. The giants of the web are operating like mini-governments in many developing nations, and there is no reason to think their role will diminish.
In most established democracies, government has got very used to simply being there. The political cast changes, but the permanent residents in the house of power remain. So do the rules, norms and incentives that guide their behaviour. The machinery of public life – the departments, ministries and the public servants that staff them – rarely feels the bony hand of mortality on their shoulders. There’s a reason that the biggest changes to the fabric of the state take place in wartime. In peacetime, complacency is hard to resist. A trifling thing like the web, the domain of geeks, isn’t going to dent that kind of embedded self-confidence.
On the one hand, governments exist in a perpetual state of crisis, but on the other, this rarely escalates into a full-blown, all-or-nothing battle for survival. Like anything stuck on eternal amber alert, this leaves most bureaucracies in a state of constant, reflexive jumpiness. It leads to reliance on instinct and precedent. It also encourages officials to patch things over and move on to the next burning issue, rather than get into the messy and difficult business of fixing the problem. They have no time for that.
The good news is that a crisis is almost always an essential condition for digitally transforming a government, and there’s no shortage of them. The challenge is choosing the right crisis.
There are two kinds that work. The better kind is something truly shocking, a failure that presents an irresistible political opportunity. These episodes are so appalling – cock-ups that hit the tabloids – that they cut through to the popular consciousness. Few voters will know or care about the intricacies of why a technology failure almost brought down a flagship policy, but they’ll remember that it did. Few people vote for visibly incompetent governments.
Megaprojects and their eye-popping budget overruns are often a good source of crisis material. Nine out of every ten government projects with an initial budget of at least £1 billion end up spending more than originally planned.28 As a comparative study by the Institute for Government on large and small projects notes, big projects tend to be inflexible, expensive to finance, encounter lots of opposition, hard to predict and often fail to deliver the transformation they promise.29 Digital transformation has no magic wand to wave away public complaints or uncertain futures. But it can often miniaturise the budget and increase the organisation’s flexibility.
The other form of crisis is the slow, steady drip of accumulated failure. Government is a big place. Taken in isolation, individual missteps can be easily explained away. But if you can join the dots, tell the story and get to the root cause, you have a chance to cut through the noise. All this is harder to do than pointing at one big mistake, yet it can be done.
Let’s say you have a crisis on your hands that is too good to waste. The press and public are up in arms. IT has failed again. Enough people have seen first hand that the internet era has opened up other, more promising ways of getting things done. It is easy to think that taking this new path will now be an inevitability. Unfortunately, if it were that easy, more countries would have done this years ago.
To have a fighting chance of changing government, a crisis is not enough. Three more things are critical.
2. A political leader
One of the strange things about governments is how rarely politicians pay attention to their department’s mechanics. Some of this is driven by constitutional rules. In many countries, there is a formal split between the political and bureaucratic worlds. The minister will tell the government official what she wants, and the public servant will make that happen in whatever way they believe is most likely to succeed.
To make a start on digital transformation, you need a leader who is prepared to engage across these boundaries. Several politicians have stepped up to this role. In Mexico, President Peña Nieto set up a unit in his office specifically to lead institutional transformation. Toomas Ilves and Andrus Ansip in Estonia brought digital transformation to the centre of government operations, conferring global recognition on the country as a leader in digital without buying or building any cutting-edge technology. Andres Ibarra, the minister of communications and modernisation in the centre of the Argentine government, is applying much of the work done by the Buenos Aires City digital team to the federal level. Scott Brison and Deb Matthews have been vigorous in their support of digital government in Canada. While he was minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull was highly influential in pushing the same agenda in Australia. In the UK, GDS’s success was in no small part down to the support of Francis Maude.
This style of leadership is not just a requirement for government; corporates need it too. Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford appointed in 2017, is not a car guy. Forbes described him as ‘a strategist obsessed by so-called design thinking as a blueprint for doing business’.30 He wants quickly produced prototypes that can test design against reality. So do his political peers.
There is an equivalence between public and private sector roles at all levels. Ministers and CEOs face similar pressures. Much as businesses have different management committees and corporate board structures, every country tends to operate its own political hierarchies, with varying arrangements of executive power and lots of different job titles. The hard divisions and shades of grey that exist between the political and civil service worlds also have their subtle differences from country to country (and indeed, within the same country over time). For the purposes of this book, it is enough to say that for almost all large organisations – public or private – there are strategic leaders (who set vision and direction) and operational leaders (who run things day-to-day). The distance between these two groups is often a good indicator of how urgently a transformation is needed.
In any organisation, the principal sponsor will usually have a number of qualities not necessarily common among politicians. For a start, they will be willing to spend their finite political capital on reforming the organisation itself. This is rare. Most people get into politics or to the top of a company because they have a specific cause they believe in or a vision they want to achieve. The machine that enables them to do that is of relatively little interest, provided that it allows them to achieve their goals. Many ministers and CEOs discover far too late that the levers they are pulling aren’t actually connected to anything.
For this reason, the best champions of reform tend to be senior figures in their party or business. They command respect from their peers. In the political world, they will have good, and preferably close relationships with figures at the very highest levels of the government. This generally means they have had a relatively long and successful career, and – not to put too fine a point on it – care less about alienating their colleagues than a newly minted minister might.
For governments, the best articulations of the bureaucracy’s flaws tend to come from retired politicians. Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister during GDS’s first four years, has spoken of feeling ‘squeezed uncomfortably between the wish to react rapidly to reasonable public demands for action and the reality of cumbersome decision-making in government, stuck between the politics of a digital age and the analogue arrangements of Whitehall’.31 Sadly, by the time the political leaders found time to draw breath, it was too late for them to do much about it.
The ideal sponsor knows that public service reform is no vote winner. However, they also know that if they wish to achieve anything of personal and political value – the reason they got into their impossibly taxing job in the first place – they need to get to grips with means as much as ends. To take the long path of changing government demands someone who understands the high cost of leaving the status quo alone. The most successful champions of digital transformation therefore tend to be ministers who have served in two or more different administrations.
Most will also hold a position that can legitimately exert influence over a wide array of government business. This generally means they will be in a central department, such as the Cabinet Office in the UK or the Treasury Board in Canada. This gives them a fulcrum to interfere in the affairs of other departments – hence their need to be a politically strong figure. There is also an argument to say that the political sponsor should not be too senior. Delivering change in the face of inertia takes a lot of time and energy as well as political capital. Presidents, prime ministers and finance ministers who need to spread their resources and favours over a very wide playing field will struggle.
Finding the right political leader for digital transformation is hard, but essential. Most administrations will have no more than a couple of likely candidates. Some will have none at all. But they are out there. You won’t get far without someone like them.
3. A team
Government is a people business. You cannot change a government without changing the people who work in it. In particular, you can’t change it without making sure a new group of people can get a hearing within the machine.
To achieve digital transformation of government, you will need to employ types of people the organisation may never have had on its books before. The internet-era digital and technology skills government needs to run basic services don’t exist in many areas of public life. At best they are found in small, isolated and disempowered pockets, largely forgotten. Some may be employed by suppliers engaged by a department to cover the gap. More often than not, they aren’t yet there on the inside of government, but working actively in the outside, with little financial reward to improve civic democracy and semi-public services. The UK civic technology movement was a rich source of inspiration, and latterly employees, for GDS. MySociety, an organisation that Tom Loosemore and Mike Bracken helped get started with Tom Steinberg, a former number 10 advisor, acted as an umbrella for civic and community websites. MySociety convened this community around two ideas: that they would write in open source code, making their work available for free to anyone who wished to use it, and that every website had to be designed with citizens as the first priority. These would later become guiding principles for GDS.
Other networks also contained the seeds of change that would later come together in the digital team. Through books, articles and quietly insistent lobbying, a group of IT reformers kept up on the sidelines a campaign of effective advocacy for fixing government technology, advising the presumptive government before they took office and pointing out the self-harm government was committing. TeaCamp and UKGovCamp, energetic groups of digital people from within and outside government, exchanged ideas, shared war stories and brought more people into the fold. Without these networks of committed volunteers to draw upon, GDS certainly would not have happened so fast, and may not have happened at all.
Before a country can really begin its journey of digital transformation, it needs to find these groups of engaged people. It needs only a few to begin with, and every country has them. We have met inspirational civic technologists everywhere, from Chile to Libya. An excellent product manager, a handful of top-class developers and designers, and one or two superb user researchers and analysts will get you off to a fine start. Even that is a relatively luxurious position; a functioning delivery team can be as few as three good people. A team working for the Peruvian government began with a handful of staff and still delivered a GOV.UK-style single domain for the entire country in 12 weeks. If that talent pool does not exist in your country, or you are unable to find it, then you have no platform to build on. There’s more about teams in chapter 4.
This is harder to do in some places than others, but it is extremely rare that there is nothing at all. People with the right ability and attitude are usually out there somewhere. They’re gathering at civic technology or developer meetups, or they’re talking on social media. Some are working in other nations, but can be coaxed back by the rare opportunity to deliver something for the public good back home.
4. A mission
‘Digital’ and ‘transformation’ are dangerously broad terms. They can kill you before you can get started.
The disadvantage of presenting yourself as the solution to a crisis is the danger of scope creep. If you pull one thread, a hundred things begin to unravel. The interconnected nature of problems in large organisations makes it all too easy for people to put forward objections or delays. ‘Of course, you’re absolutely right that this state of affairs is completely unacceptable,’ they say, ‘but once this project is finished in six months we’ll be in a much stronger position to get started.’ The variant on this tactic is for those people to say, ‘Well, if you’re going to fix x, then of course you’ll need to fix y and z at the same time for it to be really worth doing.’ This is not a new problem. ‘Pushpin politics’ was a phrase used to describe this phenomenon as far back as the 17th century. In the more recent words of one very senior former UK official, this tactic is described as ‘collecting rocks’. It can be done forever.
There is only one response to these kinds of objection, and it is an uncomfortable one. You have to ignore it. If you want to deliver change, it is imperative you set a single, clear goal of something you will deliver, preferably by a specific date. In the UK, this was the new GOV.UK website. Getting GOV.UK done on time required the team to ignore many other requests and come up with temporary solutions to deep structural problems, until such time that the organisation was ready to have those arguments. You can’t have all the fights, all at once.
The initial goal you set does not have to be the same as your mission. In fact, it is better if it is not. Your ultimate aim may be to save billions, improve public services for their users, and transform government. That is what inspires your political leader and attracts your team. However, your initial goal should stick to something smaller, tangible, realistic, low-risk and strikingly different from what is ‘normal for government’. Achieving momentum, however small the beginning, is essential.
This goal should also have support from a wide range of political interests, inside and outside government. Picking a party political battleground is dangerous. If your goal confers credit or blame solely to one political party, a change in administration could hamper any prospect of making digital transformation work for the long term. If you have the right kind of political leader, the chances are good that they will support you on this. The stress-free launch of a successful national website on time and on budget is exactly the kind of pleasant surprise you want to create. Failing on a hopeful promise to fix all the government’s IT woes is not. Better services, saving money and making happier users and politicians always meets with approval, regardless of the political orientation.
For GDS, the goals were set by a letter from the government’s then digital champion, Martha Lane Fox. Martha had taken a front row seat for the disruptive power of digital as the co-founder of Lastminute.com and board member of Marks & Spencer and Channel 4 as both piloted their way through the shake-up the internet had dealt their industries. Five weeks after taking office, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, asked Martha to advise the government on how online public services delivery could help to provide better and more efficient services, in parallel with her own passion for getting people online.32
Martha’s letter was an important moment. It established the mandate for GDS and the mission it would follow; to fix government publishing, then transactional services, before ‘going wholesale’ and creating parts of services that could be reused thousands of times across the government. It also reconciled two different agendas that needed to be brought into a single digital institution: a group seeking to make savings to the public purse through correcting a broken technology market and turning off bad services, and civic technologists motivated by making life simpler for citizens through the web. For the first time, there was a group with a shared mission to digitise government who had the opportunity and cover to do so.
These four conditions are not an exhaustive list of conditions to give you the best chance of delivering real change. Finding like-minded people in parliament and the press, economic pressures on the government to change tack, and a digitally literate private sector are also a real help. Without these four things in place, however, even getting started with digital transformation is formidably hard. It is better to take the time to ensure these are in place than rush to begin without them.
Summary
20 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-01/canada-ibm-payroll-debacle-echoes-queensland-health/7802944
21 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/09/ombudsman-launches-investigation-into-centrelink-debt-recovery-crisis
22 https://www.computerworlduk.com/it-vendors/universal-credit-it-write-offs-will-reach-500m-claims-hodge-3582955/
24 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/27/british-airways-chaos-computer-systems-crash-across-world-causing/
25 http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/data-leak-swedish-government-prime-minister-stefan-lofven-election-latest-a7863186.html
26 http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/kodak-digital-missteps/#FzkG3Csj.qqt
27 Ibid.
29 https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/big-vs-small-infrastructure-projects-does-size-matter
31 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/05/nick-clegg-michael-gove-lib-dem-coalition-idealogue
32 The full text of the letter is here: https://www.GOV.UK/government/publications/directgov-2010-and-beyond-revolution-not-evolution-a-report-by-martha-lane-fox