Heads we've won, tails we must not lose
'The future of public services has to use technology to give citizens choice, with personalised services designed around their needs not the needs of the provider.’ So said Tony Blair in the foreword to the November 2005 publication Transformational Government, Enabled by Technology. His words show just how far IT has moved to centre stage in the drive to modernise the nation’s public sector. From a backroom chore, the information services function is now seen as the key to making change happen. And that includes change across all government departments and agencies, central and local, and change on all fronts - transforming services, increasing efficiency, improving cost-effectiveness.
1 February 2006
Publication
“‘Heads we’ve won, tails we must not lose’ - Mark Porter, CEO of Capgemini UK, argues for the importance of the ‘long tail’ in transforming government IT
‘The future of public services has to use technology to give citizens choice, with personalised services designed around their needs not the needs of the provider.’ So said Tony Blair in the foreword to the November 2005 publication Transformational Government, Enabled by Technology.
His words show just how far IT has moved to centre stage in the drive to modernise the nation’s public sector. From a backroom chore, the information services function is now seen as the key to making change happen. And that includes change across all government departments and agencies, central and local, and change on all fronts - transforming services, increasing efficiency, improving cost-effectiveness.
But ‘seen’ by whom? It is manifestly seen - and understood - by Tony Blair and his cabinet colleagues, as reflected in speech after speech and on many a government website. And in my experience it is also seen and understood at ‘chairman/CEO level’ across the great majority of today’s UK public sector – ministers, permanent secretaries, local government CEOs and, of course, the CIOs directly involved. In other words, ‘the head’ level of our public sector already appreciates the huge potential for transformational change and improvement that today’s new technology can bring.
That in itself is an achievement and one that is all too easy to take for granted. And much of the credit for it belongs to the first ever CIO of ‘UK plc’, Ian Watmore, and his colleagues in the recently created CIO Council – colleagues who span key parts of the public sector – central government, local authorities, health and police authorities and others.
It is also worth pointing out that despite some well publicised horror stories, many public sector IT projects have been successes, not failures. The press inevitably – and rightly – highlights and condemns costly public sector projects that go wrong. But there is a real danger that the good projects get forgotten, as do the benefits they bring to all of us as citizens, patients, consumers, pupils, parents etc.
But when it comes to actually achieving IT-enabled change in specific projects, understanding and support at the top is only Part One of the challenge. Part Two – and by far the larger part – involves securing a parallel level of understanding and support across the delivery chain. It’s a long way from the policy centre to the front line. And it is only with the co-operation of people right across our big central government departments – people in finance, procurement, HR for example – that high-level strategies and transformation plans can be pushed through to completion.
The same thing applies to local government, where the vision shared by the CEO, CIO and other chief officers must be communicated to, and supported by, people at all levels before it can be turned into reality.
This means winning over what may be termed ‘the long tail’ of our body politic across the government sector. ‘Long’ because of the sheer number and variety of people and organisations within it.
And, let’s face it, that adds up to a challenge on a scale not seen anywhere in the private sector, because it involves some 50% of the total UK economy. It is also a challenge unique not only in scale but in kind, and for two reasons:
- It will require close collaboration and sharing of ideas – and systems – by organisations that previously have had little or no mutual contact. This is especially true of Ian Watmore’s Shared Services initiative which aims to eliminate the wasteful replication of services (HR, finance, procurement etc) across different departments by replacing department-specific units with shared services operating to best-in-class standards.
- It will require an even higher degree of mutual trust and co-operation than major transformation projects in the private sector. That is because the latter enjoys ‘command-and-control’ type structures of governance which enable the transformational change champion (often the CEO) to drive the project to completion. By contrast, cross-department change in the public sector is of necessity an exercise with a more diverse set of stakeholders and more diffuse governance.
The ‘head’ has already been won – a great achievement by the government CIO and his fellow CIOs. The next big challenge must be to win ‘the tail’ as well – the great number of people at all levels without whom transformation cannot be achieved. If the drive and enthusiasm demonstrated so far are anything to go by, it not only must be won, it can and will be won. But only if the scale of the challenge is fully understood.”
