digital

CDO as a service – the real local GDS?

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Emerging technologies and new ways of working bring with them new jobs, and new roles. One of those is the ‘chief digital officer’ or CDO.

I’ve always been an advocate of organisations having a senior member of staff who has the clout to be able to push through digital transformation and the necessary culture change. A CDO could well be that person.

However, for many smaller organisations – take district councils, say, or mid sized charities – who nonetheless have the scale in terms of service delivery to need the skills of such a person, might not be able to afford one. So what do they do?

In conversation with Adrian Hancock from SOCITM earlier this week, we discussed the potential for a shared chief digital officer between a group of organisations – around four probably being the maximum.

Each organisation would use a common framework and process for managing the digital shift and transformation. The outcomes in each may differ, of course, but the underlying process would be the same – making the CDO’s life easier but also enabling the partnering organisations to benefit from shared experience and sharing other resources, human and otherwise.

This then could form what the “local government GDS” should be. Local centres of good practice centred around a leader in the local digital space, with shared platforms, code bases, processes, services and people.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Be opinionated

To make things happen, it helps if you have opinions.

Apple are a great example of a company that has opinions. They express those opinions in their products, and like most opinions, some people don’t like them – but that’s fine.

For instance – lots of people moan about the lightning cable used to charge iPhones and iPads – why don’t Apple just use micro-USB like everyone else? The answer is because Apple is of the opinion that micro-USB isn’t good enough, hence the need to design their own.

Apple have made lots of similar decisions based on opinions – like whether the original iMac needed a floppy drive (nope) or if laptops need CD/DVD drives (nah).

GDS is equally opinionated. As an organisation, they have views on the way websites should work, and how they should be made. You might not agree with them, but there’s no doubting where they stand.

Opinions help in two ways. Firstly, they set you apart from the crowd (this can work in a good and a bad way, of course, depending on how appalling your opinions are). Secondly, they help you to move on.

Here’s a real world example. At the Department for Heath, I’m working on digital capability, as are lots of other people in lots of other organisations. Everyone has different views on what digital means, and what capability means.

Again, that’s fine. What we’ve done though is to have an opinion on what those things mean, and how they should be delivered. Quickly coming to this opinion has enabled us to move forward quickly, with the confidence that comes of having a good idea where we want to get to.

We’re not so opinionated, of course, that we can’t change direction if we need to. The joy of an agile approach is being able to respond to feedback and experience.

By taking a position though, and executing on it, we’ve been able to kick start our capability programme. Not everyone may agree, but then they probably never will.

So if you find yourself in a situation where a project is stalling, perhaps the thing to do is to have an opinion about it. After all, you have to start somewhere.

Need some help getting your digital approach right? Join me at my Achieving Digital Transformation workshop in December!

The need for internal digital evangelism

If you’re going to make your organisation sit up and take notice when it comes to new, digital ways of doing things, you need to get out there and sell them.

Pretend you’re a techie startup trying to sell your product to your organisation.

Get on every team meeting agenda that you can. Speak at every senior leadership team meeting. Come up with new and interesting angles and stories that will pique people’s interest, whilst still hammering home your core message.

Have chats with as many people as you can to find out what is going on in the organisation, make connections, build links, put people in touch with each other. Fins out what their pain points are and think how digital might help solve them.

Produce an email newsletter to send every week with interesting digital stuff in it that will enthuse and motivate people to give digital a go.

Find a way to use internal systems – maybe the intranet, or a social tool like Yammer, or even the staff magazine – to promote your digital agenda to people.

You might not have a specific product or service to sell, but you still want people to change the way they do things – and they will need convincing.

So try pretending that you are that little startup wanting to land a big contract – and get selling.

Communicating customer access

I’m at Channel Shift Camp in Birmingham today, organised by my good friend Nick Hill.

It’s an opportunity for people involved in customer services in the public sector to talk about ways of delivering services using new channels, such as online.

The point for organisations is that online channels tend to be a lot cheaper than phone or face to face; for the customer, hopefully the experience is quicker and more convenient.

The first session I attended was a very interesting one about how to communicate the benefits of using new channels for contacting councils and so on to users of services.

The problem was soon identified of the quality of the new service being sold. Often the user experience of online public services is pretty bad – to the point where most people would rather phone up or turn up to an office than try and figure out how to use them.

After all, think about the big, successful online services, like Google’s search engine, or Facebook, or Amazon. When have you seen an advert, or a poster, trying to convince you to use them? Probably never, and yet we do in our millions, because it’s better.

It was mentioned that it might be possible to ‘nudge’ people into using online channels by doing things like hiding the organisation’s phone number and address on the website, so people have to use the web service.

That is not nudging! It’s bullying.

Users ought to be able to access a service in whatever way they prefer to. The job of the organisation delivering that service is to design it so that their preferred channel is also the one their customers would choose.

So to start with there is a need, I think, for communications folk to challenge those asking them to promote a service to ensure that it is actually an improvement on the traditional alternatives. If it isn’t, then trying to persuade people to downgrade their user experience is not really a goer.

In other words, the service ought to sell itself. To do that, it needs to be designed with the user at the centre, meeting their needs and solving their problems first, and not those of the organisation.

Use what you already have

When planning a new project or activity, it’s easy to decide to get something new.

For instance, you might see it as the perfect opportunity to buy a cool web service to help you deliver this piece of work.

Or maybe you know that you could do a great job customising WordPress to do exactly what you want.

Hold on for a minute, though. What have you already got available to you that you could use to make this happen?

It might not be the perfect fit you would like in a perfect world, but it might be good enough. It might also come with a few advantages:

  • you can start work right away
  • no problems with access or other IT issues
  • your users will be more likely to be familiar with the way it works
  • there will be internal knowledge of the system to help you get stuff done

I’ve an example to share in a future post, where I resisted the temptation to do something new, and instead used what was already there and already familiar, in my work at the Department of Health.

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