I’ve been mulling a bit on what could be funded at the front line of local public service delivery, were we to save a bunch of cash at the back end by harmonising some bits of IT and digital spend.
The driving force, remember, for this drive for consolidation is not some techno-utopian centralised vision, but rather to make use of economies of scale around highly commoditised, non-local-value adding capabilities, that frees up cash to pay actual human beings to help other human beings with the complexities of their lives.
My family have a fair bit of experience of having to navigate the ‘system’ – social care, benefits, health, housing, and so on – and it genuinely is a nightmare. And we come at this from a very priveleged position: we’re pretty well educated, we have the time to deal with it, and at least one member of the family knows a bit about how councils operate.
We often wonder – if we are finding this so difficult, what must it be like for people without our advantages? Bewildering, maddening, and deeply traumatising, I would expect.
One thing that we agree would definitely help would be to have a consistent person to talk to. Social care case managers change so regularly, it is almost impossible to build relationships, with an understanding of the history, and so much time is wasted having to explain the same things over, and over again.
What’s more, even when there is a case worker to talk to, they often have little knowledge or influence over other parts of the same organisation they work for, let alone others within the system, such as other tiers of local government, or health, or the DWP to name just a few.
My brain fart today is this: if we saved enough money on boring IT gubbins, could we spend it on creating an attractive, well paid role for ‘systems navigators’, who are the single point of contact for families with complex needs, who understand the workings of the different public services involved, who knows who to talk to to find answers or to jolly things along, who can just keep the family informed and up to date about what is happening to them?
This is such a bloody obvious idea that it has surely been attempted before, and yet clearly in the places we have lived, it hasn’t quite worked. Maybe it wasn’t properly funded. Maybe the jobs weren’t attracting people of the right calibre to want to stick to them for a longish term. I don’t know.
To return to the usual theme of this blog, there’s no doubt that good digital services would help these people do their jobs a lot better; but the important thing would be that they would be actual human beings, embedded in a local area, who knows the context and grows to know the families and their needs, and how the system can help them.
This is, of course, very much a sticking plaster: the real answer would be to reform the system so it was less fragmented and confusing. But that is many years away, even if we started tomorrow, and in the meantime, this is something very simple that could happen relatively quickly, and works well as an example of the kind of highly local, high value service that could be funded out of the savings from shared back office digital capabilities.
It’s just an idea, one of many possibilities. I’m not even sure if it is a terribly good one! But it’s an example of what could be possible.
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I’m doing a fair bit of strategy work with councils at the moment, and have hit upon a framework for putting them together which seems to help keep strategies strategic, and thus make them more useful.
I’m typing here about the work I’m doing on digital strategies specifically – although this stuff may well work for other kinds of strategies too. Also, this isn’t a ‘do you need a digital strategy?’ kind of post – it assumes you’ve decided you do need one. Finally, when I say digital, I mean it as a shorthand for technology, data, and online experience. OK, let’s get into it!
Strategy sometimes has a bad reputation – and that’s probably because a lot of strategies aren’t very good!
They don’t align with any other strategic vision
They are too detailed
They are written in weird corporate speak and fail to engage people
They try to do too many things
They date really badly
Nobody reads them, or refers to them
What does good strategy look like?
Good strategies provide a destination for organisations. They describe why things need to be different in the future.
With that vision, individual teams can use them to plan what they will do, when they will do it, and how they will deliver.
Strategies aid decision making, prioritisation, architectural decisions, team structures, culture, ways of working… pretty much everything! But, importantly, they don’t need to include the details of those things.
My approach to making this all a lot easier is to do the following:
Really focus on what exactly the strategy needs to do. Keep it short, high level, outcomes focused
Resist the temptation to put operational details or project plans into strategies – ie the stuff that’s likely to change
Have proper documents where that stuff can go, to ensure it still gets thought about and written down
Explaining the framework
The way this works is that all the stuff that often (wrongly, in my view) ends up in strategies is actually published in 4 separate documents (or not documents – could be any format depending on the content).
It also ensures we can be flexible with the bits that need to be flexible. Plans change, technology changes, stuff happens. That shouldn’t affect your strategic vision, themes, and principles – but it will and should change your choices, pipeline of work, and approaches to doing work.
This strategy is high level and long term. It outlines the outcomes expected from the strategy and answers the question ‘why?’. The strategy is the formal document, which is formally adopted by the Council and will rarely if ever change.
I’m thinking of this as a maybe 6 page document (maybe more to allow for the senior person’s introduction, etc etc). It is vital that it is properly socialised across the entire organisation and referred to all the time. Maybe find a way to pull bits out of it to go on posters and things, to keep them in folk’s minds.
Blueprints are created individually for different elements of the strategy, such as core ICT, applications, data or online experience. They provide a link between strategy and delivery. They answer the question ‘what?’. They are likely to change as decisions are made around the issues involved.
Blueprints are likely to come in a variety of formats. Could be enterprise architecture type diagrams, could be statements of approach, could be policu documents, could be organisation charts. All depends what bits of the mechanisms of strategy delivery you’re articulating.
Playbooks define the ways of working and approaches to delivering the work. They answer the question ‘how?’. They ought to be truly living documents that evolve as the organisation gets better and more mature in their approach to doing digital related work.
I think the best playbooks tend to be online and easy to refer to. So, could be on the intranet, or on a blogging platform, or using something like Gitbook⬈. It’s important that it’s easy to access and easy to update and add to.
Roadmaps are created individually for each theme. They describe the activities to deliver the strategy outcomes, in other words, the ‘when?’. It’ll be updated all the time, as prioprities switch around, things take longer to deliver than expected, or where emergencies arise.
The nice way to do a roadmap would be with some nice software to make it pretty – there are loads out there. But it could be a Gantt chart type thing, or a simple portfolio list that shows when things are planned in to be done.
Hopefully that makes sense. The idea is simple – keep the strategy strategic, and make sure everyone understands it. All the detail still needs documenting, but in the appropriate place and in an appropriate format.
This is a re-publish of a thing that went on LinkedIn, my newsletter, and the Digital Leaders newsletter. I’ve backdated the published date on this post to reflect this.
Summary: all this tech called ‘AI’ is genuinely exciting. But the impact of it is unlikely to be felt for several years. Don’t expect quick results, and don’t expect them to come without a hell of a lot of hard, boring work first.
It’s hard to look at LinkedIn these days without being instantly confronted by AI enthusiasts, almost foaming at the mouth as they share their vision for how the public sector can save millions, if not billions, of pounds by simply using AI.
It sounds so easy! As a chief executive I would be reading this stuff and thinking to myself, ‘why the hell aren’t my people doing this already?’.
In fact, I am hearing from digital and technology practitioners in councils all over the country saying that this is happening. That the AI hype is putting pressure on teams to start delivering on some of these promises, and to do so quickly. I find this troubling.
It’s always worth referring to my 5 statements of the bleedin’ obvious when it comes to technology in organisations:
If something sounds like a silver bullet, it probably isn’t one
You can’t build new things on shaky, or non-existent, foundations
There are no short cuts through taking the time to properly learn, understand and plan
There’s no such thing as a free lunch – investment is always necessary at some point and it’s always best to spend sooner, thoughtfully, rather than later, in a panic
Don’t go big early in terms of your expectations: start small, learn what works and scale up from that
How does this apply to using AI in public services? Here’s my take on the whole thing. Feel free to share it with people in your organisation, especially if you think they may have been spending a little too long at the Kool Aid tap:
The various technologies referred to as ‘AI’ have huge potential, but nobody really understand what that looks like right now
Almost all the actual, working use cases at the moment are neat productivity hacks, that make life mostly easier but don’t deliver substantial change or indeed benefits
Before we can come close to understanding how these technologies can be used at scale, we need to experiment and innovate in small, controlled trials and learn from what works and what doesn’t
Taking the use of these technologies outside of handy productivity hacks and into the genuinely transformative change arena will involve a hell of a lot of housekeeping to be done first: accessing and cleaning up data, being a big one. Ensuring other sources for the technology to learn from is of sufficient quality (such as web page content, etc) is another. Bringing enough people up to the level of confidence and capability needed to execute this work at scale, for three – and there’s a lot more.
The environmental impact of these technologies is huge, and many organisations going ham on AI also happen to have declared climate emergencies! How is that square being circled? (Spoiler – it isn’t.)
The choice of AI technology partner is incredibly important and significant market testing will be required before operating at scale. There’s an easy option on the market that is picking up a lot of traction right now, because it’s just there. This is not a good reason to use a certain technology provider. Organisations must be very wary of becoming addicted to a service that could see prices rocket overnight. More importantly perhaps is whether you can trust a supplier, or those that supply bits of tech to them, to always do the right thing with your data. There’s always going to be an element of risk here: but at least identify it, and manage it.
Lastly, the quality of the outputs of these things cannot be taken on trust, and have to be checked for bias, inaccuracies and general standards. Organisations need to have an approach to ensuring checks and balances are in place, otherwise all manner of risks come into play, from the embarrassing to the potentially life-threatening.
This ended up being a lot longer than I first imagined. But I guess that just shows that this is a complex topics with a whole host of things that need to be considered.
Just remember – any messages you see claiming that AI is a technology that takes hard work away for minimal investment or effort, is at best just guesswork and at worst an outright lie.
Related to this post is a set of slides I presented to a conference in Glasgow:
For any digital transformation effort to be a success, it needs to have a organisation that is open to change to work with.
This is often a bit of a stumbling block, because even if you have an amazing digital team and a kick-ass programme in place, if the people across the organisation don’t understand what you’re on about, then you’re in trouble.
This is why one of the projects you need to initiate early on is a digital capability programme. This should provide just enough digital knowledge, understanding and – most important – confidence in the people you work with to keep things running smoothly.
There are a few different ways to approach this. Here’s some of the things I have found work well – you can pick and choose and adapt as you see fit!
Build your leaders’ digital confidence
There is no getting around the fact that you must have the buy in from senior people in your organisation. In fact, buy in doesn’t really cut it – they need to own this thing. Oftentimes leaders -whether they be politicians or senior management types – need a regular reminder of what really matters when it comes to digital and what they need to do to support this.
What I have found is that a one-off workshop is great for getting some excitement and momentum, but it’s really, really easy for that to dissipate if you don’t follow it up. I’d recommend getting workshops booked in for every other month with your most senior management team, if you can.
Another idea is to put in place a form of one to one coaching for senior people. Often they might not be willing to confess to not knowing things within a group context, so providing a safe space where they can perhaps be a little more vulnerable might be a good idea. It also helps foster your own relationship with them and builds trust, and gives you the chance to help them take a long term view of their need for understanding and commitment to the digital cause.
Digital champions or advocates
Building a network of enthusiastic and knowledgeable digital people across your organisation can be an incredibly useful way to spread goodwill about your efforts in departments other than your own. It’s really important though to avoid ‘milk monitor syndrome’ in creating yet another opportunity for people to volunteer for something nobody wants to do. One way to do this is to maybe avoid titles like ‘champions’ and instead go for something newer sounding – I like ‘advocates’.
One key thing is to engage with the already-enthused. Any network or community of practice like this will die a death if people feel they are forced to be there. Find those hidden, motivated digital enthusiasts who want to be a part of something and will make change happen because they want to.
Some of the things you can do to make your advocates network something people might actually want to join:
Run face to face events as well as online networking to build trust in the network
Make things available to your advocate network that other’s don’t get – whether early access to new digital services, learning and development opportunities or even just a sticker for their laptop
Organise an excursion – maybe to visit another similar organisation to yours to see how they do things, or perhaps to a digital company in another sector
Big thanks to the digital doers community for their help in sharing what has worked for them building these internal enthusiast networks.
10 things you need to know
This is something I have been banging on about for a while, and I have seen it – or similar – done really well in a couple of places. To me there is a basic amount of knowledge that you would want everybody in the organisation to know about digital and transformation. Not the specifics on how to use certain products or services, or even how to run agile ceremonies or user research, but instead focusing on the big picture things people really need to understand to ‘get’ what you are trying to achieve.
This could be delivered in a number of ways, but I like the scalability of an e-learning course, one that could be pitched to anyone in the organisation, from the CEO to front line workers. It should give everyone the core knowledge they need, so you can move quickly when working with other service areas.
Internal blogging or newsletter
Working in the open makes things better, we know this. However sometimes we can work more openly internally, to let people know what we are up to. It’s a great way to spread your cultural tentacles, whether in the form of a regular newsletter or an internal blog. It helps you ‘show the thing’ to a wider audience than can attend show and tells, for instance, and can bring your weeknotes to more people’s attention.
You might worry that people won’t be interested but my experience is that people are way more interested than you assume they are – and if you can add some character and humour to your comms, that will help a lot too.
Come along for the ride
A final idea is to get people from other departments involved in the work you are doing even if they wouldn’t ordinarily be a part of the project. Digital volunteering, in other words. Say you have someone who you’d like to expose to agile delivery methods – why not invite them to play a role on the team, attend the ceremonies, and deliver some of the work. There is no better way of learning this stuff than by doing it and being surrounded by others doing it, and creating a way for people to get experience of it before being involved in a project they are truly responsible for is a great approach.
The importance of inclusion
I can’t finish this article without flagging up the importance of taking an inclusive approach to your capability building. People’s backgrounds can have a huge impact on how they engage with change and new ways of looking at work, and it’s important to ensure that whatever training, workshops or other learning activity you put in place acknowledge this and are built around the needs of those engaging with it. Take the time to understand the people you are going to be working with, and demonstrate that digital doesn’t just mean churning out cookie-cutter experiences using technology.
In other words, your capability programme should be a great exemplar of user centred design itself!
Even if we adopt Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital – and we should – it’s still necessary to interpret it in the context of the service you are looking to digitise.
I’ve worked out a really simple framework for thinking about this, by dividing the options into three distinct levels, or approaches to, digital change. None is necessarily right or wrong, but it’s always likely that one is more appropriate to achieving the outcome you desire for a particular service, in a particular context. Moreover, they shouldn’t be seen as fixed – instead, you can evolve a service through the levels as context changes. The levels are digital access, digital redesign and digital transformation.
Digital access
Digital access simply means taking a process that currently doesn’t work on the internet, and making sure that it does. Much of the digital work before around 2012 was of this nature, often called things like ‘e-government’ or, later, ‘channel shift’. A lot of the early efforts were based on putting electronic versions of forms on a website, often as a PDF, which would have to be printed out, filled in with a pen and then returned, either by scanning and emailing or, most likely, sticking it in the post.
That sort of thing isn’t really good enough these days, and so the more modern approach is to have online web-based forms that the user can complete there and then. It’s quick and simple and does one of the most important things – it makes things convenient for the user, at least at the start of the process.
The downside is that these forms when used just for digital access tend to email details to the back office, where a human has to read them, process them, enter details into the line of business system and so on. Also, the user won’t be aware of the progress of their transaction unless they phone up and ask. More troubling is that if services never evolve beyond digital access, it masks a lack of progress and ambition.
Pros
Cheap
Fast
Demonstrates progress
Convenient for users (especially if they are used to paper)
Cons
User will be frustrated with what is still a fundamentally manual service
No efficiency gains for the organisation
Can be a mask for a lack of progress (we’ve digitised all of our services! errrr…)
Digital redesign
Digital redesign cranks things up a notch, and I suspect it is the area where most attention is being paid at the moment. It goes beyond digital access by creating real changes to services when they are digitised. These come in two main flavours:
redesigning processes and user experiences
making the technology work smarter, through integrations and introducing new capabilities
Digital redesign takes longer than access, but the rewards are greater in terms of better meeting people’s expectations and potential for savings and other efficiencies. The outcomes are also less certain, which means risk levels are a little higher – so taking an agile approach is definitely a good idea.
To make this work, you’re also going to need to do things like user research and employ some service design thinking – considering the whole service from end to end from the user’s perspective to ensure it meets their needs, as well as those for the organisation.
Pros
Greater returns from your effort
It’s actually properly changing something, rather than just sticking forms on the web
It’s not so ambitious that people won’t understand what you’re trying to achieve
Cons
Needs more people, more skills, potentially new technology, which means more money
Can take a while, so unless you manage the work in an agile way, it might take time before seeing results
Integrating into back office systems can take years off your life
Digital transformation
So what, then, is digital transformation? Well, when a service is truly transformed for the internet era, it takes a completely blank piece of paper approach to its design. You take as first principles that the majority of your users have access to the internet, wherever they may be, and design around that.
This is the bit of Tom’s definition of digital that refers to business, or operating, models. One of the best ways to describe this idea is to think about some of the new, digital age companies that have come to have such an impact on our lives:
AirBnB is a global hotel company that owns no hotels
Uber is a global taxi firm that owns no cars
Amazon is a global retail empire that has no (or very few!) actual shops
These companies base their operating model design on the fact that the majority of people have access to the internet the majority of the time. It’s what makes hailing a cab via a smartphone app viable.
True digital transformation does the same thing, but with existing services. Note that this is much harder than it sounds – coming up with workable, transformative operating models isn’t an easy thing to do in the first place, but even less so when a service is live and working already, in a mature organisational setting.
Another issue is that some of the rather trite ways that this is presented – “What is the Uber of social care?” – can be rather off putting – over-simplifying what is an incredibly complex web of interlocking services, providers and funding mechanisms. Nonetheless, sometimes a rather blunt way of expressing a problem space like this (“the AirBnB of emergency accomodation!”) does help people start to think a bit deeper about how they might redesign a service from the ground up in the digital era.
The final consideration I would raise here is that many of the business models of these modern internet companies is also based on their access to many billions of dollars of venture capital funding, which is used to fund fast growth, soak up early losses, and establish brand recognition and market dominance. Public services have no access to such funding, although they do often have a natural monopoly – which while is not the same thing, it could perhaps be leveraged to make an operating model redesign more likely to succeed.
To sum up, true digital transformation is extremely rare, but is the pinnacle of what can be achieved when completely redesigning a service for the internet age. As local public services become increasingly cash-strapped, it’s something that more organisations must start seriously thinking about.
Pros
Genuinely transformative, creating services built for the digital age that meet users’ expectations
The kind of change that is needed to protect local public services in the future
You’re likely to attract great people to work on such a project
Cons
A lot of work. You’ll have to go back to first principles and design out from there, which will take time and effort
Risky, there are a lot of opportunities to make missteps, so taking an agile approach will be key to minimising the impact
This requires organisation-wide buy in and support, so building a coalition to commit to this will be a massive job
Summing up
Hopefully that helps. The important thing to remember is that there are different ways of approaching digitisation, each with its own balance of risk and reward. Which you choose will depend on a number of factors, including the digital maturity of the whole organisation and the service itself, the people and tech you have access to, the amount of time you have, and the outcomes you need to achieve.
Also, bear in mind that you don’t have to take just one approach. It’s perfectly plausible to start with applying digital access to a service, then evolving it into a digitally redesigned service, all the while plotting a complete transformation further down the line.
